January 2017 Progress Update (Patreon)

It’s the start of a new year, and we’ve got a substantial progress update for you all to make up for our recent extended lack of communication!

First off, we’d like to quickly address said media blackout: The holiday period is a busy time for most people, visiting family and friends, eating too much, and then forgetting to post updates on your Minecraft Mod, the regular. 

Coupling this break time with a few other problems, such as one of us not having a proper internet connection for the best part of a month, as well as all the other “real life” stuff each of us has to deal with, and you’ve got a recipe for trouble.

But we’re pretty much back up and running again now, and have lots to share with you about what we have been doing! Including what’s to come in the future…

End of Year Review

Although we’ve been eerily quiet here over the last month or so, we have still been working on the mod! Here's a brief overview of the changes and additions we’ve made since our last review in November:

NPCs!

The fabled merchant, Edison, has finally made an appearance in the Aether II. 

A long awaited addition by many of our long term fans, this NPC comes with our new dialogue system, complete with awesome portraits and useful information to start to flesh out the world we’re building for you. Edison can be found any Outpost structure throughout the world, and they’ve been updated too!

In the future he will act as a merchant, buying and selling goods for coin. (Yes! The Aether Coin of old shall return, and now it won’t be useless!)

Edison will be just the first of our NPC characters to be implemented to the project, so stay tuned for more people popping up in future.

Improved Mob Designs

Something we’ve been wanting to finish for a long time is updating all our mob designs to represent our own unique Aether creatures, rather than winged versions of Minecraft mobs. That’s right, it’s time to say goodbye to the Phyg and the Flying Cow, and say hello to the Taegore and Burrukai. Both these mobs (as well as the formally added Kirrid mob) now drop their own unique food and hide items. This brings us one big step closer to a totally unique host of mobs in the Aether, and we will continue to review and update the designs for our other mobs in future. 

Other than these major updates we have also fixed and tweaked a whole host of bugs and features, as well as various visual updates. The full details can be viewed on our GitLab page.

Performance Improvements

More recently, we’ve been focusing on improving what has become worryingly poor performance in the mod.

This means a slight hold up on content additions while we make some drastic reworkings of our major systems, but the results are already beginning to show improvement!

Aether II 1.10 Builds

Our initial trial of releasing “Indev” builds of the Aether II Rewrite has been somewhat successful in ways; it has let us get the project into your hands as soon as possible (meaning you don't have to wait until we’ve finished and released a large update to play), and it gives us access to the feedback of tonnes of players as we develop the project, letting you see the project evolve yourselves as you play!

This is all positive stuff, but we have observed a number of issues with how we manage these builds. We’re busy working on implementing a few changes to improve the experience for both players and us alike. 

In order to combat the potential irregularities with builds being released, (as we’ve unfortunately had recently), we are working on a new automated build system! 

We've also done some reworking on what kind of builds we put together and how often we push them. Builds will now come under the following 3 categories: 

Nightly Builds

These are automatically pushed to all our Patrons every night, and contain the bleeding edge of our work. However, we will only distribute these builds through our launcher.

These builds have no official support from us, as they’re likely to be very buggy and contain unfinished work. 

Weekly Snapshots

These builds are released publicly each week, and will be more stable than nightlies. Unlike nightlies, these builds will be available for manual download and receive partial support. 

Due to this category's higher emphasis of stability, some unstable content may not be enabled in weekly builds. These may still feature potentially buggy and unfinished features, but will be more supported than nightlies.

Update Releases

These will be the least frequent builds by far, and most like our traditional releases, containing a complete content package. 

As such, these builds will also be the most stable out of the three, and receive official support from us. However, they may not contain all the latest content to ensure stability.

If you're interested in playing the Aether Rewrite in the long-term, or running a server, you'll likely want to run our Update releases. 

Downloading these releases

You can find the latest snapshot and stable releases on our official downloads page. Nightly builds will only be made available to our supporters on Patreon, but if you're wishing to compile the Aether from source, you can visit our GitLab here. 

We hope with this new system for releasing our content, as well as our continuing efforts to improve our Aether Launcher and release structure, the experience of joining us on our journey of developing this project will be easier and more accessible for everyone.

New Forums

We know you’ve all been patiently awaiting a replacement for our old forums, and we’ve been hard at work to get our new forum platform up and running. 

We are pleased to announce that the new forums are but a polish away from completion and are already looking rather lovely. Expect news on the launch of the new Gilded Games Forums extremely soon!

Changes to our Patreon

Having run our Patreon campaign now since August of last year, we’ve identified (with the help of much feedback from you, our many fans) a few areas that could do with some changes in order to make it more worthwhile for both us and our supporters.

Removal of the $1 “Moa” Tier

We’ve been reaching out to those pledging to the Moa tier, and have received a lot of feedback that pledgers felt their contribution was superficial, and offered very little in terms of rewards.

We at Gilded Games ourselves feel the the rank has been incredibly time consuming to manage and distribute meaningful rewards for, and that it doesn’t offer as much value as we wish to provide with our Patreon.

Unfortunately, this means that anyone who is currently supporting us for $1 a month will lose those perks once at the end of the month. 

New Stuff!

With the removal of the $1 Tier we are able to make a much more compelling framework of Perks for our Patrons, with what we hope will be much more meaningful rewards. All Patrons will also feature in our future credits section of the mod, by whichever name they wish.

$5 “Angel” Tier - Access to Nightly Builds for Aether 1.10, Donator Status in-game (featuring a basic set of cosmetic perks) as well as on our various sites and servers.

$10 “Valkyrie” Tier - Access to the new Aether 1.10 Official Indev Server (detailed below), an extra set of cosmetic in-game perks not featured in the Angel Tier.

$15 “Arkenzus” Tier - 2 extra game keys to share with whoever you wish, giving access to the Nightly Builds as well as the new Aether 1.10 Official Indev Server! (They will not receive access to special ranks or in-game perks however.)

We hope this offers a more attractive and worthwhile set of incentives for people to come and support us when they can. We depend on this support to deliver quality services and our content to all our fans, whether they can support us financially or not.

The New Aether II 1.10 Official Indev Server

We are planning in the near future to set up, with the support of our Patrons, an official multiplayer server for the Aether II 1.10 for our $10+ Patrons (and any Guests given access by our $15 Patrons). The plan is to update the build of the server very frequently, and for it to be more of a testing space for how the Aether II 1.10 runs in a multiplayer situation, with you as our testers! For these reasons the experience may be somewhat choppy at first, so don’t expect a completely smooth playthrough on the server too soon.

If you’re not a Patron or can’t afford to be, don’t despair! Once we have had enough time testing and improving the multiplayer experience through this new Indev Server, we are sure to put our resources into opening a Public Official 1.10 Server in the future. Featuring less frequent but more stable builds, this will be the optimal space for extended multiplayer play in the Aether II.

And for those who prefer to play with friends in Aether II 1.7, we plan to continue support for our 1.7 Official Server for the foreseeable future, not indefinitely, however.

What’s in store next for the project?

As hinted at previously above, we have planned out a new development focus for the content of the Aether II mod. We will now be aiming towards completing content for large segments of our content design, to be released as our large stable “Update” Builds.

The first of these Updates, currently internally referred to as the “Highlands Update”, is what we shall be working towards now. This will contain the groundwork for our finished “overworld” experience (the world outside of our Dungeons), this one focused on the first major Biome: “The Highlands”, of which you should already be relatively familiar. 

The major content for this first Biome Update will include a highly visually polished biome with various sub-biomes and a host of flora and fauna, including both hostile and passive mobs. 

Additional to the natural aspects of the Biome will be various structures, both abandoned and inhabited, including large settlements populated with more new NPCs! Another major structure type will be our new “Mini-Dungeons” which will act as small but challenging encounters not dissimilar to the dungeons of the Aether 1 which are fully generated in the overworld, unlike our main Dungeons.

This Update will also feature the first “finished” iterations of any of our own gameplay systems and mechanics we introduce with the mod.

All this means that this first Update will take a good while to complete the work for, as it lays out the baseline for all our future overworld content updates, so don’t expect this to be released any time soon. Obviously though, you will be able to play along and observe all progress towards this first goal via our indev Builds.

“But what about Dungeons?” you ask. Well that is where the second Update comes in: In order to craft a truly new and meaningful dungeon experience for the Aether II, we have decided to make each main Dungeon its own separate Update. This way we can fully focus as a team on just Dungeon content, in order to get them finished quickly and with quality. Once completed, each Dungeon Update will add the Dungeon to it’s respective Biome, thereby making a fully complete content package on a biome basis.

After the first Dungeon Update, we would then move onto the next Biome Update, and then onto that Biome’s Dungeon Update. Thus creating our full plan for development of the mod. It is far too early now to judge how much content we can add to the mod, and we don’t like to make promises on things we can’t control down the line, but hopefully this plan will show that we have a solid plan going forward and give you all a lot to look forward to.

Thank you

Hey guys! Oscar Payn here. Thought it would be appropriate for me to give a little personal thank you to all of our patrons for your continued support and feedback over these past few months. You’ve helped us become financially independent and going forward will help us develop and mature as a studio.

It’s really important that we continue to engage with you all and continue to offer the high quality creative content you all love so much. So I hope to see lots of you giving us feedback and ideas on our new forums and on our multiplayer servers.

We really do appreciate every single one of you and hope we can continue to please you all through 2017!