Inside Aether — October 2026 (Patreon)

Hey everyone, Matt here.

Welcome! Thank you for supporting Aether Studios through the Insider Program. This is our first issue of Inside Aether, so here's how it'll work: every month we'll give you a recap of what the team's been building, who did the work, and what's coming next. If there's something about the studio you'd like to see covered in a future issue, let us know in the comments and we'll try to work it in.

State of the game: this month's update was massive, and the team has been working on it for most of this year. It includes a full engine upgrade, WORKSHOP, performance optimizations, the Halloween 2026 bundle, and the much-needed Character Moves List. Our next major release in December will include a new character, a new event, and any quality-of-life additions that fit our schedule.

Workshop 1.0 Arrives

Workshop moved from Beta into the live game this week, alongside an engine update.

The engine change should improve the shader warming process, and it sets us up for console support down the road.

Documentation and video guides are shipping with it, so creators will have a real on-ramp for adding their custom characters to the game.

In the last week of development, Beth added a workshop matchmaking queue. We thought this was a very important feature for release and are grateful for Beth getting it implemented in time.

Player-Facing Features Worth Knowing

Move List UI: In-game move lists with video breakdowns are rolling out, so you don't have to tab out to a wiki mid-match. It is a feature we wished had been released with the game, but hope it will help new player onboarding going forward. 

Training Settings Menu: A reworked training mode with more granular controls, built from player feedback.

Rivals 1 Mode: A new mode that replaced casual queue in September. It brought back the camera feel and pacing longtime fans associate with the original game. Do you like or dislike this mode in the casual queue? Let us know what you think of the mode in the comments or on our Nolt Board. 

Mecha Event Recap

Our 3-month Mecha Event launched September 1st with Mecha Zetterburn, Mecha Ranno, and Mecha Gouie bundles, plus free Cyber palettes for Forsburn and Clairen.

This cosmetic event is one of the most popular, so it was a priority for it to return this year. Skins have custom effects, sounds, and most pay homage to popular robot-themed anime. See if you can recognize any from the images below. 

For more insight into the mecha trailer and its anime influence, watch Dev Stream: The "Making of" our Mecha Madness Music Video.

The Mecha Madness trailer was a genuine team effort across the video editing, animation, and music teams.

Mina the Hollower — Progress Check

Since our guest character collab with Yacht Club Games was announced at EVO, the team's been working hard to move towards making Mina playable:

Yacht Club Games approved the game model proportions for Mina, and her articles.

The team is deep into her prop and weapon set, including her Iron Steed, which even comes with broken bike pieces.

Animation work has already begun: her basic attacks, strongs, and aerials have first-pass gameplay pass animations, with specials in progress.

Note: Gameplay Pass animations are the first stage of animating a character. Before we push each animation to final, we create a gameplay pass animation that has the correct timing and key poses but does not feature final expressions, details, or secondary animation. We do a review of these for game feel and testing and make changes. Once gameplay animations are approved, we move onto final animations.

Her trailer is being outlined now for a premiere next year, and we have found a voice actress for the character and will be recording soon.

We're targeting an internal playable before the end of the year, with more specifics to share as we lock them in.

Behind the Build: Moving the Whole Game to a New Engine

Here’s a look at one of the less glamorous but genuinely hard problems the team solved this quarter: migrating Rivals 2 from Unreal Engine 5.4 to 5.8 while simultaneously shipping patches.

This wasn’t a flip of a switch. It started in June, when the team identified the need to upgrade to 5.8 to ensure Workshop had a stable release. It became a months-long group effort. It wasn’t just the Aether team, either. Our amazing community in the Closed Beta helped test when the first update was pushed in late July.

The engine update wasn’t the only big lift. Workshop was developed off the main branch for over a year, and it had to be merged back in for this update. With that merge happening at the same time as the engine update, there were a ton of bugs to track down and fix.

Along the way, we hit more real snags. The UI broke across the board on the new engine. Workshop mods needed to be re-verified so they wouldn’t break again with the update. The backend networking (“Snapnet”) required a cross-team investigation to rule out a performance regression. At one point, the team made the call to delay a month rather than ship something shaky.

Why go through all of it? Better performance, a real path to console support, and, most critically, a Workshop feature that won’t break mods every time we update the game going forward. The whole migration culminated with Workshop 1.0 going live on the new update on October 6th. Some bugs still slipped through, and we’ll be fixing them as reports come in.

What's Next

This month we released the Halloween 2026 Bundle: Booie and Werewolf Fleet skins.

An exciting collaboration is in the works. More details will be revealed soon. In the meantime, which Rivals character do you think will become a playable monster in Aethermancer?

November Patch will feature another cosmetic bundle of a fan-favorite returning theme. What do you think it will be? 

Our next character releasing in December will be announced at least a month before release.

We’re preparing for more updates and expansions in 2027 and beyond. I think we’re going to need more room on the Character Select Screen. How does this look?

Gameball Shoutouts

Every week the team hands out a "Gameball" for work that went above and beyond. A few highlights from the last few months:

Tom for implementing the Patreon backend

Beth for building Rivals 1 Mode and its new queue from scratch

Coconut for the Mecha Event's VFX work

Anita for the new Move List and Training Settings UI

Gabe and Jaime for Mecha skins and rushing Werewolf Fleet to the finish line

Joe for steering the team through the engine migration

Dan and George for representing the studio at PAX

Ask the Devs

Each month we'll put a couple of community questions directly to the team. Got a question? Drop it in the comments, and we may feature it next month.

Questionnaire

Here is a link to the forum that you can participate in as an insider. We want to hear from you to improve the studio, our games, and its community.

Link to form

That's the wrap for our first issue. Thanks for backing the studio; more next month.

— Matt Worrell, Lead Producer, Aether Studios