What is Aetheris ?

A Roguelite Tactical-RPG

Lots of words to describe a pretty unique experience that I had the chance to help bring to life.

In Aetheris you play as Vazzards, a species of humanoid lizzard who leave their village in order to find a way to escape the darkness that threatens to take over their land.

During their travels, they will encounter and battle monsters, but also other Vazzards from different cultures and point of views, that they may clash against, depending on their actions.

Because yes, your choices have importance ! The game will regularly ask the player to make a decision that will branch the narrative path, and allow them to express how they wish to behave in this world. Of course, their environnment will respond accordingly...

Writing, and re-writing...

So what you do on your travels will directly influence who (or what) you fight against.

Perhaps you tried to abuse some fellow Vazzards and now they want to give you a piece of their mind ?

Perhaps you decided to shelter yourself from the rain by going into a cave, and it's residents aren't really happy about it ?

Perhaps you chose to stray from the main path and discovered something useful...

There are a bunch of different situations, each one having 4 possible courses of action, each representing one of the four main personality traits known to Vazzard : Brutality, Mysticality, Rationality, and Empathy

So yeah, lots of branching, some choices even have two possible outcomes, depending on whether you fail or succeed at what you were trying to do...that means lots of writing, and lots of dialogue with the game design team to know what we're making happening when and where.

...But we're never "just" writing.

I come from a Game Design background (unlike my lead who is an author for comparison), that means that when I write an event, I don't just think about what the event will say narratively, but rather I try to grasp everything as a whole during conception.

What were the events that could lead to this one like ? Were they fights ? Is having too much fights in a row possible at this stage of the game ? When will the next campfire be ? The rythm here is very important to know what the player's party will be able to tackle, and that can only be achieved by checking in with the game design team and the (many) balancings that are done to the ennemies, so we can avoid situations like when we wrote events leading to a mini boss before we got told "oh this one won't be in the game after all" just before implementing it.

Behind the scenes

The game itself is made with Godot Engine, and the narrative part is managed with Ink ! But a lot is going on before anything makes it into the game. Let's take a look on the different parts of production :

The main structure

Down below, you can see one of the documents used as a reference to build the narrative of the game. There's one of those for each of the zone the player can explore, seven total.

Although it's better to stick to it as much as possible, it's not written in stone and some parts have been modified to better suit the balancing or smooth the rythm of the game.

To make things simpler, we used a well known interactive writing technique called a knot, where branching paths converge into one, so no matter what the player was doing before, we know where they will be at any major point of the story.

This construction allows the player to leave its own adventure, while allowing us devs to have better control over things, so I'd say it's a nice compromise.

What the player sees...

Right down below is the type of document we use to detail every situation, the options the player has and their consequences, creating an overview of each zone with exactly what the player will be reading after implementation.

Every battle that can occur in a specific area is also listed and updated when the game design team makes a change on it.

One thing I omitted is that each event resulting of your choices has an impact on your stats. (That's why so much balancing is needed).

Down below is a portion of the sheet we use in conjonction with the overview to keep track of every stat change in the game. You take the structure document above, you see how many branching there is, multiply that by seven and you get about the amount of stat changes occuring in a playthrough.

That's about a gazillion, give or take.

...And what they doesn't

Cold hard implementation. You, the engine, let's do this.

I'm overdramatizing a bit, since our technical director made it super easy to implement and change stuff on the project.

As I mention, we used Ink to implement the narrative content into the game, so here's a look of that part of my work.

TRANSLATION

You may have noticed every documents that I've shown is in french. Well each and every one of them also exist in english, as I was also charged with translating the game !

And other mentionable efforts.

Just to say I've done it, here are some examples of my contribution to the production of the game :

A document meant for the sound designer on our team to implement relevant audio with certain events :

A complete bestiary of the ennemies of the game

And a document retracing every random event the player can encounter and where they are allowed to be called in.

THE END

There ! I think I've talked about all of the aspects I was involved in on this particular project. Then again, there is always so much happening that it's hard to be exhaustive.

If you have a question about anything, feel free to contact me whenever !

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dupont-axel/