⭐ Reaching a lifetime contribution of $100 grants permanent Expeditioner perks, inclusion in the "Special Thanks" credits, and the "Aetherborn" discord profile tag.
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Standard-res links to NSFW scenes
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⭐ Reaching a lifetime contribution of $100+ grants permanent Expeditioner perks, a slot in the "Special Thanks" credits, and the "Aetherblessed" discord profile tag.
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High-res links to NSFW scenes
High-res links to bonus content (not yet available)
⭐ Reaching a lifetime contribution of $100+ grants permanent Expeditioner perks, a slot in the "Special Thanks" credits, and the "Aetherblessed" discord profile tag.
Aethertale is a queer furry RPG where you can explore dungeons, navigate relationships with your fellow expeditioners, and have some spicy fun along the way. We're heavily inspired by mystery dungeon games, visual novels, and furry titles like Tavern of Spear and Grove.
We're super excited about this project, and hope you'll consider joining us on the adventure! You can find our Discord and other social media here.
See you in the dungeons,
-Jump
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Devlog #2 - May 2026
Second devlog, woo! The focuses for this month were worldbuilding, creating a formal plan for the demo, and establishing relationships with collaborators who will be contributing art & other assets to the game. Development on the game itself was a secondary focus, though I was still able to make good headway on the core game systems. Ref Sheet for Mak (the main character!)
Coming Soon - SubscribeStar
Our current plan is to maintain identical pages for this game, on both Patreon and SubscribeStar. It gives us a backup in case one of these platforms is unable to provide their services. The SubscribeStar page is currently under review; we'll make a post when its ready.
Collaborators
As mentioned above, a big focus this month was establishing relationships collaborators. Currently, 4 artists have be commissioned, each working on one of the following:
Mak's refsheet
NSFW Scene Illustration
Sketch Illustrations
VN sprites
I'm VERY happy with how things have been going so far. The artists are really nice folks, and I've been overjoyed by the excitement they've expressed towards the project. It's reinforced my passion for this project quite a bit.
I'll be sharing their names as the commissions are completed.
Refsheet - Mak
(See image at the top)
New art yaaaaaa!!!
Mak is the player character in Aethertale; a sturdy 23-year old who dropped out of Knight's College when he discovered deep institutional corruption. He's an internalist, has a harsh inner critic, and is searching for a new cause to believe in.
I spent a lot of time updating character sheets & biographies this month, especially for the first 3 characters you'll meet in Aethertale. I won't share these assets here since they contain spoilers.
These materials were created to make sure I have a documented authority on character traits, arcs, etc., and also so that artists have a clearer idea of the characters they're working with. This will be especially important as I start commissioning refsheets for new characters.
UI Implementation
To me, UI feels like a conceptually straight-forward game system to implement, but man it always kicks me in the ass. I had the beginnings of a UI system in place before this month, but it was dawning on me that it wasn't architected well enough to support the full game. So, after getting over the dread, I locked in for a weekend and grinded out a new system.
There's some nuance as to why this took so much effort. It mainly revolves around:
My priority of making this game playable with keyboard only (no mouse), and
My desire to design a reusable system that would facilitate development of other UI in the future (inventory and such)
Regardless, I'm very happy with the system. I feel like I can see a clear road to implementing future UI needs, which removes a lot of existential dread.
What's Next
Now that I've got a concrete plan for the demo, and artists working on the assets, I'm doing a pass on game systems polish and integration. This will include stuff like:
Removing jittery transitions between game modes
Fixing bugs that result from longer playtests of the game (esp. inadequate cleanup)
Whatever other bugs I find
That's a pretty continuous process though. The more specific things I want to tackle are:
Conversation Sequence Execution (i.e. triggering game logic from a conversation)
Fleshing out the options UI menu (the buttons don't do much currently)
Implementing a basic inventory system (this doesn't need to be robust for the demo, but I want to implement it while UI stuff is still fresh on my brain)
At some point I also intend to flesh out the dungeon mechanics a bit more, including:
Ability system
Sprite updates
Conversation triggers
We'll see though, that's a lot to try to get done in a month. I'm not trying to burn myself out lol.
Thanks for reading and we'll see you next time! -JumpShark
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Dev Log #1 - Apr 2026
First devlog on the books!
I'll be tinkering with the formatting and stuff as time goes on, but I'm excited to be in a good place to write one of these. My intent is to release these dev logs around the end of each month. I will generally hold myself to not delaying them more than 1 week after the end of the month.
Dungeon Entity Hierarchy
Lots of refinements to this system, with the hopes of mitigating technical debt. There's now a much clearer implementation of the inheritance path, which looks something like this:
Grid Entity
Grid Actors
Player Character
NPCs
Grid Features
Walls
Items
etc.
A lot of the changes here have been separating entity capabilities into their own interfaces. For example, some actors might need pathfinding, but others won't if they don't move.
Sequences
Sequences are how I handle any general changes to the game state. For example, starting a conversation, entering a new dungeon, or opening a UI screen. Sequences generally entail changes to how the player interacts with the game.
The original, quick implementation I did was a bit messy, because I didn't fully understand the full scope of what sequences needed to do. A lot of this month was refactoring and fleshing out this system into something that will be usable (and appropriate) for this project in the long run.
Dungeons
I've done a lot of work on the dungeon gameplay during the prototyping part of this project. I'm mostly focused on other things at this moment, but I am continuing to make tweaks here and there.
Hub World
The implementation of this is frequently on my mind, though its not something I want to lock in right away. The demo I'm working towards currently will just be a dungeon with a conversation or two, so the hub world won't be necessary for it.
My current vision is to have the hub world operate with the same controls as a dungeon (grid based), but without enemies. This is subject to change, but figured it was worth sharing my current thoughts.
VN Interface
Again, lots of work was done in March for this. However, there are a few additions for April too, which I think go a long way for production value.
For one, I bought some font packs to give the text a more playful / adventurous / game-y feel. I'm really happy with the way it looks-
I've also done some experimentation with the plugin I'm using to handle this work (PixelCrusher's Dialogue System, which I highly recommend). Its got a lot of features that I want to figure out before writing too much.
UI
The big development for UI this month was purchasing and importing a plugin that has some nice looks buttons and effects. I'm mostly just using it for the assets, which means I have to do some low level UI programming. It's not too bad, but given my priority of making the controls support keyboard-only input, there's a few extra steps I've needed to do already.
Story
Wrote down brief bios for the 6 main characters I want the game to focus around. Searched around for some reference art, I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of what they'll each look like. Still leaving room for interpretation as I continue commissioning designs / refsheets.
I've also got a good idea of what the introductory chapter of the game will look like. For reference, the demo I'm currently building will be scoped to this introductory chapter. More on this later!
Pixel Art
Spent a good chunk of time designing Mak's sprites based on the in-progress refsheet I commissioned. I'm REALLY happy with how they turned out, and ended up doing a full pass on his idle animations.
You can also see a slice of the sprite sheet at the top of this dev log.
Illustrations
Things are progressing well here. Mak's refsheet will still take a couple more weeks to finish, but the WIP is already looking phenomenal (and was enough to do the animations above).
I'll be looking into working with other artists soon to start making illustrations for the demo.
Next Up
Most likely, I'll be working on integrating the dungeon, conversation, and UI modes together. They're each in a good state with the latest refactors, but are mostly contained to their own test environments right now.
I want to also start designing a simple goo / slime enemy, to replace the placeholder arrow enemies I've currently got.
And who knows what else! Excited to share more updates soon- thanks for reading :)
Don't forget to follow us on Twitter / BlueSky for more updates!
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