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.

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.

Illustrated by the immensely talented TunaWineSauce
https://x.com/tunawinesauce
https://bsky.app/profile/tunawinesauce.bsky.social

Worldbuilding Updates

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