Happy New Year / Update from Making Fun

[LodWig]

So we’ll meet this Oracle soon… Maybe the Titans later?

[Bali_Lenni]

Happy New Year, thank you for all the effort , keep up the great work and anticipating a great year in the making...

[John Welch | CEO]

Good question! Thanks for nudging us on this. We are talking about what to do.

[papa jim]

Enjoyed the Astera alphas, looking forward to more of those and the beta. Question I asked in discord and maybe not a priority, but 10 years for mage and minions/eternium a big milestone. are you maybe planning something for the anniversary?

[John Welch | CEO]

Hello Eternium Players!

The team here is super excited for the year ahead. Last year was about learning, setting strategy, and foundation building. This set things up for more ambitious Eternium updates and several new product launches in 2024. Let’s review and take a look at what’s coming.

Eternium

Eternium is the absolute core of Making Fun’s portfolio - our highest priority project today and into the foreseeable future. This started the day we moved development responsibilities from Dream Primer to our internal team a little over a year ago. We had to create Marmalade/C++ development environments, learn the code, and put together build and release processes. We built relationships within the player community, where helpful veterans are giving us valuable input on design and teaching us the nuances of optimal strategy. We made some rookie mistakes. We reacted as quickly as possible to fix them.

We dipped our toes into the code with required platform SDK updates, bug fixes, optimizations, and a Platinum ANB. We recently completed the first Season in a long time to offer a new feature, Spiritstones. The current Season offers a second new Spiritstone and a new craftable shield called The Liberator and balance tweaks to re-energize Warrior builds.

Putting that shield in was a big deal, because it was the tip of an iceberg of effort.

• We had to create a pipeline of tools and processes for adding assets to the Marmalade-based development environment. This crucial step required a significant transfer of knowledge between the Heads of Art at Dream Primer and Making Fun, ensuring that the torch of expertise over a complex pipeline was passed seamlessly. This collaboration has now laid the groundwork for effectively and efficiently creating new levels and assets in the future.
• For 3D gear, props and character models, we continue to use Blender as the starting point. Blender is the popular open source 3D creation suite that supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline - modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking. We are also using Substance Painter, a software that allows us to texture directly to 3D meshes in real-time.
• Creating a powerful and flexible art pipeline will have positive downstream benefits as we expand our ambitions to include new characters, items and terrain and updates to the user interface.

The player community responded well to the improvements, with appreciative comments and renewed interest in playing and purchasing. This support is super important to us as a small, indie developer.

Looking forward, each new Season will offer increased expansions to gameplay. For next season, we will overhaul the Season metastructure to make it more interesting for new and veteran players. We will also have more new Legacy items, another Spiritstone, and additional performance optimizations for low-end platforms.

Now that adding items and improving the player experience is becoming ‘standard’, we are able to move into more ambitious territory. We are starting to discuss new competitive events and the plan for Act V, which will also yield new gameplay in the form of new enemies to face in Trials. Oh, and you have a hint of a future NPC, who already put a “mark” on the current season.

We hope these ongoing more and more substantial improvements will continue to boost excitement for Eternium, which will in turn enable us to make more ambitious expansions.

New Games

We have two new RPGs coming, each of which will be a fantastic complement to Eternium.

Dream Primer passed the Eternium baton fully to Making Fun in order to focus entirely on Astera, a multiplayer, open world action RPG fully cross-platform for phones, tablets and PCs. We completed two closed alpha sessions in December, collecting valuable data and feedback from thousands of helpful Eternium players. We will offer a few more invite-only alpha sessions leading up to a beta release in Summer 2024. Between now and then, the team is hard at work expanding the world with more features, locations, enemies, and playable character classes.

The prototype mobile game Heroes of Eternium is looking promising after a recent all-staff playtest had everyone in the company competing for bragging rights. It is clear we have “found the fun” - the question now: is there enough fun to keep players coming back day after day? The small dev team is making a final push towards an upcoming greenlight meeting, where we will determine if/how to take the prototype forward through the development cycle including determination of scope and schedule. We can’t wait for you to see this incredibly creative new take on the RPG genre!

Excited for the Future

The teams at Making Fun and Dream Primer have been at it for a while, collaborating remotely across three continents for over a decade. As fun as it has been, we have never been more excited about the future.

Once more, Eternium is in full, active development with a team that knows the code and is making strong progress in all aspects of the game. Astera is over the hump, looking like a real game, delivering on the multiplayer vision, with novel features still to come. And Heroes of Eternium is a wild new concept to scratch that RPG itch when you need to keep one hand on a cup of coffee, the subway rail, or the TV remote.

Last year, we raised $750K across a private funding round and an equity crowdfunding round on Wefunder. This extended our runway to get us closer to the launch of the new titles and we couldn’t have done it without your support. We may raise additional capital in 2024 – but we won’t need to if Eternium keeps growing back to its former glory. Let’s do it! ?

Thank you for your support and please keep it coming. We hope your new year is off to a great start.

John Welch
CEO @ Making Fun