Aether Studios: 2023 Recap and 2024 Preview
Hi everyone! It’s been 2 years since our last developer recap and preview and it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster since then behind the scenes. Today, I’d like to share some insights behind Aether Studios, Rivals 2, Dungeons of Aether and our current development plans.
2023 Recap
Rivals Direct 5
In April 2023, we continued a storied tradition with Rivals Direct 5. We approached last year with a plan to scope down from the insanity that was the puppet show in Rivals Direct 4. To create an exciting show, we decided to partner with fellow indie game studios and highlight their games in our showcase. In exchange, these studios featured a cameo of some kind as Aether characters entered their game worlds. We had an awesome showcase with both skits and trailers from these indie games: Another Crab’s Treasure, Backpack Hero, Duelists of Eden, Samurai Gunn 2 and Animal Well.
We also revealed some new Aether Studios updates including that Dungeons of Aether was releasing on the Nintendo Switch. And our big ending reveal was that Fleet, one of the protagonists from Dungeons of Aether, was joining the Rivals 2 roster.
Dungeons of Aether
Dungeons of Aether is a single player dungeon crawler set in the Aether Universe. The game is designed and programmed by Ampersandbear with pixel art led by Ellian, story by Ian Flynn, concepts by Andy Ayala and Marc Knelsen and music and sounds by RESOFORCE.
The game released on Steam in February 2023 and Steam has been our best platform for the title. We are sitting on a Very Positive rating after 400 reviews. In April of 2023, we launched the game on Nintendo Switch and the title plays great in handheld mode with the joy-cons.
In November 2023, we launched the game on iOS and Android. After testing Dungeons while in development, I found the touch controls on mobile to be the best way to play the game. Members on the Dungeons of Aether team also localized the game into Spanish, French, Russian and Japanese for all of our platforms.
Dungeons of Aether was created by a core team that fluctuated between 4 and 8 people and started development in 2020. The game has already generated over half of its development budget. With sales across its 4 platforms, we are hopeful that this game will recoup its costs over the next couple of years. Along with the timely sales this year, the title has added a ton of value to our studio going forward. We saw positive reactions from those who finished the story and have seen requests for nearly all of the Dungeons characters to join the Rivals 2 roster.
RCS Season 8
RCS Season 8 is planned to be our last full season of tournament competition for Rivals of Aether as the studio moves its focus over to Rivals 2 this year. Our plan is to keep hosting Rivals of Aether competition even after Rivals 2 launches, especially at events that we officially support. But we’ll be taking a break from the RCS, and plan to support just a handful of events that are running Rivals of Aether this year.
Last year we reduced the RCS down to two active regions. We hosted 6 official RCS events in both North America and Europe with a mix of local and online events. The North American RCS Finals take place in person at Genesis X in San Jose, CA. While the European Finals take place online at The EU RCS Finals. Both finals will be happening in February of this year.
As the final year of RCS in North America, Season 8 is gearing up to be one of most competitive yet. Last year’s RCS champion, CakeAssault, continued where he left off, picking up 4 major wins this year. While top competitors Soulrifle, CheesyPotato and ZeeBee often pushed for the crown this season, it was kusi who made the biggest splash in the RCS taking the other 2 major wins including a massive upset over CakeAssault in Grand Finals at Riptide 2023.
In Europe, Fireicey continued his dominance from the last three years as he won every event that he competed in. Arianaa was able to claim the one event that Fireicey did not attend. While Fireicey’s top position remains unchallenged, there was some shakeup among the other top spots in EU. We saw veterans Hukon, OliveOily and bosshog still winning big matches, while relative newcomer TheDripCollector claimed the 2nd seed on the EU standings.
Rivals 2
Behind the scenes at Aether Studios, we have been full steam ahead on Rivals 2’s development. 2023 was a challenging year for us in a few different ways, but we were able to cap it off with a lot of excitement for the title as the year came to a close.
We designed Rivals 2 to be ambitious from the jump. Rivals of Aether was a game that we have supported for over 8 years, but the title was never designed to be a long-running service. When starting Rivals 2, we set out to course-correct and avoid some of the limitations of the first game.
This desire to be a premiere multiplayer game led us to take some big risks with our development. We changed engines from GameMaker to Unreal Engine. We changed art style from low-res and low framerate pixel art to 3D models animated at 60 FPS. We changed our netcode from a peer-to-peer solution to a server-based solution with third-party matchmaking. We designed the game to be one that we can grow over the years taking inspiration from our favorite competitive games like League of Legends and Rocket League.
The first challenge that we faced is that a game this big takes a lot of money to create. We are fortunate to be an indie game studio that is fully funded by our own titles. This means we don’t have a publisher or a parent company that directs our financial decisions. It also means that we are limited by our studio’s revenue. Early into Rivals 2’s development, we knew we wanted to swing for the fences. We see that there is a clear opportunity for a competitive platform fighter to attract a large and passionate fanbase across multiple platforms. Our game design was above our means, but we began laying the foundation with the plan to find a publisher or investors to help us finish the game.
We began pitching to studios as early as 2018 about our team and even a sequel, but we didn’t start getting serious until 2021. Our talks extended as we couldn’t find the right fit for us. As 2022 wrapped up with no partner on board, we got even more serious and pitched to as many potential partners as would listen to us as the calendar turned to 2023. Unfortunately, we were met with a financial winter and gaming investments had dried up.
On the development side, we were seeing those big risks start to pile up challenges too. Our studio burn-rate including our employees, contractors, royalties, events and other costs have exceeded $1.5M / year for the last couple of years now. This was great in 2020 when the Definitive Edition launched and our sales cleared that burn-rate. But as Rivals of Aether has gotten older and sales have decreased, we have not lowered our development costs to match. If anything, we still have engineering roles that we need to fill to get this game out the door. In order to keep the lights on, all of the profit from the studio before 2020 has been invested back into the development of Rivals 2. I put the savings that I had back into the studio and cleared out my investment accounts to pay our team. We also made some tough choices to let some of our 2D team go or reduce hours back in March of this year after Dungeons of Aether wrapped up development.
Our team has worked diligently this year to push the game toward launch. We integrated SnapNet, our server-based netcode solution. We ported the game from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 and overhauled our VFX to work with our new engine and netcode. We have continued development on characters and cosmetics. We laid down the groundwork for single player content. We created core menus and showcased the game at PAX West in September and Heat Wave 6 in November.
But while the team was overcoming development challenges, the writing was on the wall that something had to give. We had run out of money and unless we let nearly the whole team go, we weren’t going to be able to continue Rivals 2’s development. With no business partner in sight, we went to the one partner that had gotten us this far — our community.
Kickstarter
After comparing different ways to cover development costs through crowdfunding, we opted for the most tried-and-true, Kickstarter. On November 15th, 2023 we announced and released the Rivals 2 Kickstarter with a mix of digital and physical rewards for those who wanted to support the project.
For the Kickstarter itself, we partnered with OFFBRAND, a creative studio founded by Ludwig and other creators. Through this partnership, we had Ludwig kick off the Kickstarter on his stream as we raised over $500k in the first 24 hours. OFFBRAND also created our Kickstarter video and worked with us on marketing so that some of our focus could be kept on making the game itself. They also helped us close out the Kickstarter on December 15th by making Rivals 2 a part of The Match, a show match between Cody and Zain in their fight for the Number 1 ranking in Melee.
Going into the Kickstarter, we didn’t know what to expect. Kickstarter seemingly had its heyday nearly a decade ago. Rivals of Aether is a known brand among competitive gaming fans in North America, but we had seen investments dry up and we worried that fans would be feeling the same strains. Internally, we weren’t sure if we were going to raise $200k or $2M. We also knew that we need to get the PC version of the game out the door this year. Rivals 2 needs to start generating revenue if we want to keep our team together.
With these numbers in mind, we set a low goal of $200k. These funds would still be critical for us if our projections were far off. We also set some stretch goals at much higher numbers that were revealed out of the gate. We know that just the foundation of what we are building is ambitious, but we also have features we want to create even if we can’t afford them at launch. We took some of the features that made the most sense and spaced them out from $1.5M to $3.0M in the chance that our projections were far off in the other direction.
In the end, we raised $1,076,198 for Rivals 2 from November 15th through December 15th. We were ecstatic with the results because it confirmed a couple beliefs that we have held as a team. Firstly, that Rivals of Aether is a known brand that would attract interest in a sequel. Secondly, that there is a community of gamers excited for a new platform fighter with a competitive focus. Thirdly, that we have incredible fans who are willing to buy cosmetics and merchandise if presented the opportunity. For these reasons, we found that doing a Kickstarter was a much better path for us than simply opening pre-orders for the game. We were able to raise more funds and also satisfy some of our long-term fans who have been looking to pick up more Rivals goodies for a while now.
We are excited by the Kickstarter merchandise that we were able to offer as we worked with some long-time partners to create a mix of digital and physical rewards. We’re working with SPIFspace to create an exclusive Rivals 2 Hoodie. We’re working with RESOFORCE to create a physical soundtrack CD and vinyl. And we’re working with Symbiote Studios to create an exclusive “physical edition”, a pair of pins, and an adorable set of 6 new mini plushies.
Kickstarter rewards are starting to go out this week and will be delivered to backers over the course of the year. The first reward going out is the Early to Bed Maypul skin for Rivals of Aether. Backers will be able to use this skin right away in Rivals 1. The next reward that players will receive is access to the exclusive Discord channels through a role on the official Rivals of Aether Discord. Next we’ll be having a developer Q&A on January 18 on the official Rivals of Aether Twitch channel as part of a hidden stretch goal that we hit. Then in the spring of this year, we plan to have our first beta tests on Steam, which will be exclusive to backers of the Aetherian Hero tier and above from our Kickstarter. Finally, physical rewards will start going out in the fall closer to our launch window for the game itself. The game and digital cosmetics will be delivered when the game launches in late 2024.
2024 Preview
Story Mode Update
A couple of months ago in the Kickstarter, we revealed that we have been building a Story Mode for Rivals 2. This ambitious feature is inspired by The Subspace Emissary from Super Smash Brothers Brawl and our chance to have deep single player gameplay with a meaningful story. The mode is designed to be episodic in nature and Chapter 1 is meant to come out within the first year of the launch of Rivals 2 on Steam. We have been developing this mode in tandem with our other features for over a year.
After seeing where our Kickstarter ended up and looking at our internal progress, it became clear that we have to adjust our current feature set and our burn-rate in order to get this game out the door. We never planned the Kickstarter to cover our full game’s budget, but we did plan to adjust our launch features based on where we ended up. You could see that in the stretch goals that we laid out.
In order to focus on our core experience, we have made the tough choice to delay Chapter 1 of Story Mode to a little later after the first year of Rivals 2’s life. We still want to achieve our goal, but we are now aiming to devote resources to Story Mode after Rivals 2 is a successful multiplayer product. With all the technical hurdles facing our team, we don’t have the funds or the ability to split our focus right now. The Story Mode that we have designed is basically its own game in terms of development assets and team coordination.
With the delay, we also have to let go of a few talented game developers at the end of this month who have been working on Story Mode and other features. This includes Kyle, our Story Mode Designer, Archytas, our Story Mode and Tools Programmer, Mason, our Environmental Artist, Calvin, our VFX concept artist, and Samantha, our Senior UI Artist. This whole team has been a blast to work with and we are sad to see them go. If you are hiring in the game industry right now, you would be lucky to have any of them join your team.
Because of the longer delay before Story Mode, we have also been shifting our internal schedules on other features to make sure that we can have content for our less hardcore players before we are able to recommit and reinvest in a Chapter 1 of Story Mode. We’re not sure exactly what we will be able to squeeze into launch, but we’ll make sure we have something for your friends to try out first after you tell them how cool the game is.
Rivals Workshop Character Contest
My personal favorite announcement in 2023 is that we announced a new contest for our Rivals of Aether Workshop developers. We added Steam Workshop support to Rivals of Aether back in 2019. We have seen so many characters, stages, buddies and even game modes created with the tools. We were so impressed that we added 4 Workshop characters to Rivals of Aether as official characters that joined our universe. We love how these characters have evolved the game and our world in directions that we never anticipated. It’s amazing to see how Rivals of Aether has evolved with our community and these characters exemplify that relationship.
In July of 2023, we announced that we wanted to foster that relationship even further with a new contest. Creators had 5 months to create a new character on the Rivals Steam Workshop for a chance to win the first place prize — getting their character officially added into Rivals 2. We also extended the deadline by 2 weeks from Dec 31, 2023 to Jan 14, 2024 so our creators could enjoy their holidays a little bit more. The submitted creations have a Rivals 2 tag on Steam Workshop and can be found here.
As the contest wraps up on the 14th, there will be a couple of months before we announce the winner. Our team will be deliberating and comparing characters on all kinds of metrics — design, fun, roster fit, element fit, potential lore and more. We have unannounced internal character designs that are in different stages of development that we’ll need to compare to when it comes to roster fit. We also want to give these characters a chance to show us how cool they can be. So with that in mind, we plan to add as many as we can as playable characters in the Genesis X Rivals Workshop bracket. This will be a great chance to see how some of the designs shake out in competitive play.
Along with some time before the winner is announced, there will be a much longer period of time before the character joins the Rivals 2 roster. Because our team members each have their own expertise, we employ parallel development. We already have post-launch characters and content at different stages of development. The Workshop Contest winner is currently slated to between the 15th and 20th character that joins the Rivals 2 roster. We have already seen some amazing ideas that excite our team and we can’t wait to dig in and find out which character will be the best fit to join the Aether Universe.
Genesis X
One of the most exciting dates in 2024 for Aether Studios is right around the corner. Next month on February 16th, fans, along with some members from our team, will be descending upon San Jose, CA for Genesis X.
This year is massive for us because it’s the last planned RCS Finals for Rivals of Aether as well as the first big tournament for Rivals 2 (albeit a pre-release tournament). In our Kickstarter, one of our stretch goals was to have a pre-release event at Genesis X. After we opened registration, we filled our 256 cap in just a few days!
We also announced in the Kickstarter stretch goals that two new characters would be playable at Genesis X in the Rivals 2 tournament. Both of these characters have the element of fire revealed for them. But who could they be? Oh you think you know? Maybe you do. Or maybe we’ll surprise you. I guess you’ll have to wait until Genesis X to find out.
Rivals Direct
What even is a Rivals Direct? Rivals Direct started many years ago as a humble collaboration with your favorite content creator, Adam Carra. Our team had been making jokes on April 1st for many years. What started as a blog post in 2015 grew each year until we created the first Rivals Direct in 2018. This was followed by an entire free game in 2019 called Lovers of Aether. The following year saw Rivals Direct 2 in 2020, along with an official tetherball mode in Rivals 1 as a callback to that first blog post.
In 2021, we really went off the walls with Twitch Plays Rivals Direct 3. Adam returned but this time was teleported into a fully voiced, live Twitch Plays visual novel with other interactive elements. Needless to say, the directs were starting to balloon out of control.
So of course, we scoped down in 2022, right? Absolutely not. Instead we doubled down and hired Manual Cinema, a puppet company based in Chicago, to create Rivals Direct 4. Once again, Adam returned, but this time with puppet versions of the Rivals cast. This Direct was when we really blew the lid on Rivals 2’s development in hopes that the trailers we created would be pivotal marketing pieces to help us get additional funding.
As I mentioned, last year in 2023, we already had our hands full with Rivals 2 development and Dungeons of Aether wrapping up. But we didn’t want to disappoint fans so we tasked George and our community team with a plan to create a direct that wouldn’t demand as much studio involvement as past years. Rivals Direct 5 was born and explained above in the 2023 recap.
Now going into 2024, we really don’t have the time, money or focus to put on another Rivals Direct. But we also know that we can’t just announce there will be no Direct. Because no matter how many times we say it, our fans just won’t believe it. We put a stretch goal in our Kickstarter for $4M to “uncancel” Rivals Direct 6. Why did we do this? Because we knew we would never hit $4M and we want to get off this crazy train.
This preview is now my way of announcing: There will be no Rivals Direct this year. We will be taking a break so we can focus on Rivals 2’s development and align our marketing closer to its testing and release schedule. I hope you all believe me so we don’t see any pitchforks on April 2nd.
Aether Spin-offs
Back in 2020, we launched Rivals Direct 2 and ended it with a trip through the history of the Aether franchise at that point. Rivals of Aether had launched on Steam Early Access in 2015 and each year we expanded the game and the world of Aether. Then in 2020, we began expanding at a rapid rate outside of Rivals of Aether with spin-off projects.
I greenlit Creatures of Aether, Tales of Aether and Dungeons of Aether. Each project had its own team and development timeline. Creatures of Aether was a collaboration with an external team Tako Boy Studios. Tales of Aether was created by a contracted team of comic masters led by Ian Flynn. And Dungeons of Aether was created by an internal team in Aether Studios after Nick Blackwood pitched his game project to us as his work on Rivals of Aether was wrapping up.
These projects are all massive successes in that we released all three within one year of our initial expectations. In game development of any size, just releasing projects (especially self-published ones) is a feat in its own right.
Each project was picked strategically to add value to our studio and brand in ways that Rivals of Aether could not. Creatures of Aether was a game that was designed as mobile first, both from the gameplay and the business model. Tales of Aether is a four issue digital comic book series and enabled us to tell the backstory of a single character much deeper than a fighting game would. And Dungeons of Aether is a roguelite dungeon crawler with a single player story mode that allowed us to tell a brand new tale with 4 new protagonists in its own corner of Aether.
The value from these games, especially on worldbuilding, is undeniable and useful in our quest to grow Aether into a premiere gaming brand. But financially, none of these projects were able to turn a profit on their own. In hindsight, the reason is very plain to see — the brand as it is now and was in 2020 is not big enough to carry these projects alone. And with our indie game studio resources split, we weren’t able to support these games with the focus, marketing and additional funds they would have needed to stand on their own.
In many ways, I jumped the gun on spinning off the brand. Rivals of Aether and Rivals 2 are still on an upward trajectory, but the spin-offs would have performed much better in a world where the Aether brand was already a household name in gaming. Right now we succeed in our niche of platform fighters, but we’ll need to be a bigger player in the gaming industry for these smaller projects to make sense.
The reasons above along with our financial waist-tightening is why you haven’t seen us announcing any new Aether spin-offs since 2020. After Dungeons wrapped up development in March 2023, our studio moved to a 90% focus on Rivals 2 development with 10% on Rivals and Dungeons on-going support. We plan to continue that split as we slowly sunset updates on Rivals of Aether sometime in 2024 and end the year with 100% focus on Rivals 2.
We aren’t going to be greenlighting any new spin-offs unless we can stick the landing on Rivals 2 and grow it into the gaming mainstay that we believe it can be. We already have a few game designs internally and have even discussed a few projects with external teams set in the Aether Universe. But if we are going to commit funds to these projects then we need to make sure that Rivals 2 is generating revenue and our core fanbase is happy with the product. Until we can reach that point, our team will be a one-game studio.
Rivals 2 PC Launch
2024 is the year of Rivals 2. Our team has been working toward this goal for over 3 years now and we are determined to release the game this year.
Our launch is going to a look a little different than we imagined in 2020 as the challenges and costs built up on us. We never found that partner to help us create the fully featured multiplayer game that we initially designed. Yet we remain extremely confident in Rivals 2 for two reasons.
First, we believe in the gameplay that we are building. When it comes to videogames, there are hundreds of ways that big games fail to meet expectations. But the most common and hardest to fix is that the gameplay is just not fun over a long period of time. We believe that we are creating a platform fighter that will appeal to a wide variety of players — whether they just enjoy one specific title or are looking to get into the genre for the first time.
Second, we believe in our team’s ability to build a game alongside our community. Back when Rivals of Aether was just 4 people, we launched the title onto Early Access and steered the gameplay and features around both what our team wanted to build and what the community wanted to see. You can go on Steam now and play the first patch from 2015 to see just how much Rivals of Aether has evolved. Over the years of support, we added replays, training tools, custom colors, story mode, abyss mode, tetherball, dev mode, steam workshop, characters, stages, tutorials and more. We expect to do the same with Rivals 2 as long as the game is financially viable for us to do so.
One big risk is that our team is larger and more expensive than we were back in those early days of Rivals of Aether. We’ll need to be more sucessful than the first couple of years of Rivals 1 in order to maintain the game and update it while also putting out any fires that may arise. But the good news is that the foundation we are building lends itself much better to expanding than our first game did.
Rivals 2 Future Plans
And that foundation is what excites us to release and grow Rivals 2. The most exciting change is the overhaul of our netcode. Moving to servers and third-party matchmaking is going to allow us to grow the game in ways that weren’t possible with our first title.
The most obvious benefit is that our online is set up to support cross play and cross progression as soon as we are ready to move onto consoles. This will allow us to keep one large playerbase rather than fracturing our community on multiple platforms. It also allows us to expand to less powerful platforms farther down the road without those players impacting the experience of the rest of the community.
The next big benefit is that servers allow for more potential game modes that would have been extremely difficult through peer-to-peer. Our plan is to launch the game with up to 4 player support both online and locally. But with SnapNet and servers as the backend, we have the potential to expand to more players in specific game modes. Something with objectives akin to a MOBA could be possible for us down the road while it would have been virtually impossible in Rivals of Aether.
But we also have plans to expand more than our online support in Rivals 2. As mentioned above, we want to bring back Story Mode into our development pipeline when we can afford it. The Story Mode that we designed is episodic in nature. We want to tell a long on-going story that evolves with the game and the community over time.
Another area that we will be looking to develop as soon as we can stabilize our development is modding support. We saw how popular how Steam Workshop was in Rivals of Aether after we added it in 2019. The amount of content that our community has created is truly mind-blowing. Rivals 2 mod support is going to be a bigger undertaking both for us and our fans. With the 3D graphics, the move to Unreal Engine and the new netcode, there are a lot of challenges with how we are going to make modding work this time around. We have done some work to make sure that characters are siloed in a way to support modding eventually, but there is still much more we need to do. But, we are moving mod support up our priority list as we complete the tasks currently on our plates.
We have even more plans for Rivals 2 to grow it as the years go on. But we also want to react to our fans and see how the community evolves. We have no problems shifting our internal priorities around to match the needs and desires of our players.
At Aether Studios, we LOVE platform fighters. We want to release Rivals 2 so we can play it with everyone and fill up the matchmaking queues. We feel that we are building something special and we can’t wait until we can share it with you all. We’re full steam ahead on Rivals 2 as we work toward our 2024 Steam launch!