Monthly Update - February 2023
GM Builders and Jumpers!
Art Updates
We're very excited to finally welcome MaxCreed to the Etherjump team as our first Pixel Artist!
We've enjoyed collaborating with Max ever since we met him for our Halloween event, for which he created the Pumpkin Runner enemies. Since then, he's produced several of our newest assets and has just knocked them out of the park every time. His amazing creations have helped push the artistic direction of Etherjump, and we're excited to push it further with his level of talent.
Max will continue to create visuals that bring Etherjump to life for both Builders and Jumpers.
With Max, we are currently revisiting the art style of Etherjump and producing mock-ups of all possible upgrades and refreshes. This is a significant endeavor that may change existing art, and all final decisions will be made toward greater quality and cohesion of game assets.
As the game expands in depth and breadth, we want to make sure that our art style can scale to our needs, while creating a charming gameplay experience that can be enjoyed by all ages.
Concept Art
As we continue to explore our art direction, we’re also expanding the world of Etherjump and its many lands and characters. As such, we’ve sought out talented illustrators to bring that world, and our imagination of it, to life. These illustrations will help us express the core components of Etherjump through a creative and story-driven lens.
Engineering Updates
This month we continued work on the long-awaited Unity update, with lots of progress made. Here is some of the progress:
We reworked our internal architecture to be a lot more modular, which will make it a lot easier to add to and scale our catalog in the future
Gameplay is much more performant than before. Complex levels that were extremely laggy in the past, now run with ease in the new engine. We architected the new codebase with maintainability and scalability in mind, ensuring that future updates will remain performant, and easy to implement
All of the items from the old engine were also ported with multiplayer in mind, so that current game items will work mostly out of the box when we start to develop multiplayer, without significant redesign
We redesigned our enemy/item systems to take an entity-based approach, meaning that it will be a lot easier for things to interact with each other. Now, things like mud blocks, magma, and jump pads are able to affect enemies, and in the future, we hope to take this even further with more complex entity interactions (eg. fireballs melting ice, etc) to bring greater cohesion to the gameplay and introduce new game mechanics
Bomb Elf jumping on jump pad
We have finished the brunt of the work in porting things from the old Javascript engine to this new Unity engine, which includes the enemies, items, special blocks, projectiles, and more. We are currently working on the final miscellaneous things, such as UIs, camera systems, and general bug fixes/final changes.
Early win screen (work in progress) We are also exploring refreshed music/sound effects to create a more pleasing auditory experience in Etherjump, but this may not be available on the initial release of the Unity update
Once the Unity port has reached minimum viability, we will begin private playtesting within the community, with select community members being chosen to access the new engine for feedback/bug reports before public release.
While we have not yet officially opened up for additional headcount, we’d love to hear from you if you are, or know any experienced Unity developers or illustrators/artists! Shoot us an email at team@etherjump.game
Thank you all for your continued support, and we look forward to sharing continued progress in our next monthly update!