Dev Diary 3 - Meet the Aeterna Noctis team!

Hello everyone! We hope you all had a good week :)

In today’s dev diary, we wanted to tell you all about the team of Aeternum Game Studios, the project’s origins, and how we ended up building the game we have right now!

The project started with a team of only five people. We knew each other from work and were passionate about video games, we were good at software development and knew a bit about game design. All these made us start creating Aeterna Noctis as a hobby, even if we did not have a background in game development, but after a while we realized that the project had a lot of potential so we started working on a plan to get investors on board.

After one year working on the first alpha version of Aeterna Noctis, we were really happy with how the demo was shaping out. We decided it was time to show it to the world and try to draw some attention to it through a meticulously planned Kickstarter campaign. Despite the campaign not reaching its goal, this worked well, as an investor fell in love with the game and decided to fund the rest of the project! Once we got the funding, we were well aware that we had to make the most of all our resources, time and people in order to be able to develop the best possible version of Aeterna Noctis. At the same time, though, we really wanted to enjoy this creative experience and make sure that the rest of the team did too. With all this in mind, we applied everything we knew about project organisation, production, and business management, and we also made what we think was one of our best decisions: we hired a Project Manager right at the beginning.

He was the first person to join the team, and he planned all the schedules, calculated the quality levels we’d be able to aim for, and made sure that deadlines were met and that the development was smooth. This allowed Aeterna Noctis to end up being at least three times superior in quality and performance to what we had imagined at the beginning, thanks to all this planning but also to the excellent team that joined us.

We started the funded development as a team of 15 people, but during the last stages of the project we added six new members to make sure that we could reach the quality and goals that the game needed. Below these lines you can see how our studio looks like nowadays. Everything in Aeterna Noctis has been handcrafted by the studio: design, development, art, music, sound… We believe all of these things give the project and the team work a special value and charm. Besides, some members of the team have been professional gamers for years, so we were able to apply their user experience, knowledge and feedback for our own game.

Furthermore, the whole team agreed on which were the premises we wanted to focus on and in which order, to give Aeterna Noctis the perfect game feel. For us, the lore is the most important, as we believe that without a good story there’s no point in trying to communicate feelings and moods through a game, and that it would end up lacking charm and soul.

The second equally just as important aspect as the story is the gameplay. We developed complex algorithms to give the main character a fluid and unusual movement and feel, apart from the varied abilities and weapons he’ll obtain throughout the adventure.

We have put a lot of love and care into art, music and sound design. Accompanying the story with appealing settings and enemies and having juicy movement and combat is crucial to get a satisfying experience and a good game feel.

Lastly, we wanted to make sure that there was plenty of gameplay time to enjoy and a lot to discover! Aeterna Noctis is an extensive and detailed game, with more than 20 hours just for its main story and maybe double or triple of that if you want to complete the game to 100%! Happily, there are only a few months left until you can see the final result of all this hard work. Can’t wait to share it with you!