Welcome back to our dev blog, where we summarize what you might have missed the past few weeks on our social media and streams.

Community driven game development and Discord update

## Welcome back to our dev blog, where we summarize what you might have missed the past few weeks on our social media and streams. For the last few weeks, we have focused on getting more feedback and ideas from our community.

![Wonders of Aether Twitch Live Stream 3D Landscape](/news/2021-07-20/wonders-of-aether-stream-rock.jpg)
## Sculpting On Twitch
Together we sculpted new landscapes on our [stream](https://www.twitch.tv/wondersofaether) and came up with some great ideas along the way. We thought it would be nice to include you, our supporters, into WoA's game assets. So we came up with the idea of etching your names into our newly sculpted landscapes. After creating the landscape and texturing, we decided where on this landscape we carve our names. After much deliberation, we came up with some great new ideas.

 - We will etch our followers names using the Aether's language.
 - Instead of using the landscape we created, we will create a new scene using designs from our community!
 - We came up with a quest/story system to revolve around decoding the names.

Hopefully, in the coming weeks, we can show off more of what our community has created, and we look forward to seeing what you make!

![Wonders of Aether Island Twitch Stream](/news/2021-07-20/wonders-of-aether-house-building.jpg)
## More Island Building!
Another fun stream we had the previous week included some island-building! We constructed this small house outside of Everhart and introduced the ***Sea of Lucia***. Although our stream was brief, we were able to build this house from scratch reasonably fast, thanks to our community's quick thinking. Let us know what you think in [Discord](https://discord.gg/JTu93Ee2pt).


![Wonders of Aether Island Twitch Stream](/news/2021-07-20/wonders-of-aether-house-building-lucia.jpg)

![Wonders of Aether Island Twitch Stream](/news/2021-07-20/wonders-of-aether-game-island.jpg)

![Wonders of Aether Island Twitch Stream](/news/2021-07-20/wonders-of-aether-house-building-twitch-stream.jpg)
## Now on Discord!
Also, in other news, we have created a [Discord](https://discord.gg/JTu93Ee2pt) server! As it's been challenging to keep up with all the messages we get about the game; we decided to create our discord server! If you'd like to join our growing community, come on by and say hi!
It's great that we could come up with such great ideas from our community. We look forward to coming up with new ideas for WoA and hope to see everyone in the Pre-Alpha soon!

[Join us on Discord](https://discord.gg/JTu93Ee2pt)

[Watch our Stream (Every Friday!)](https://www.twitch.tv/wondersofaether) 

![Wonders of Aether Join our Twitch Stream](https://media.giphy.com/media/lj8QaJGwOKF0egyxFl/giphy.gif)



It's developer update time! Today we are digging into the technical details about Wonders of Aether and when you can start playing!

The road to Alpha and new milestones

Huge community updates released! Interact and build with our new community tools out right now.

Suggest and vote on new features to be added to WoA

Oh yes, we have done it. Out with the old UE4 and in with the new UE5. We've managed to migrate the entire project months ahead of schedule and are already seeing excellent results. 

Unreal Engine 5, monster taming, musical instruments, photography mode, cinematic camera, free games, and more?

## Unreal Engine 5 updates are in, and we are ahead of schedule!
But before I begin, I'd want to again thank everyone for joining our [Twitch](https://www.twitch.tv/wondersofaether) streams and being a part of our [Discord](https://discord.gg/wondersofaether). Whenever I start streaming or chatting with you guys on [Discord](https://discord.gg/wondersofaether), I get a burst of motivation from all your positivity, and I am always grateful! Thank you again for being here along our journey!

## The future is now, old man!
Oh yes, we have done it. Out with the old UE4 and in with the new UE5. We've managed to migrate the entire project months ahead of schedule and are already seeing excellent results. That's not to say that we haven't encountered any bugs! If you didn't know, UE5 is currently in beta, so we are in the bleeding edge technology zone. With this in mind, we weighed out the pros and cons of migrating early. Fortunately, we can live with some of the issues for now, as many of them are not gameplay-related and editor-only bugs. We hope that these issues will resolve on their own with further updates to UE5 and their official release coming early 2022.

![Riding mount Wonders of Aether](/news/2021-11-08/wonders-of-aether-riding-mount.jpg)
## Monster taming? Like Pokemon?
Yes! But think of it as more of a hybrid of Monster Hunter, Pokemon, and mix it with some Yu-Gi-Oh! We are still working on the spec, though, and decided to focus on one easy part, riding the creatures! If you want to contribute to the spec of this feature before we move it into our "In Development" board, add your comments to the suggestion [here](https://wondersofaether.com/vote/pet-system).

If you have joined our live stream on [Twitch](https://www.twitch.tv/wondersofaether), you might have noticed us riding two types of creatures.

First off, we have quadrupedal land-based monsters. As explained during our stream, some of these monsters may increase player mobility speed, but some may reach new areas unreachable by foot. For example, you may not have access to a boat to cross a large lake or the stamina to do it by swimming. This is where some creatures may provide you with this ability. We showcased a deer/horse-like creature, but in the future, we may add bipedal creatures for climbing and fish-like creatures as well!

The second type was flying mount-type creatures. Now, these will vary in size, but we expect you to have a ton of fun flying through the skies together with friends!

![Wonders of Aether Play Musical Instruments](/news/2021-11-08/wonders-of-aether-play-musical-instruments.jpg)
## Start a band, but in Aether!
We started to add instruments to Wonders of Aether, and although its current version is very limited to instrument types, we plan to add many in the future! Suggest us an instrument in our [Discord](https://discord.gg/wondersofaether) or post it on our feature request page!

![Riding mount Wonders of Aether photography mode](/news/2021-11-08/wallpapers-2.png)
## Photograph the world!
As suggested by you guys, we have been testing our new photography mode! Now, this is a bit different from other photography modes since we have no pause mode (online game!); we have to get creative. So if you want to take a screen during an epic boss fight, you will be able to freeze everything into your frame. After you finish positioning the camera, the only problem is that you might return out of camera mode to a dead character! Unavoidable, of course, but it might be worth the respawn for that sweet shot!

![Riding mount Wonders of Aether photography mode](/news/2021-11-08/wallpapers-4.png)
## Enjoy the view, why don't cha?
Along with the other updates, we improved our intelligent camera system. While idle or performing specific tasks, our camera system will intelligently move to more useful or cinematic areas in idle vs. in action mode. This is to help you fiddle less with the camera and focus more on gameplay and combat. The side bonus is to help you enjoy the views more while idle. Of course, if this isn't to your liking, you may disable this feature in our new settings menu!

## System requirements are no longer an Nvidia 3090 RTX!
I was kidding! It never was in the first place! But now, with our new settings menu, you can fine-tune it to your desire in case you are looking for that 120+fps bump! I wanted to get this in place sooner rather than later as we begin to test lower-end devices to make sure everyone can enjoy Wonders of Aether!

![Waffles No Mori](/news/2021-11-08/waffles-no-mori.jpg)
## FREE GAME?! Yes, come try it out!
We created side games for fun during our live streams, and within the 12 hours of total development time allocated, we created "Waffles No Mori."

![Waffles No Mori](/news/2021-11-08/waffles-no-mori-screen-2.jpg)
This is a horror game similar to slender man, where you have to collect three random spawning VHS tapes while avoiding me "Waffles" of the woods! Currently only available for PC, head over to the #downloads section in our [Discord](https://discord.gg/wondersofaether) if you want to try it out. And always, if you would like me to add features to the game, feel free to suggest it in [Discord](https://discord.gg/wondersofaether)!

Well, I believe that's all for last month's update! I'm sure I missed something, but we have "a lot cooking in the kitchen" and are excited to show you all what we come up with on our Friday streams! Thanks again for joining us, and if you want to stay more in the loop, join us on [Discord](https://discord.gg/wondersofaether), where we share all the deets!

[Join us on Discord](https://discord.gg/wondersofaether)

[Watch our Stream (Every Friday!)](https://www.twitch.tv/wondersofaether) 

Weather and time get a complete overhaul in the world of Aether. We are excited to announce a new mechanic introduced in our most recent Pre-Alpha update. Now, aside from looking aesthetically beautiful, Aethers weather and time system will bring new challenges to explorers.