The Forge Chronicle
Realms of the Ascended is built in the open. Here we publish the goals we’re working toward and progress reports at the end of major work sessions — screenshots, clips, and what’s next.
Goals Board
A running ledger, not a to-do list: goals move from Up Next to In Progress to Shipped and stay on the record.
Demo footage, the written application, and supporting materials are being assembled for the next submission cycle. The build earns it first.
Three prototype gods with complete ability kits, VFX, full casting animations, and the Thor-Freyja Storm Valkyrie synergy.
The core loop runs start to finish. This period added the card deck screen, a fog of war map that no longer reveals undiscovered enemies, combat feel passes, and full casting animations.
Capture resumes on the prototype build once the fresh-save and combat work lands, mechanic legibility ahead of polish. The grant application footage comes first, public clips follow from the same material.
Seeded outdoor landscapes with biomes, weather, and natural scatter. The first forest layer proved the approach against a written specification for pacing, readable pathing, and rule-placed enemies; the full exterior block is queued behind the fresh-save and combat work.
A third-person home base between runs, built around the studio's namesake: a working forge.
The multi-phase apex predator the Norse arc builds toward.
- 2026-09-28Custom Mjolnir: Thor's hammer, hand-modeledSerhii Prytula, the artist behind our Thor and Odin models and Odin's spear Gungnir, sculpted and textured a custom Mjolnir for Thor. The key art and model sheets are up on Mjolnir's and Thor's compendium entries.
- 2026-09-05The whole project ported to Unreal Engine 5.8Every gate was written down before the move: build, tooling, plugins, save format, every shipping map, a full asset resave, a cook, and a real play session. A copy of the project took all the risk and the real project switched only after every gate passed. The story is next week's post.
- 2026-09-05First clean packaged build of the prototypeThe project cooks to a packaged Windows build with zero errors and boots to the main menu, so the game can be tested the way a player would actually meet it.
- 2026-09-05The Forge: our in-house Unreal Engine agent tooling pluginBuilt from the ground up so an AI assistant can work directly against the running editor: reading project state, creating assets under our conventions, and proving its work with its own captures. Now past three hundred tools, and carried onto the current engine version through a gated overnight migration.
- 2026-08-27Player-first site rework: homepage, game page, and navigationThe homepage now leads with the game and routes each visitor to their lane. The RotA page gained a proper landing, and Codex articles quietly point Norse readers to the game.
- 2026-08-18VisEterna Codex & RotA Wiki live at viseterna.comWorld mythology wiki (13 traditions) cross-linked entry-by-entry to the game compendium.
- 2026-07-31Cross-god synergy system: two powers combine into a thirdA data-driven registry discovers ability pairings at runtime, so combining two gods' powers produces a visible third effect instead of hand-wired special cases.
- 2026-07-15The design document became a living backlogThe 500-plus page design document moved into Jira and Confluence as epics, stories, and linked pages that every work session can query.
- 2026-04-30Procedural dungeon generation running end to endFrom data layer and generator algorithm through level streaming, doors, rewards, minimap, special rooms, and modifiers: the system that assembles every dungeon run.
- 2026-02-28The clean restart: a codebase the studio owns line by lineA new repository, C++ first with Blueprints for data and content, seven ability parent classes every god's kit derives from, and written conventions from day one.
Progress Reports
A Good Brief and a Great Artist: Commissioning 3D Game Art as a Solo Dev
Serhii Prytula's custom Mjolnir just landed in the game. Here is how the two of us work together, the handoff details that let a model drop straight into Unreal, and the brief template I now start every commission with.
The Shape of a Safe Upgrade: Write It Down Before You Build It
Two stories from the same month with the same lesson underneath: an engine upgrade that went smoothly because it was a checklist, and a generated forest that only started working once 'good' existed on paper instead of in my head.
Done Is Not Proven: The Bugs That Taught Me to Check the Claim
A month of work on the prototype, compressed into the one lesson that kept repeating: the distance between a thing being finished and a thing being proven finished is where most of my lost time lives.
The Force Multiplier: An Honest Post About AI, Craft, and the Grant Push
The Epic MegaGrants submission window is close, so this is the story behind the build: how AI code assistance and our in-house Forge plugin let one non-programmer put a dream game into motion, where I refuse to use AI, and why the way you use the tools is the whole argument.
The Opening Chronicle: Who I Am, What Went Wrong, and What We Built Since
Eighteen years in field technology, a lifetime of mythology, one failed prototype, and a clean restart in February 2026. Here is the honest story of how Realms of the Ascended came to be, and the lessons a solo dev can take from it.
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