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 in final assembly as the submission window approaches.
Capture sessions are underway on the prototype build, mechanic legibility ahead of polish. The grant application footage comes first, public clips follow from the same material.
Serhii Prytula, the artist behind our Thor and Odin models and Odin's spear Gungnir, is sculpting a custom Mjolnir for Thor. When it is finished, expected in the next few weeks, the renders go up on Thor's compendium entry.
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 month added the card deck screen, an honest fog-of-war map, and combat feel passes. HUD polish continues.
Seeded outdoor landscapes with biomes, weather, and natural scatter, taking runs above ground for the first time.
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.
- 2026-08-27Player-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.
- 2026-06-30The Forge: our in-house UE5.7 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.
- 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
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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