Devlog: August 2026

Heyoo!

This month started with two suggestions from the community and somehow ended with a serpentfly murdering one of my oldest friends. So let's start there.

You asked for better melee animations

Discord member @jin put it rather eloquently: "It's important for a game like this not to have ugly hit animations." Fair point. Eldria didn't have any hit animations at all. Ranged attacks already showed arrows, bolts, fireballs and other missiles flying through the world, while melee attacks were basically invisible. In hindsight, that was an obvious gap.

This matters for more than looks too. In a messy group fight, especially in PvP, you can now see who is hitting who.

We have two melee animations so far: one big swoosh for two-handed weapons and one smaller swing for one-handed weapons. They are configured per weapon, so we can keep adding variations and give different weapons their own look. Fiery axe swings? Icy swords? Now very possible!

One new spell, yet another enormous refactor

Echo Step came from another Discord member, @Elgade. The idea was a spell that teleports you forward and leaves a decoy behind to distract monsters. I liked it right away, but Eldria's engine was not ready for it. Every time I tried to figure out how the "echo" should work, the server model turned into mud.

After a lot more work than expected, Echo Step finally exists. It teleports you three tiles forward and leaves behind a ghostly copy of your character that attracts nearby monsters for a few seconds. It gives you movement and a precious bit of breathing room in one spell. I can already imagine it saving someone from a terrible pull, or causing complete chaos when they use it in the wrong direction.

The tricky part was that the decoy did not fit into any category the server already knew. It is not quite a player: you cannot trade with it, invite it to a party, or chat with it. It is not really a monster either because it has no health and cannot die. It exists in the world, looks like a player, and can be targeted by monsters, but almost every other assumption we made about combat actors was wrong for it.

That forced a fairly huge redesign of how the server understands things in the world. Now players, monsters, and NPCs are no longer rigid boxes that every new idea needs to be squeezed into. The server instead builds actors from composing the behaviors they actually need.

This is the part I am really excited about. We could make a cursed tree that looks like an ordinary object, with no name or health bar, until it starts attacking you. Or a turret-like object that shoots spells at anything that comes close. Weird things can be weird now without pretending to be players or monsters. Cool stuff!

Someone actually played Eldria

A few months ago I was talking to a childhood friend about the game we are building. Back then, Eldria could barely stay up and healthy on the server. I gave him an early access invite code almost as a joke and then completely forgot about it. There was not really a stable game for him to log into anyway.

He has a busy life with a wife and kids, so some time passed. Then last weekend I woke up to a message saying he had registered an account, downloaded the client, and spent a few hours playing.

I was so excited! Someone was online?! In Eldria. For hours. Without me sitting next to them explaining which button was currently broken. That was an exhilarating feeling. The game is already playable! It is lacking a lot of content and depth, and he found waaaaaaay too many bugs, but he got in and played it.

His experience was not exactly gentle. He played in a tiny window where he had to squint at the world while his unit frame occupied roughly half the screen. Then he wandered up the little mountain just outside town and got one-shotted by the serpentflies chilling there. Apparently the progression curve from rats to serpentflies is currently less of a curve and more of a cliff.

I have spent quite a bit of time fixing game-breaking things since then. I also learned that different screen sizes are a nightmare, so for now Eldria will run in a fixed-size window.

Getting the controls right

His biggest complaint was that offensive and support targeting did not feel intuitive, especially when combined with having to enable auto attack manually. I agree. The individual systems made sense when we built them, but together they ask the player for too many button presses.

That is what we are working on now. I am rethinking targeting, auto attack, and the basic combat controls so we can get a stable, enjoyable first version of Eldria out to you guys.

We can keep tweaking all of this later. But before I ask for your precious time to join us to test in-game, I want the game to at least be at a point where I genuinely enjoy playing it too.

And while I am talking about people joining: welcome to everyone who has recently found us on Discord or signed up for early access. Seeing new names appear and people get excited about Eldria is super thrilling.

The two features at the top of this post both started as ideas from @jin and @Elgade. If you have other ideas for Eldria, come tell us on Discord. We really do read this stuff, and sometimes one innocent suggestion causes an enormous server refactor.

I keep saying we are getting close. This time I have a childhood friend getting one-shotted by serpentflies as evidence.

See you in Mirenroot soon!