Dev Blog #1 - We're Making an MMO

Hey everyone,

This is our first real dev blog post so we wanted to give a quick update on where things are at.

Where We're At

We've been heads down building Eternal Realms Online for a while now and honestly things are coming together pretty well. Most of the core gameplay systems are in and working. Combat, all 14 skills, crafting, the economy, social features, guilds, trading, offline progression. The bones of the game are solid. You can check our progress page for a full breakdown of what's done and what's still in the works.

Right now we're focused on building out more world content. Areas, quests, dungeons, enemy types. The systems are there, now it's about filling the world with stuff worth doing.

Working With Our Artist

We've been working with an artist on the visual direction for the game. Here's an early concept sketch we got back for the player character:

Three different proportions to figure out how we wanted the player to look and feel in-game. We ended up going with the middle one, felt like the right size and silhouette for the kind of game we're building. Obviously the final character won't look exactly like this but it gave us a solid direction to work from.

Still early days on the art side. We've been using placeholder art and animations to build and test everything, and now we're starting to replace those with the real thing piece by piece.

"Why No Gameplay Screenshots?"

You might be wondering why we're not showing off the actual game yet. Trust us, we want to. But we've all seen the "hey I'm making an MMO" posts with half-finished placeholder art and programmer sprites, and that's not the first impression we want to make. (And yes, the screenshots on the homepage right now are AI generated slop. We know. They're placeholders until we have real stuff to show.)

You only get one shot at a first impression and we'd rather wait until our custom art is actually in the game before we start showing it off. When we do reveal gameplay, we want it to look like something you'd actually want to play, not a work in progress you have to squint at and imagine the potential. Real gameplay footage is coming, just not yet.

The Website

We also just got this website up and running. It's still a work in progress, there's stuff we want to add and polish, but we wanted to have something out there so people can see what we're building and follow along.

What's Next

More content, more art, more polish. We're going to try to post updates here more regularly so you can see how things are progressing. If you want to stay in the loop, join the Discord or check back here.

Thanks for reading. More soon.

- The ERO Team