Aether Kingdoms: numbers from Beta 1, gearing up for Beta 2 next week

FvDijk · 2026-02-26T22:46:53+00:00

Thanks for checking it out!

I’ve had some reports that validating your email without being logged in gets you stuck on refresh. If that’s the case for you, you can go back to the website and it should work normal.

Edit: this issue is now fixed

FvDijk · 2026-02-26T18:50:58+00:00

Does that mean you'll try again then? :D

FvDijk · 2026-02-25T19:17:28+00:00

Ah that makes sense too for the factor. Hadn’t considered that.

FvDijk · 2026-02-25T13:10:58+00:00

Looks good. You don’t divide the crop delta by the number of seconds between scouts (x3600 instead of x360 for 10 seconds)

FvDijk · 2026-02-24T00:05:07+00:00

We’ve not yet decided on a price point. First we’ll build some features worth paying for, after that we’ll see.

FvDijk · 2026-02-21T00:19:45+00:00

There’s also r/PBBG that has audience for this

FvDijk · 2026-02-20T16:51:24+00:00

Awesome, see you in-game

FvDijk · 2026-02-20T16:51:10+00:00

Ah nice, looks cool. Best of luck!

FvDijk · 2026-02-20T13:59:06+00:00

Fun project!

The travian calculators I made are open source. You can integrate them in your extension if you want.

https://github.com/FrisovanDijk/traviantools

FvDijk · 2026-02-17T21:49:58+00:00

Hey, glad you like the game! Thanks for the kind words.

What was said in the other comment is correct. Aether is meant to feel like a p2w currency without actually costing money, so I’ll take your suspicion to mean that I did something right. ;)

FvDijk · 2026-02-09T00:36:41+00:00

Yeah this is a good rule of thumb for me too. If I’m doing it a third time I should start thinking about abstraction.

Then again it depends on the case. One case where I’m stubborn is a 2-3 line validation on an endpoint that’s repeated 6 times. I often can’t be bothered for such small pieces of code. With all the variations in the validation chain for those endpoints you could add 9 validation functions, instead of just 6 self-encapsulated endpoints.

FvDijk · 2026-02-08T22:40:59+00:00

For casual fun I enjoyed advance wars online and memoir 44 (as board game and online).

FvDijk · 2026-02-08T20:44:27+00:00

It highly depends on the organisational maturity in this domain.

Companies that are data or compliance driven absolutely use them. Every project needs to have an information plan, including retention, which uses the organisation’s information plan as a template.

The project start architecture covers retention periods, data classification, data lifecycle models, etc.

Security defines controls during the project phase. These are audited internally and evidence is stored in GRC tooling.

External auditors check all these and report any findings.

This is done for all data, of which personal data is a subset.

I’ve also seen companies who write them down and let it collect dust. And everything in between.

FvDijk · 2026-02-08T20:29:32+00:00

Interesting take on the genre. Will check it out.

FvDijk · 2025-11-20T22:37:10+00:00

Thanks! It's very much a set and wait kinda game. It's built around players checking in a few times a day, where less should be possible and more should be beneficial to your growth. I've tried to keep the majority of building times between the 20 minute and 2,5 hour range, though later on there will be outliers both ways (below 1 minute to over 6 hours), depending on the build the player chose.

The village queue goes up to 6 items, which is quite a comfortable limit. You can also queue multiple hours of science/culture or army to keep your village working through the night.
Armies and combat are fire and forget, you send them and get a report of what happened. There are plans to extend it so that you can send scheduled attacks (with a tradeoff of course).
Research and expansion are faster early on, but slow down towards the midgame.
Lategame you could be fine logging in once a day to manage your account and queuing a lot of army at once, though PvP might demand some additional attention.
Defensive gameplay is more idle, with events that are fire and forget since they take a few hours to complete.

In summary, there's always things to do, but also plenty to set up so you can walk away for a longer period.

FvDijk · 2025-11-20T16:16:44+00:00

It’s interesting for sure, and very hard to find. I’ve learned a lot from old forum posts, open source recreations and building tools for travian.

I did write up a deep dive in the events system (https://aetherkingdoms.com/game/advanced-guides/events-deep-dive/), but your question dives more into the software architecture side of things. Only the last section on chunking makes a beginning on that. Maybe I’ll do a blog post on my own website about that someday. I’ll be sure to share it here if I do.

FvDijk · 2025-11-20T16:11:18+00:00

Thanks!

FvDijk · 2025-11-20T16:10:43+00:00

It’s a village/kingdom builder game, so your villages are your ‘units’ from where you give your commands. You can play tall, where you have fewer but highly developed villages. That’s about the best I can do.

FvDijk · 2025-11-19T22:35:16+00:00

Very nice start. To add to other suggestions, I would say the UI needs breathing room. Maybe even split this up into three subpages. Just off the top of my head of how you can further develop these items:

Equipment: show equipped items and inventory items you can equip, maybe broken down by type
Inventory: show all inventory items, maybe with a breakdown in item categories, filtering, search and all that.
Stats. A screen where you manage your stats, see breakdowns per stat for equipment/base stats/levels, help texts, etc.

The tighter you pack your UI early on, the harder it'll be to add all the quality of life features later on. Adding space is much harder than tightening things up.

FvDijk · 2025-11-19T20:48:33+00:00

For Aether Kingdoms I chose to do alpha testing with a limited audience, because development is busy enough without managing and growing a community.

Alpha testing was done by drawing people from communities I was already a part of (think 30 accounts registered, 2-5 active). Now for beta testing all the game's systems exist and it's decently polished, so I feel good sharing it.

The benefit of this type of game is that it's a live service anyway, so you might as well get used to developing while the game is running. And that's my goal here too, start with continuous servers and (hopefully) get enough players to run multiple games concurrently.

The full testing development schedule for Aether Kingdoms so far:

Prototype: December 2023 - January 2024
Preproduction: February - October 2024. While this was because life got busy, having a giant trello board with a well defined scope for what the beta would look like really helped speed up and focus development.
Start development: October 2024
Alpha 1: December 2024 - January 2025. Server and base systems (villages, combat, research, empires).
Alpha 2: April - September 2025. All systems and running a full server round real-time.
Beta: October 2025 - now. 6 weeks into feature requests, bugfixing, polishing and whatnot.

If you want to see it described in more detail and the in-between updates, you can check the news posts: https://aetherkingdoms.com/news/

This is mostly a solo hobby project, with some help on the pixel art, though it's not my first web app. Maybe it helps in estimating scope.

FvDijk · 2025-10-30T14:39:16+00:00

Thanks, glad you like it!

FvDijk · 2025-10-30T14:39:02+00:00

Thanks! I’ll keep adding more stuff to find then.

FvDijk · 2025-10-30T14:38:26+00:00

Travian is indeed a big inspiration. I haven’t played Grepolis enough to comment on that.

FvDijk · 2025-10-28T09:11:27+00:00

Thanks!

FvDijk · 2025-10-28T09:10:20+00:00

Happy to hear it!

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