Eons ago, in a long-fotgotten era that some call “the nineties”, I had my first exposure to a programming language. mIRC, the internet relay chat client for Windows, included a feature-rich scripting language that allowed you to not only customize the interface or have user events trigger custom functionality, but to develop entirely unrelated applications parsed, interpreted, and executed by the mIRC “virtual machine”. Aesthir was born.

Around this time, the announcement for a then-revolutionary game by the name of Horizons led me to the “of-istaria” IRC network’s #hz channel, a place of much shenanigans and rejoicing, and the occasional Horizons-related talk. It was here that I met Jacob “HolyViper” May, someone with whom I still chat daily, and “co-founder” of the Aesthir franchise. You see, we have attempted to make Aesthir-branded games since we both started tinkering with mIRC’s bitmap manipulation abilities. Aesthir games since then have included a mIRC-based 2D MMORPG, a massively-multiplayer roguelike, MUDs, web-based strategy RPGs/city builders, etc. Kingdoms of Aesthir was the last of these incarnations of the latter type, and, I must confess, suffered the vaporware fate of the earlier iterations.

Why, you ask? Simply a mixture of lack of direction, over-ambition, under-thinking game systems while overdesigning the game world, and, most importantly, lack of momentum.

While this last incarnation of Aesthir was the most fleshed out and definitely the furthest developed, and may possibly be picked up once again, the lesson learned remains:

Keep it simple, keep it small, keep a goal’s end always in sight, and don’t allow the development of trivial features sap your momentum.