AetherForges Interactive · Amsterdam · est. 2016
Forty-three developers. One studio on the Fred. Roeskestraat. A single, stubborn conviction: a role-playing game should feel less like software and more like a place you once lived.
Enter the studioThe studio began in the winter of 2016, when six developers left larger houses in Utrecht and Stockholm and rented a cold-water workshop above a bicycle repair shop. The first eight months produced nothing shippable — only a lighting engine, a folder of maps, and an argument about doors that lasted three weeks. We consider all three foundational.
What we learned in that workshop still governs everything on this floor: worlds are not assembled from features. They accrete, like sediment, from thousands of small decisions that each answer the same question — would this exist if no player were watching? The tavern ledger nobody reads is written anyway. The mountain pass has weather whether or not you cross it.
We ship rarely. We cut generously. We would rather release one place worth returning to than five worth forgetting.
“The player should never catch the world performing for them.”
— Mirre Aldenhoven, Creative Director
Select a stage to open its dossier.
Before a single asset exists, a small strike team spends eight to twelve weeks digging for the world's central tension. For Vessel of Ash it was a question — what does a kingdom owe its dead? — found in week nine, taped to the wall, and never taken down.
Grey-box geometry, placeholder combat, and a traversable slice of the world within ninety days. Nothing is beautiful yet, and that is deliberate: we test whether the place is worth walking through before we decide what it looks like.
The long middle. Environment art, systems, quest architecture, and the thousand invisible ledgers grow in parallel. Every fortnight the entire studio plays the current build together on the big wall — the ritual we call the Gathering.
Feature-complete is where our real work starts. Six months of pacing passes, performance budgets, accessibility audits, and the ruthless cutting of anything the world does not need. Roughly a fifth of finished content dies here. It always hurts. It is always right.
Launch day is quiet at the studio — the loud part happened months ago. We stay with a world long after release: two years of free chapters for Vessel of Ash and counting. A place you once lived deserves a caretaker.
Everything below was built in-house because the shelf did not sell what our worlds required. Hover an instrument to read its file.
Our fork of a physically based renderer tuned for alpine light: volumetric cloud shadowing, snow subsurface scattering, and dusk that arrives the way dusk actually arrives — from the valleys upward.
An off-screen economy and ecology simulator. Grain prices, wolf populations, and ferry schedules keep moving whether or not the player is nearby. The tavern really does run out of ale.
A dialogue and consequence graph editor our writers use directly, without programmer hand-holding. Vessel of Ash runs 214,000 words through Loom, every branch reachable, every branch tested.
The retargeting layer between our capture stage and the engine. Marrow preserves weight — the pause before a heavy swing, the settle after a landing — where generic retargeting flattens it.
Procedural weather-and-wind audio driven by the same simulation that moves the clouds. When the storm you hear arrives, it is the storm you heard.
The city above is Aldersgate, capital of the Vessel of Ash setting. Before an artist painted a single spire, the world team wrote its water rights disputes, its funeral guild's fee schedule, and the reason the eastern bridge was never finished. Players will encounter almost none of this directly.
They will feel all of it. Coherence is not a feature you add — it is the residue of decisions taken seriously.
Every character begins as graphite. Drag the seam to move between the sketch pass and the pigment pass.
Volume B occupies the old loading bay: fourteen metres of clear floor, thirty-two cameras, and a wall display that solves the skeleton live so performers can watch their character breathe in the same second they do.
Our stage direction rule is borrowed from theatre — capture the intention, not the choreography. A tired soldier walks differently from a frightened one at identical speed, and Marrow keeps that difference all the way into the build.
The score for Vessel of Ash was recorded with a nine-piece string section in a deconsecrated church in Haarlem, then dismantled into stems that Vane reassembles against the weather. Run your cursor across the waveform.
Our flagship. A kingdom that buries its kings in glaciers, and the cartographer sent to find out why the ice is retreating. 2.4 million players. Two free chapters shipped; a third in Tempering.
A tight, twelve-hour story about a hedge-witch conscripted into a war she predicted. Our first fully performance-captured cast, and the project that paid for Volume B.
The cold-water workshop game. No combat, one valley, and a map that redraws itself as your understanding of the valley changes. Still selling. Still strange. Still ours.
A Tuesday on the floor, as recorded by the studio log.
Melting a glacier in real time sounds like a rendering problem. It is actually a level-design problem, an economy problem, and — as of last sprint — a funeral-guild problem. Notes from six months of controlled flooding.
— Mirre, Creative DirectorThe three-week door argument of 2016, finally written down. What a locked door promises, what a fake door steals, and the render budget we pay to keep that promise on every street in Aldersgate.
— Joost, Studio Technical DirectorRoom tone is the sound a space makes when it thinks nobody is listening. How forty minutes of a sleeping church in Haarlem became the emotional floor of the entire score.
— Femke, Audio DirectorWe cut a finished region from Vessel of Ash eleven weeks before launch. Two years later, here is what was in it, why it had to go, and where its best ideas quietly resurfaced.
— Sanne, Principal Character ArtistForty-three people, eleven nationalities, one floor. We hire slowly, pay properly, and do not crunch — Tempering is scheduled, not survived. Four-day on-site core, Fridays wherever you think best. Relocation to Amsterdam supported end to end, visa included.
You will own combat feel for Chapter Three — hit registration, animation-driven movement, and the invisible half-second economies that make a sword feel heavy. C++ fluency required; opinions about input latency non-negotiable. You will work daily with Marrow and the animation team.
Apply with a build, not a CV, to contact@aetherforges.pro.
Aldersgate's lower districts need an owner. You will lead three artists through the thaw rework, balancing painterly intent against Smeltwerk's performance budgets. We want a portfolio that shows restraint — spaces that feel inhabited rather than decorated.
Portfolio and a paragraph on your favourite real street to contact@aetherforges.pro.
The bridge between Volume B and the build. You will extend Marrow's retargeting, maintain the capture-to-engine path, and guard the weight of every performance that crosses it. Python and a working knowledge of solver maths expected; stage experience a genuine plus.
Reel and pipeline war stories to contact@aetherforges.pro.
Weather is an instrument here. You will design within Vane, record in the field (and occasionally in churches), and mix for a game where silence carries narrative weight. Bring ears first, tools second.
A three-minute soundscape of anywhere real to contact@aetherforges.pro.
It is in Tempering now. We announce dates only when the shipping candidate exists, which historically means an announcement eight to ten weeks out. The Journal is always the first place to hear.
We are independently owned by the people who work here. Thornwake's success bought that independence and we guard it. We partner on distribution and localisation, never on creative direction.
Twice a year we open the floor — including Volume B — for a public evening announced in the Journal. Outside those dates the floor stays quiet; a shipping world needs one.
No, and for legal reasons unsolicited design documents are deleted unread. If you want to shape our worlds, the honest route is the Careers section above.
Not currently. They are load-bearing and opinionated, and supporting external teams would cost the focus they exist to protect. We do publish technical write-ups in the Journal.
Two paid placements each year, one in art and one in engineering, run with Dutch and EU universities. Applications open every September via the Careers address.
AetherForges Interactive
Fred. Roeskestraat 115
1076 EE Amsterdam
Netherlands
contact@aetherforges.pro
+31 20 794 6382