Introducing… The AetherLight : Chronicles of the Resistance

Yes! We finally have a name!

We have spent a long time trying to work out what to name our game. It had to be something that sounded steampunk, but also fit with our demographic. We actually drew this Venn Diagram on the whiteboard to help us focus on what names would be possibilities:

One name that we really liked was called “Aetherlight.” We felt that it combined a really central steampunk motif (Aether), and a central christian motif (light). However we faced 2 massive problems – Aetherlight.com wasn’t available and its a hard word to spell.

Anyway, we left that for a while and set about trying to find other names that could work. We just kept coming back to AetherLight and so we decided one option was to try to convince the owner of Aetherlight.com to sell his domain to us. Serendipitously, whilst looking up his contact details on who.is, the page suggested to us other options that were similar to AetherLight.com….

Enter… TheAetherLight.com. So, that took care of the .com problem – but what about the spelling issue? Well the advice we were given was that we need to also get alternative spellings – such as theEtherLight.com – and wouldn’t you know it, but that was also available! Awesomeness!

We thought about the change from AetherLight to The AetherLight and decided we liked it. It made the aetherlight a thing, an actual item in the world, in the mythos, in the story. We also realised that we had a perfect place to make it fit in the story.

So what is the Aetherlight? It is a relic of the great engineer that has come into the possession of the games chief protagonist Joshua (non-playable). It will be a key theme and image throughout your game experience – we were keen to make it a physical object not simply a ethereal word.

“Ancient documents, from before the blight that is the great fog once again descended upon our land, tell of a key. A simple key, and it holds our future. A future we can only dream of, save for the key. Save for the Aetherlight.

Skeletons of great engines are scattered around outside our cities, amongst our forests, and throughout our snow-moors, reminders of a time when the fog was kept at bay. Reminders of a happier time – a time when things were right in the world. Reminders of a time when the great engineer dwelt in Evercity. Alas, such times are past.

The key – lost along with the great engineer – hasn’t been seen since the Usurper burned through the Evercity gardens and into His castle.

All who’d ever seen the key are no more than dust or ash. The Usurper has now ruled for generations uncounted – and without any knowledge of the location of The Aetherlight or the Great Engineer – there was no hope for the people.

Until Now”

So, we hope you like the name as much as we do! If you do, head over to http://facebook.com/theaetherlight and like us. You can also follow along at theaetherlight.com