Rivals of Aether and Rivals of Ather 2 are indie fighting games that combine fast-paced

platform combat with elemental themed characters. The game takes inspiration from Super Smash

Bros and emphasizes skillful movement, tight controls, and competitive balance, making it

popular in the fighting game community. Dan Fornes is a game director and designer at Ather Studios, the developer

of Rivals of Ather. He joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about developing platform

fighting games. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has

worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal.

Joe got a start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Gary's Mod.

And game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

Music Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash. And today I'm joined by Dan Fonasey, studio lead of Ether Studios, creators of Platform Fighter, Rivals of ether two. Dan, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today. Yeah, thanks for having me.

So before we get into chatting about your game and your studio, I want to start with what your

journey into game development was. What brought you to where you are today? Yeah, so I think like,

it probably goes all the way back to the

fact that growing up, I was born 89, so I'm a 90s kid. And my family, we didn't have

video game consoles, but luckily my dad was still a big nerd. And along with Star Trek, he was really

into computers, like kind of those early days. So we had like

DOS games, like even before we had Windows. We were playing games on DOS. And my mom still has a story

about me as like a three year old, I think, trying to tell her how to type in where the location

of some game I wanted to play was, but he's like calling my dad at work to try to

get some game booted. So I think just that ability of what to jump through hoops just to play

video games is kind of what led me down a path of being able to jump through hoops to customize

my own video games. Nice. That makes a lot sense. Yeah. And I guess, fits very nicely into where you've ended up and the kind of the niche you're working in and a lot of the genre you've worked on. So I guess before we get into the game itself, it walks a little bit through what is a platform fighter? Because this isn't the most widespread genre. What do you think of the space you occupy as? Yeah, yeah. So it's definitely

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