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Announcements and Articles: The Gatehouse Quarter => Announcements! The Town Crier! => Topic started by: Jubal on July 18, 2026, 12:51:54 PM

Title: Updates from the Forge 62: Summer 2026
Post by: Jubal on July 18, 2026, 12:51:54 PM
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Issue 62: Summer 2026

EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Welcome to Updates from the Forge 62, for Summer 2026! We're past the halfway point of the year and deep into the middle of summer, but despite the heat there's still plenty to show you in our creative updates.

We've had one article in our articles section in recent months, with Indiekid continuing his world travels by heading down to Thailand, a key location for backpackers on which he reflects in . This is the first part of a two part series, so keep your eyes peeled for the next instalment.

If there's a theme to this quarter's updates, it seems to be nature and the natural world: we have building terrain and exploration RPG development in our game dev section, wildlife photography and poems about the sky and animals in our arts sections, and some soaring music resources for barren landscapes in the miscellany. As most of us live in very urban spaces in the modern world, it can be easy to set nature aside or build 'natural' spaces in our imaginations that are quite bare compared to the reality: but maybe these updates will give you some thoughts on how to enrich them in your creativity, one way or another.

And so - the updates!

CONTENTS:


GAME DEV
Godot and Terrain3D

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Jubal has been working with learning Godot, the open-source game engine, over the past year, as a base for new projects. Using the 3D elements of the engine, he's worked through basic UI, camera angles, movement calculations, and more besides - and, more recently, has started writing up elements of his experience.

In his latest escapades, he's been using Terrain3D, a plugin for Godot that allows easy in-editor height and visual editing of terrain meshes. In Jubal's initial experiments, he attempts to make an island with a few different textures on the terrain, and to combine it with a shader for some surrounding water - and he's written about a range of the confusions and problems inevitable in using a new tool, so if you're looking for advice on building Godot terrains yourself, this might be useful for you!

Do you have particular bits of your favourite game engine that, or are there particular bits of game dev you want? The Indie Alley is always open for your thoughts and questions! In the meantime, do check out Jubal's progress:

Terrain3D Notes (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=7173.msg171279#msg171279)
Jubal's Godot Experiments (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6984.msg158431#msg158431)



The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of... 2!

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One day... or once upon a time.
Hobbyist game dev couple and studio EntangledPear (who I'm now only just realising are therefore an entangled pair, that really should have clicked years ago) are building a sequel to their lovely old-school RPG The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of! The first TSFTAMO follows a scholar, Paul, who undertakes a quest to bring the sunlight back to the fantasy realm he lives in. The second instalment will return to an older, married Paul, this time facing a new and equally fairytale challenge: a plague of deep, irretrievable slumber, the sort that could cloak a realm for a thousand years, which is inconvenient when you'd been planning to live a settled family life in that time.

The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of 2, like its predecessor, has classic JRPG style systems including turn based combats and classic pixelly art styles. It also features an ingredient collection system, puzzles, an emphasis on exploration, and lots of NPCs to interact with around the world (at least you're not the only one still awake!)

You can already get the demo on Itch, so do check that out and provide the team with feedback here on the forum:

Get the demo on Itch (https://entangledpear.itch.io/the-stuff-fairy-tales-are-made-of-2)
Exilian thread (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=171351)

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Indiekid's Game Dev Adventures

Indiekid has recently been providing - as well as writeups of his actual travel adventures - some of his latest adventures in boardgame development and ways to approach it. In his latest post he's been writing about the different ways we produce and consume information and advice - the difference between blogs and books, and why actually you might want to physically print out a lot of blog pages sometimes. We also have his adventures to a Lego event, as a tabletop-adjacent hobby with quite a lot of potential uses and overlaps for the design-minded brain, and highlighting a friend's recent kickstarter of Bots 'N Pieces, which describes itself as a "Robot-Fusion TTRPG" and is still accepting late pledges (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/darkjewelgames/bots-n-pieces-a-robot-fusion-ttrpg).

If any of that sounds interesting, do check out his blog at the links below:

Master of Olympus Blog (https://masterofolympus.wordpress.com/)
Indiekid's Updates on Exilian (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=171484)

ARTS AND WRITING
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Behold, for it is smol and yet mighty.
Rob Haines' Photographic Print Club

We've long known that Rob Haines had an eye for a good shot in virtual or physical worlds, given his amazing ingame picture projects, but now his photography is coming up to a new level with his print club where you can purchase or subscribe monthly for his latest photos. He's recently obtained a professional grade printer so he can produce physical copy prints of some of his best work - his own favourite being some gorgeous bluebells, but there are also bees, a heron, and this beautiful wren to choose from too.

Nature photography both captures and changes the world it shows - it gives us insights both into the natural world we see through it, but also what we find beautiful in that world and why particular contrasts or subtleties appeal to us. Why not have a look and think about what you get from seeing the creatures around us, and why?

The Print Club on Ko-Fi (https://ko-fi.com/robhainesprintclub/shop)
Exilian Thread (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=172032)

Winds and Whimsy: Jubal's Poems

Quote
Sing high, you little lost wind,
Sing high where the air is thin,
Where all our breaths escape and soar,
Our lips grow cold and lie no more,
So scattered where the cloud-wisps stray,
Our lives and sins, wind, cast away.
- From Sin-Eater, by Jubal

Being one of our resident poets as well as a game developer, Jubal often regales Exilian with new rhymes, riddles and the like, and recent months have been no exception. His works this year have leaned in many cases towards a nature theme in different ways, from reflecting on the different landscapes in his travels to Norway, to meditating on the theme of sin-eaters and thinking about the way a wind or other moving landscape could act as them, to much more whimsical ideas about why snails don't sing and what a hawfinch would eat if it had the capability.

If any or all of that sounds up your street, do check out Jubal's Exilian thread, which includes most of his poetry going back over most of the last twenty years - there's lots to find from blank verse to rhymes to song lyrics, and thoughts and discussion are always welcome. Maybe you'll find something hidden in an unexpected corner that speaks to whatever's going on for you: there's only one way to find out.

Read Jubal's Poems on Exilian (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=171034)

MISCELLANY
Proso:Portal

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A new independent academic project, Proso:portal is a website for aggregating and finding humanities datasets on the premodern past and for helping users to understand them. It currently offers some "data bibliographies" with links to key datasets around particular themes - either across a particular method or type, like prosopographies, or across a particular area of history, like the Byzantine world - as well as some regular bibliographies providing teaching materials and core reading suggestions for finding out more about data methods on the premodern past.

These resources are just the start of the plans for the website, which aims to help not just provide access to resources but to explain the data models and other underlying information involved.

Visit Prosoportal (https://exilian.co.uk/prosoportal/)
Support Forum (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?board=264.0)

Latest Music from Eric Matyas

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Composer Eric Matyas regularly creates huge banks of free sounds and images to use in creative projects, all of which can be used entirely for free! No-attribution licenses and custom work can also be purchased, but for both commercial and hobby projects, there's a huge amount you can access on the SoundImage website and it's been continually expanding for many years now. He's also been moving progressively more tracks into higher quality OGG format, which especially helps get smooth looping in game engines for those of you out there who want some music for your latest gamedev projects.

Recent new tracks incorporate a certain high airy theme, including Stratosphere, originally designed for high drone videos, and Unforgiving Himalayas, a cold and airy piece to give the impression of soaring mountaintops. It could also be a great video backing, or perhaps the backing track for an especially barren or desolate RPG location?

Either way, you can find these and much more besides on SoundImage:

SoundImage Website (https://soundimage.org/)
Latest Updates on Exilian (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=172530)

And that's all of summer's updates! Check back here in Autumn and we'll no doubt have a host more writings, games, and resources for your creative projects. But until then, take care!
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