Rivals of Aether and Rivals of Aether II 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 Fornace is a game director and designer at Aether Studios, the developer of Rivals of Aether. 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 his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsors
If you’re using AI to code, ask yourself: are you building software, or are you just playing Prompt Roulette?
We know that unstructured prompting works at first, but eventually leads to AI slop and technical debt.
Enter Zenflow.
Zenflow takes you from “vibe coding” to AI-First Engineering. It is the first AI Orchestration layer that brings discipline to the chaos.
It transforms free-form prompting into spec-driven workflows and multi-agent verification—where agents actually cross-check each other to prevent drift.
You can even command a fleet of parallel agents to implement features and fix bugs simultaneously. We’ve seen teams accelerate delivery 2x to 10x.
Stop gambling with prompts. Start orchestrating your AI.
Turn raw speed into reliable, production-grade output at zenflow.free
You’re a developer who wants to innovate—instead, you’re stuck fixing bottlenecks, and fighting legacy code. MongoDB can help. It’s a flexible, unified platform that’s built for developers, by developers. MongoDB is ACID compliant, Enterprise-ready, with the capabilities you need to ship AI apps—fast. That’s why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns? Start building at mongodb.com/build.
Capital One’s proprietary AI solutions are built on their modern tech stack. Their engineering teams are using real-time data at scale, applied research, and the power of cloud platform standardization and automation to embed customer-driven AI solutions throughout their business.