Origins of Legends of Aitera

Hello Everyone! My name is Lily, and I am the lead game designer and producer for Legends of Aitera. We originally began the Legends of Aitera project on February 18, 2022. As a child (& Adult!), I had always wanted to make and design an MMO. By grade 5, I had already started extensively designing ideas and concepts for one, although at that time, it was for Minecraft. As time went on, I slowly came to realize that I loved game design and decided to go full steam ahead. By 7th grade, I realized my dream was to make video games.
Around early 2022, I wanted to create an MMO and finally give it a try. However, asking around, it became painfully clear that building this genre of game would be nearly impossible at the scale I was hoping for. So, I began looking for alternatives. Around this time, I had already begun playing around with ROBLOX. So, I asked a long-time friend of mine and LOA’s Co-Founder to jump onto ROBLOX and help me build an MMO. The first day consisted of us simply trying to figure out how to use the engine, but soon we were building the game.
This version of LOA from February would not last. As we were playing around, I had been downloading assets from the toolbox. Not being aware of ROBLOX’s Community Guidelines at the time, I had added a Guillotine as a background prop for what was planned to be Aquarin Town. This promptly got the game deleted, and I was banned for 3 days following the incident. This was a huge blow at the time, but all it did was motivate me to come back even harder. This is when we went full force into development.
During that time, we still had no plan, making decisions on a whim, and we ended up creating the world spawn in only a few days (Aquarin Town Shore). We then began creating Aquarin Town. Our first shop in the town was Jarad’s Smithing Shop. We had built many houses, a bridge, and a beautiful path before we decided to restart development on the town. Our goal was to make it more visually distinct. We decided to begin by removing all the structures and reorganizing the pathways of the city. Unfortunately, the original pathways were scrapped because they were a lot of extra work. Around this time, I decided to also scrap the rest of the map except for the spawn.
I had come to realize that the spawn was too small and decided to expand it. Aquarin Town Shore increased in size by over 2x. After I began working on the town once again, we also started to thoroughly develop the lore and world-building, establishing that the game would take place in a fictional world called Eudoria. The setting would be a country called the Aitera Archipelago. Originally, we had planned to have each island on one single map. However, after a while, we decided against it for performance reasons.
With many challenges to overcome and tons of work to do, I hope everyone will stick through this project to its end. We are aiming to make something truly special and have put great time and effort into considering the problems the genre currently faces, making our own innovations along the way. We plan to hold Q&A’s, Community Polls, and Blogposts frequently as we develop a new type of MMO experience. On behalf of the entire Legends of Aitera Development Team, we want to say thank you for taking the time to read this blog post, and we look forward to building the game alongside our community!