Howdy, folks! 

It's been a hot second since we've posted; the second half of 2025 flew by, and we can't believe it's almost the end of January already. Azure Ravens has been staying busy, and moving forward we're hoping to update a lot more regularly on what we're doing and working on here at the studio. Part of those updates is the woman behind the curtain writing this - I'm Kate, AzR's new community manager! I'll be working on getting socials for AzR, Ravenwood, and an unannounced project set up and refreshed, helping with dev logs and general updates, and interacting with our community on our Discord, among other things! 

Another recent development that we're very excited to talk about and have chosen for this installment of Dev Diaries is the update to our Blacksmithing minigame. Welcome to the Ravenwood Acres forge, run by Alden! 

Previously, we had imagined blacksmithing as a world space UI-style game, which can be seen below:

As we kept playtesting it, however, we realized it didn't feel as dynamic or smooth as we wanted, and decided that we weren't quite happy with where it was at. 

We ended up insituting the following changes:

• Swapped to an entirely HUD-based UI, updated the camera angle, and had the camera move from zone to zone to get a more fluid experience for gameplay that just feels cleaner overall. 
• Completely redid the hammering minigame to now be a rhythm-based action that you'll successfully complete by hitting on the correct beats. 
• Created a new Quality System to showcase improvement and success as players progress through stages of the minigame. (We're also laying the blueprint for putting the same system in all other crafting minigames moving forward!)
• Added new pop-ups to show the quality of successfully crafted items! This is another feature that we'll be utilizing across other sorts of crafting, including the fishing minigame.

All of those changes combined resulted in this:

We're very pleased with the new iteration and are excited to keep hammering away at what we have. (Get it? Ha.) 

But for real, we can't wait to see what everyone ends up forging in their blacksmithing journeys! Next month we're going to have some updates from the art team, and we have a lot of exciting general announcements coming this year, so stay tuned.

Thanks so much for reading! 

- Kate, Community Manager