Hey there travelers, settle down and listen,
Hello everyone! Remember how we said we would be working at a reduced pace for the summer? Well, we had a lot of fun, we took some vacations to enjoy the nice (fickle, humid, hot) Quebec weather, and now we’re back on track to keep creating a badass, awesome, fun and wholesome Aloft game!
Since the last devlog where we talked about tools, corruption, enemies and all that good stuff that’s still in the demo for you to enjoy, we kept working at a reduced pace, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t work though! We took the time to improve the visuals and the gameplay of the game to add more systems, improve the pacing of the demo and, of course, interact with our awesome community.
If you want more regular updates, we do encourage you to join our Discord, it’s full of good stuff, and we share updates more often and in a more casual way.
Next Fest
In early June, we put out a pre-alpha demo for the Steam Next Fest to see what people would think of our upcoming game and the answer was astounding! We had more than 100K views on our streams, 100+ gameplay videos, tens of thousands of new wishlists and hundreds of Discord members, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and it’s telling us we’re moving in the right direction.
The demo we put up for the Next Fest has been kept up, because we like having people play the game and have fun!
Navigation system overhaul
As you may have noticed in that previous GIF, the sailing system has been completely overhauled to make it better, more intuitive and with a more depth as well! Now, various sails offer different levels of flexibility, wind efficiency and durability. Players can also build rudders to help steer the island and floaters - horizontal sails - which enable vertical movement. The new sails must be strategically placed to help you pilot your island through the more dangerous areas of the hurricane, whereas the other structures provide necessary guidance to the island.
New assets
In addition to the navigation system overhaul, we also implemented new assets for the sails, windmills, helm and rudder! Those are way nicer than
The current sails are made of leaf fabric, which is the lowest tier of fabric available in the game. It’s not very resilient or efficient, but it’s cheap and easy to make. Leaves are a fairly common resource to find after all! They’ll be the very first thing new players will use to sail their islands and explore the world of Aloft.
The windmills we’re very happy about, they look great and have a bunch of customization options available to them right now. Just like the sails, windmills are limited to leaf fabric for now, but you can select different blade patterns and amounts. We think they look absolutely badass, and some players have been putting them to great use.
Finally, the helm has been upgraded from its placeholder status to full-fledged 3D asset! It works in the same way, as the piloting center of your flying island.
Survival fest
Next week, we will be participating in the Steam Survival Fest. Of course, the game will not be on sale (as it is not being sold at all) but a new version of the demo will be up and running for you to try out! We have addressed several bugs, improved the gameplay and added tutorial features. You can find the full changelog in the patch notes posted next week along with the new demo. Of course, a new demo means that previous saves will be destroyed which is a bummer, but at this stage of development, we are unable to make old save files compatible with new versions.
What’s next?
For the rest of the summer, we’ll be working on bringing our animal concepts to life, but also to make our own non-placeholder character model! We have great concepts we cannot wait to show you, and with Joanna on board, it’s going to look amazing in 3D as well.
We’re also working on improving our starting biome, to bring to the level of quality we expect to have upon full release, it is one step closer to our full-blown vertical slice which we’re hard at work bringing to life.
Given the additional team members, the higher rhythm of work we’ll be taking on, you can expect more devlogs to come, roughly every month, or earlier if we have important, urgent news to share with everyone.
If you want more Aloft content or would like to give feedback, be sure to wishlist the game on steam here and join the Discord server using the image below
