Hey there travelers, settle down and listen,
Hello everyone! We are so happy to see you again!
Winter settles comfortably in Montreal and you can feel that the holidays are around the corner.
The streets are lit up, cheerful music is playing and the Christmas markets are in place, along with the city's ice rinks!
This is the perfect season to stay cozy near a warm fireplace right? This is exactly what we did the last couple of weeks so we don’t really have anything to share…
Just kidding! We have SO many news for you!
First, since the last update, our team has grown considerably. We are fortunate to welcome 5 new members :
- Solene : our Project Marketing Manager
- Emma : our Rigging & Animation Artist
- Vincent : our Game designer
- Calvin : our 3D Character Artist
- Kyle : our Composer & Sound Designer
Our team is up to 11 people now, we are really happy and proud.
Community involvement
With Solene’s arrival, we’re developing our social platforms. If you want to support us, we are now on: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Linkedin
Every Thursday we share Kenzie's beautiful concept art through thematic posts. For example, the last one was about eye colors and facial hair.
On Saturday, we follow the ScreenshotSaturday trend and post a screenshot of the game.
We also try to share regularly about various topics, without any particular agenda, so stay in touch :)
It goes without saying that our Discord stays the best way to communicate directly with us. It’s always such a pleasure to exchange with you all. We answer every question, suggestion, comment… and show exclusive content.
Last October, Megamigs took place in Montreal and we were lucky enough to be among the participants. It was so good to chat with the different actors of our community from all over the world. Many players enjoyed our demo and the feedbacks were very encouraging. This experience was very positive and reminded us how much we appreciate physical events.
We also participated to the November Play test organized by GamePlay Space in Montreal. It was a very formative event, we took many notes and interacted with a lot of friends.
We’re amazed that more than 270 videos have been made on Youtube about Aloft. Big names continue to be added to this list with Meatwagon22 creating a series of 7 videos about our game, go take a look!
Cooking
In the last devlog, we discussed farming and all the great produce you could get out of it. There’s more to come regarding farming, but that will be for a future devlog, as there is still a lot of design work to be done before we can announce anything. In the meantime, we decided to get busy with the logical successor of the farming system: the cooking system!
Our designers have built a very flexible system that allows players to combine many different food items in order to make all sorts of meals, no matter what combination you input! Of course, that amused the fans on our Discord server to no end, as they are really looking forward to break our system.
In short, you need a heat source, either a campfire or a fireplace, and a cooking plate. By interacting with the cooking plate, you can input three ingredients, which will slowly cook over time. If you feed the fire with coal and if you actively cook the meal, it will go even faster! But watch out, you might end up with a burnt meal, which is never very appetizing.
The ingredients you use actually determine what kind of meal you’ll get (provided it’s not burnt). Is it a soup, a skewer, a stew or a salad? Who knows! You will need to try it to discover it!
New character model
One comment that came back many times was that our player character model had a bow & arrow on his back, but that we didn’t have a bow & arrow! Well, that’s because our model was a placeholder while we hired the perfect 3D character artist. Calvin is now part of the team (see 1st paragraph) and he worked on an amazing character model over the last month and a half.
The character and its outfit is inspired by maritime cultures and sailor clothes. As you have seen on our social media over the past few weeks, we have a lot of character customization options in our pipeline, but we decided to make a single character for now. It will be of course a lot of work to create all of those options, we will let you know whenever it’s ready to show!
New character animations
Emma, our new rigging and animation artist has also been hard at work making the animations for both our new player character, but also for the guard monster! Fighting him is much better now that there’s proper animations and its falling animation is very funny to look at.
Working on animations is a lengthy and complex process, so the animations you see above are not final. We will keep working on them until they are perfect. Of course, there will be much more animations to keep everything lively and varied.
Doors & Windows
Sometimes, in the development cycle, we have to cut some things short to make sure we reach our objectives. That means that some things are left for later, like at the end of our milestones, when we try to wrap everything up and do all the things we didn’t have time to do before. A good example for this are doors and windows! The assets themselves were done a while ago, along with the last wave of construction pieces (like the doorframes…).
Well those assets are now implemented! You can have a door in your house! It doesn’t change much, but it’s one more building piece that our players can play with. And hey, now they swing like a saloon door, which is pretty funny to us.
Survival system
The last thing to mention here is the upgrade of our survival system. Up to now, people had health points and stamina galore, monsters were hitting like wet noodles and globally there was little challenge in the game. Now, there’s a lot of new things to consider during your playthroughs.
First of all, stamina and health have been greatly reduced, which means you now have to manage those resources with greater care than usual. Additionally, eating food and meals now gives you additional bonuses that will make survival easier and more efficient.
Furthermore, now there is a more cohesive approach to our survival system, with stamina, resources and health being resources to trade with each other, emphasizing the “survival” aspect of Aloft. We will keep tweaking and working on it to make the experience better and better for our players.
What’s next?
2023 is around the corner. New year, new Aloft : An updated demo will be available soon and we can't wait for you to try it! Everything you see in this devlog will be in it!
Also, we are looking for volunteers for a private playtest from December 16th to 19th.
The participation survey is on our Discord and, if you see it soon enough, there might still be a way to get in! If you want to be sure to get in during the next playtest, join our Discord server using the link below!
We hope to see you there ;)
Don’t forget to follow & wishlist Aloft!
