All in-game footage in this blog post comes from an EA beta build and may differ from the final game.
Vagabond!
It was quite some time since you last saw us in one of our dev blogs. Instead we’ve been seeing you… on Tycos!
It has indeed been two very exciting months since our last dev blog. Things have been moving fast at the studio, and the entire team has been developing, producing, concepting and creating like never before. Just as we thought we’ve reached our peak speed, the team has leveled up into yet another gear. The fantastic team behind ATMOSFAR never seizes to amaze. Make sure to buckle up, ‘cause you’re in for a ride!
ATMOSFAR: The Demo
One of the most palpable things during the last two months has of course been our demo. Releasing at Steam Next Fest, the demo managed to climb up to be one of the top 50 most played demos during the online event, with over 70K individual players this far. This placement is more than we could have ever hoped and wished for, and we are incredibly grateful and humbled by every single one who decided to give the demo a try. In addition, we’re getting closer and closer to reaching 1000 members on our Discord server, a goal we did not expect to reach before Early Access! If you’re not a member already, you should become one today!
It has been so much fun to see players overcome obstacles, finding secrets and solving challenges in a creative way. We’ve watched a lot of streams, and it has truly been a blast to see you all! We cannot emphasize enough how much joy all of your participation has brought us.
Alongside the pure amazement over all of our players, the demo has also brought us something else: A learning opportunity, and with it, invaluable insights, ideas and feedback. When we decided to release the demo, we did so due to a number of reasons. Being a relatively small studio, everything we decide to put work and time into must always be weighed towards the time and effort lost on other things, as we cannot do every single thing we wish we could. There is simply not enough time and resources for every idea we wish to implement. In a sense, you could say that a large portion of ATMOSFAR's development is resource management… in real life!
But let’s get back to the topic! The point that we’re trying to convey is that the demo was not an obvious choice for us, as it meant we had to use valuable resources to make the demo itself. But in hindsight, we can proudly say that we definitely made the right decision.
One of the main points of ATMOSFAR is, and has always been our players. We are making this game as much for the players as we are making it for ourselves. Even if a game can be described as multiple disciplines combined into an advanced piece of art, that very piece of art is not tangible or understandable until someone decides to try it out. To offer some food for thought: Is art still art if someone never experiences it? While we don’t hold the answer to that very question, we do know that ATMOSFAR always have been designed with every single one of you in mind. While a game can be beautiful on its own, it is nothing without its players.
This was one of the major reasons as to why we decided to release a demo. The demo has been an excellent way for us to see how ATMOSFAR have been perceived and experienced by all of you. After all, how can we make sure that we created a fun and exciting game for you, if we never get to hear what you think about it?
This brings us to another major topic regarding the demo: All the feedback! Since we released the demo, all of our social media channels have been flooded with feedback, and we love it! Getting feedback means that our players are passionate and invested. Feedback also give us an excellent rule of thumb as to which processes work and are enjoyable, as well as which mechanics need further polishing. At the end of the day, even if we are truly trying our hardest create as good of an experience as possible, a game like ATMOSFAR is an incredibly large task to take on. Multiple loops, mechanisms and processes need to be functioning and tuned to each other. Controls, cameras, animals and challenges need to be balanced. Art and sound direction need to be matched, decided on, concepted, created and modelled. It is a tall order, and even if our team is incredibly talented, we are humans, at a limited number. Which is why we’re extremely grateful for every comment, idea and bug report we’ve been getting. It has been an immense help to us on our road to ATMOSFAR. So without further ado, we’d like to say a big THANK YOU to each and everyone of our players all around the world. Honestly, we could literally not have done it without you!
The road to Early Access
As we hope that most of you have seen by now, we have finally been able to give you somewhat of a closer estimation to the release of Early Access: Q2 2026! This means that ATMOSFAR is bound to release in just a matter of months. Gaah!
As we’ve stated in almost all of dev blogs by now, things are moving fast at the lab. Actually, now, it’s faster than ever (maybe we’ll reach the speed of light by the next blog post. Who knows?). Right now, our focus is divided into two major aspects, with one being iterating on all the feedback, and the other being continuing to further developing the game. The demo was just a small appetizer of what’s to come, and even though we’ve done a large portion of the main game already, there is still a lot left!
In the world of Tycos, we’ve turned our gaze towards the upper regions and islands to continue with primarily level art to get everything in place before continuing on making them look better through set dressing. The further up in the atmosphere you go, or should we say the atmosfurther you go, the more the biomes change. This means that we are currently working, and are in a sense getting to know a new region, that players have not seen yet. Even though we of course have the idea and art direction in place, it always takes a while to get to know a new region or island. Just like a player is exploring the world before them, so are we, in a sense. Development of islands and regions is planned to continue through Early Access, and we are also planning on releasing a roadmap further on, so that you can follow the development process continuously.
As some of us have flown higher up in the skies, others have turned around to go back to islands well-known to all of you: Pearl Island and Mawknest Cluster. Even though further polishing was planned on these islands, the feedback on the demo has helped us see and understand what we need to revise once more.
The Utility Wasp camp
One of the things that was planned for further polishing and additions is the Utility Wasp camp, that most of you have interacted with and tried out by now. While most of its key modules and functions already are in place, like the camp hub and crafting table for example, some of the assets are still in need of models.
How does having your own, portable garden sound? Well, soon it’s possible! Right now, we’re working on models for portable planters for the Utility camp, that will allow you to plant the various seeds you may find. In addition to this, we’re continuing to crank the camp coziness up even more by adding chairs, tables, oil lamps and flower pots. The crafting table is also getting a visual makeover to look a bit more interesting and detailed.
Further on, we’re also updating some of the core functions of the camp hub to make the gameplay loop smother and more enjoyable. By Early Access, the camp hub will allow you to store your camp layout as a template, meaning that just as you pack down your entire camp by just removing the camp hub, you will also be able to build the entire camp by just placing out the camp hub. This allows you to quickly and effortlessly set up camp in new spots without having to manually place each and every piece of camp equipment. After reading some of your feedback, we noticed that the cue for packing down the camp hub was hard to spot as it was placed in the bottom right corner. This has now been moved to the middle of the screen to be more evident to players.
Cloud Cruising to new heights
The Cloud Cruiser was, as you unfortunately know, not part of the demo (we gotta leave some treats for EA, right?!). There are several reasons for this, where the main reason was that you gain access to the Cloud Cruiser a bit further on in the game than what was covered by the demo.
Since the Cloud Cruiser will be fully base buildable and customizable, we need to plan the parts it’s comprised of carefully so that the end product will be visually satisfactory to all players, regardless of how they decide to build it. This is quite a challenge! Here are some words from our Art Director:
“Designing a vehicle that players could build almost any way they want while also potentially being pretty huge can be quite a challenge. Every part needs to be modular and fit in many different configurations (configurations which we as developers might not completely be able to predict); parts should also not be too detailed as this will create a huge overly detailed mess of a ship. We’re also tied to the gameplay functions here more than for most other vehicles as the Cloud Cruiser is a very large and important feature of the game itself. And somehow the design still needs to come together into a single, unified, cool-looking whole that ties into the rest of the art direction of the game, our overall design philosophies while also being recognizable as The Cloud Cruiser from ATMOSFAR.
We chose to focus on a few pillars for the visual design of the Cloud Cruiser to achieve this: Keeping many surfaces (like walls and the hull) clean and not cluttered with detail noise (both in color and materials), focusing our detail on tech-sections and features (like jet engines, turrets, wings and the like), and really honing in on connecting the overall look of the Cloud Cruiser with a few references from the real world (a combination of modern military vessels, container ships, and contemporary spaceships).
We wanted the Cloud Cruiser to feel majestic, comfortable, and in the end not read as a battleship. This is the mobile base, scientific hub, and cozy home of our players, not the Death Star. I can’t wait (with terrified delight) to see what wondrous, mad, and clever configurations players will build when the game comes out!”
Even though we haven’t really shown the Cloud Cruiser until little over six months ago, the massive ship has actually been in development for far longer. If you go waaaay back in our dev blogs, you can see that the Cloud Cruiser was first introduced in 2023. That’s three years ago! Let’s take a closer look on the development over the years. A trip down memory lane, if you will!
Here are some very early iterations of the Cloud Cruiser. These are evidently directly based on one of the first pieces of concept art for the vessel:
The ship has indeed changed quite a bit since we first presented it to the world. One thing that you however still might recognize is the hydrogen refinery! This model has not changed yet since we first created it all those years ago. Sometimes you just hit the bullseye right away!
After this initial presentation of the Cloud Cruiser, things moved a bit slower on its development as… well, we had an entire game to work on. The next time we really focused on the mobile home base was last summer, which resulted in quite the makeover for the vessel. This makeover was however not only visual, as the task force also covered its core functions, gameplay loops and the foundations of its customization system. In other words, this was essentially when we got things up an running properly! This was also the first time we got to try out the building system by creating our own vessels without relying on concept art or art direction:
After building Cloud Cruisers in different shapes, sizes and colors, it became evident to us that we still needed to put in some more work on the visual side, especially when it came to the size and shape of the different modules. We also realized that we needed to simplify both silhouette and color balance, as the ship became too noisy fairly easily:
So, as described by our talented Art Director, what we’re now focusing on is simplifying the shapes and color, to reduce noise and clutter. This is still a work in process, but the mobile base is already looking slicker, with even more new parts to come:
Needless to say, the Cloud Cruiser is a beast when it comes to development. And not only on the visual side! It is filled with different kinds of mechanisms and gameplay loops that all are dependent on each other in various ways, that all need to be working simultaneously. Adding fully customized base building and of course the multiplayer aspect complicates things even further, as all visual and mechanical changes need to be functioning and moving at the same time across different clients. To solve this issue, we’ve come up with an approach internally labeled as Cloud Cruiser mirroring tech, which we’re planning to dive a little deeper into in the future.
But on the other hand, the development matches the gameplay experience. Just as much a beast it is for us developers, it will be for players! As the Cloud Cruiser is thought to be one of the major aspects of the game, it would only make sense for us to spend a considerable amount of time designing and developing it. After all, building, planning and tending to your Cloud Cruiser is almost like a game in itself.
And on that note, it’d probably be wise to let you know that this is far from the last time you’re going to hear us talk about the Cloud Cruiser. Our approach to this monster is very much: “But wait, there is more!”.
Exciting times ahead
As we’ve already touched upon in this blog, the best thing about all of this is that we still have the most exciting part before us! Believe us when we say, that we are as excited as all of you to release ATMOSFAR after all of these years. It is almost unbelievable that this insane, creative and above all, massive teamwork effort so soon is about to reach its goal. Even though we’ve been planning for it since day one, nothing could have prepared us for the joy, excitement and nervousness that we are feeling right now (yes, of course we’re nervous as well!).
Before we end this dev blog, we’d once again like to say thank you to each and everyone of you who’ve played the demo, given us feedback, checked out our trailers, or are even reading this blog post right now. Believe us when we say, that we could never have done this without you.
Thank you, from the whole team!
// Apog Labs
