Hello all Voyagers, Michael / Spacenorth here to talk about the latest on the game.
First, I wanted to share some game level-updates. We’ve been seeing people ask for more specifics about our launch timeline as we get closer to the end of the year. Unfortunately, as some have guessed, Voyagers of Nera is NOT going to be ready for Early Access in 2024.
This is not the result of a specific problem or delay. Actually the opposite - development has been progressing well and the frequent playtests, player feedback, and iterations have helped us improve the game in leaps and bounds. But this process is also giving us better info on just how much work it will take to deliver a game that stands out and that we are proud of. So we are shifting our expected Early Access date to mid 2025, which we fortunately have the budget and resources to do. We are also reducing the player count for the game from 16 → 10 for performance reasons given the scale of world we are building.
Lastly, we are continuing to ramp UP the amount of playtesting we are doing. We’ve said this a few times, but player feedback has been incredibly meaningful for our team. Not just for making the game better more quickly, but also for our satisfaction as developers - seeing people light up when they play even the rough builds of our game is our best source of motivation! We will have more specifics in the coming months, but we plan to grow our playtester group rapidly starting with our very next playtest.
Please sign up if you would like to play and give us feedback on an upcoming alpha build. :)
Now, on to the cool new game content!
Christina (World Design Director) and Kyle (Senior Environment Artist) from the Treehouse team recently shared the evolution of the first biome in Voyagers: the Embrace.
This space is named the Embrace because this whole set of islands formed around the chest and arm of a massive, stone colossus. This long-dead, magical titan was an Ancient - one of the protectors of magical spirits in this world that ultimately fell to the creatures of the Deep.
The Embrace did not leap out as a fully-fledged idea. It had much more humble beginnings, starting as simple MS paint sketches about the layout and flow of a player’s experience through this space. Fortunately, some concept art from Mitch (Creative Director) made it much more thematic!
A lot of design work, playtesting, iteration and art passes later (not necessarily in that order), we have an exciting island archipelago to explore full of monsters, caves, and spirits in need of rescue. And, of course, the remnants of the Ancients in their beautiful, tragic glory - wherever you are in the biome, you can always see its chest, arm and other pieces in their final resting place. Find traces of its fading magic, explore the stone ruins it left behind, or even build a base in the palm of its hand!
In Voyagers of Nera, we want to create a mysterious, magical ocean world for players to explore and the Embrace is just the beginning. We’re excited to show you lots more as we get deeper into playtesting and development. :)
That’s all for now! Our next dev stream is this Thursday at 5pm PT in our Discord, so join us if you’d like to see a bunch of recent changes and awesome bases that players have been making. Otherwise, see you at our next dev blog in two weeks!
- Michael and Treehouse Team