Find your new home, contribute to the community, and embark on adventures, together! For PC, Mac and Nintendo Switch.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
💌 Dev Update #8: NEW NPC!! 🧋💛
about 1 month ago
– Fri, Aug 02, 2024 at 06:07:04 AM
Happy 1 Year Kickstarter Anniversary! 🥳🎉
Hello and welcome to another dev update Loftians! Can you believe it's been a full year, a whole 12 months, since our Kickstarter campaign? This time last year, we had officially launched our Kickstarter campaign, and at the time we were bubbling with feelings of excitement, nervousness and anticipation. We had been building up to this moment for more than half a year, over 6 months at that point and had poured everything we had into our Kickstarter campaign. As a small indie studio, it's not an exaggeration to say that the odds were stacked against us but we knew in our hearts that we were building something truly special. We were fortunate enough to find a community of supporters who shared our vision and we're so grateful to have achieved our fundraising goals with the best community we could have ever asked for. 💛
Since August last year, our small indie team has now grown to over 20 full time members, and we've had our heads down in development ever since. Building a game, much less an MMO, is one of the hardest creative feats to achieve - so we've definitely experienced our fair share of ups and downs. Over time we would love to share more about the business side of building a game in this industry, and economy, so let us know if you have any specific questions or topics you would like us to share!
For now, let's dive into some of the exciting features that our team has been working on throughout the month of July 👀
New NPC Reveal: Jun! 🧋
A new NPC has arrived in Loftia city!!
Jun works at Loftia's boba shop and he loves coming up with new boba recipes! Jun always makes sure to add a few extra toppings for his customers - so you might find some extra tapioca pearls or lychee jelly in your drink. If he looks familiar, that's because he's Kun's younger brother! Kun works at Loftia's Study Cafe, and together they're known to serve some of the tastiest beverages in the city. You'll be able to meet Jun (and maybe even work with him) at the boba shop and create some sweet treats with him. 😋
We would love your help in developing Jun's character profile, so please let us know if you have any suggestions for him! Here are some character traits and features we're looking to develop:
Jun's likes and dislikes 🍓🌶🍣
Jun's pet 🐰🐶🐹
Jun's favorite boba order 🧋
Jun's relationship with his brother Kun 🤗
Jun's hobbies and interests ⚽️📚🎮
Share your ideas and suggestions with us in the comments below, and we'll work them into Jun's character!
New art assets 🎨
Last month we presented a few concept art sketches that we had designed for our cooking stations and tools. Well this month we've been working on turning them into 3D assets that can be used in game!
Cooking Station:
In June, we spoke about the sustainable cooking methods we’ve been researching and the innovative Smog Free Tower designed by Daan Roosegaarde which uses patented positive ionisation technology to produce smog free air in public spaces, allowing people to breathe and experience clean air. Inspired by this technology, we thought about how this concept of air recycling can be applied to smoke as well, which lead to the design of our very own smoke recycling cooking station. Our artists have been working on the 3D model of this cooking station and you can see the closeups below! This is where you’ll be able to cook up a storm of delicious treats!
What recipes should we add?
Advanced Workbench:
We've also been developing an "Advanced Workbench", which is the upgraded version of the basic workbench. This one looks more high tech and snazzy right?
For all your crafting and innovating needs
Tailoring Station:
We're also excited to reveal that we've been working on a tailoring station! You'll be able to build this station to craft and tailor clothes from a variety of different sustainable materials. Think banana leather, pineapple leather, recycled cotton, and more! What outfits would you like to craft first?
Yes, the eyes move 👀
Tools and equipment
And as for our tools and equipment that we revealed last month, they've also been modelled in 3D and are now ready to be equipped in game!
Handy tools for a handy Loftian!
Item Descriptions 💬
This month, our design department has been busy iterating on our core game loop and adding more flair to our item descriptions. Each item in Loftia is uniquely important and has its own story to tell, which is why we've spent time coming up with interesting, fun and sometimes witty descriptions for each one! Here's a sneak peak of some of our crop descriptions below 👀
🥕 Carrot: What's up, doc?
🥔 Potato: The "apple of the earth"
🍅 Tomato: Team Tomato
🥬 Lettuce: The staple of salads!
🧄 Garlic: Makes a popular bread...or vampire antioxidant
🌿 Basil: Lends a herbal, fresh smell to your food
🍚 Rice: The heart of Asian cruisine
🍉 Watermelon: Team Watermelon
👚 Cotton: One of the best materials for making fabric!
As a fun activity, help us come up with descriptions for these following items in the comments below!
🍞 Bread:
🍓 Strawberries
🌶 ChiliPepper:
Updates to UI ⚙️
This month we've also made some more updates to our inventory UI and station UI! This includes:
Multiple tabs for different types of items Now you can neatly arrange your inventory and categorize your items accordingly so that they're easier to find! What other inventory UI features do you think we should add?
New player battery mechanic All stations require power to operate, so we've added a battery slot in the UI so that you can start using renewable energy to power all your crafting and cooking needs! All you have to do is click on the empty battery slot and have a charged battery in your inventory to begin!
New UI icons All our UI icons are 2D renders, and we've added a new batch to our collection this month! Can you identify what food and beverage items some of these are? 👀
Community 🌱
We've been running an Emoji Contest over in our Discord server this month, and there's a few days left to enter - submissions close August 5th! Winners will have their emoji added to the Loftia Discord to be used in the server on the daily. Not a designer? That's okay! You can still vote for your favourite emoji to win the competition, and community voting will remain open until August 8th! 🤗
We're also currently working on logo designs for the game studio behind Loftia called Qloud Games. For those curious, we chose the name Qloud Games for our indie studio as it fits Loftia's sky island setting. Players will be building a world amongst the clouds, and so we wanted our studio to match! The Q instead of C was just to add a playful twist! These are some logo designs we're loving, vote for your favourite below! ☁️
Let us know which one is your fave!
As always, thank you for being a part of this wonderful community, and we wish everyone a great month ahead!
💌 Dev Update #7: Cooking stations, updated crops and new tools! 👩🍳🍰🌽🔨
2 months ago
– Thu, Jul 04, 2024 at 12:40:39 AM
Welcome to yet another dev update Loftians!! 🤗 Grab a cozy beverage and come have a read of everything our team has worked on during June! We also want to thank everyone who voted on our rain barrel bot and sun designs on our last devlog! Rain barrel bot #2 was a clear favorite and we can't wait to bring him to life in the near future! ☀️🌧
Now onto our devlog for this past month, our artists have been a bit hungry - we've been cooking up a storm with new concepts and upgraded art assets for cooking stations and farming crops!
First on the menu: Cooking Stations! 🍳
We know how excited everyone is about cooking, so we've spent some time brainstorming various ways that cooking can come to life in the game. Here are some of the initial cooking stations we designed:
Just a few of our cooking station concepts 👩🍳
We also spent time researching into many sustainable cooking methods and how we can best translate those techniques through gameplay, and one of the most unique and interesting innovations we came across is the Smog Free Tower by designed by Daan Roosegaarde. The 7-meter tall SMOG FREE TOWER uses patented positive ionisation technology to produce smog free air in public spaces, allowing people to breathe and experience clean air. It is equipped with environment-friendly technology, cleans 30,000 m3 per hour and uses a small amount of green electricity.
Inspired by this technology, we thought about how this concept of air recycling can be applied to smoke as well, which lead to the design of our very own smoke recycling cooking station:
The top funnel and canisters represents a smoke recycler!
We'll be continuing to iterate on this design and integrating this concept in our gameplay, so stay tuned for another update on this soon! In the meantime, let us know what you think of this design and what kind of basic recipes you would expect to cook in the beginning! 🤔
Next on the menu: crops! 🍅
But what's cooking without ingredients to cook with? Our artists have also been improving the look and aesthetic of our farming related assets. Starting with seed packets! We've changed the way our seed bag looks so that it fits more in line with our overall theme. These 2D versions will be used in the game UI, such as your inventory.
Which crop are you growing first??
Likewise, we've also improved on our 2D icons for these various fruits and veggies:
As well as the fully grown version of these crops:
And finally, this means we've also improved upon the 3D models! This screenshot below showcases a before and after version of our tomato crop. We've made the model more aligned with the toy-like aesthetic of our game, with brighter colors and rounder shapes.
Our tomatoes are looking big and juicy now 🍅
Tools 🔨
In Loftia, tools will be one of the main ways for players to interact with the 3D space around them. Some activities like harvesting crops, salvaging for resources and going on group adventures will be gated by having the proper tool equipped, paving the way for different layers of progression for each feature. A main priority for us though is to make sure that players have a satisfying and joyful experience with tools, which is why we're focusing on iterating on animations, timings and the feeling of impact.
These are some of initial animation concepts that we designed:
A first concept pass of our tool animations
We want our animations to feel satisfying and appropriate, but also with a tinge of playfulness and silliness - we're a cute cozy game after all! The process of animating takes a lot of time and iterations though, it's a very specific skill that we'd love to shed more light on in our future devlogs as we make further progress. But we do have a few early examples of what we've built so far down below - so keep reading to find out!
The tools themselves is also an aspect that our art and design team have collaborated closely to create. The most basic motions that the player will be able to perform include salvaging, foraging and farming. Here are some of the initial tool designs we have in mind for these activities:
Our watering can is a recycled teapot! 🫖
As for how players will equip tools, we're experimenting with a simple tool wheel that will allow you to quickly and easily switch between different tools:
The UI is just a placeholder!
A test of our hammer tool for salvaging -- the animation and model is of course just placeholder! Previously, salvaging was handled in salvage nodes where you simply interact with the node on the ground with a key press to pick it up. Adding in a tool that you are actually swinging and aiming makes it feel way more engaging as you gather up resources.
Animation and models are just placeholders!
Engineering ⚙️
In engineering land, our focus for the last month has been around core game systems -- iterating and refining how they work. Everything here is hugely work in progress, of course! We often use temporary or placeholder art assets in our first pass when working on things, as the art team is finishing making things beautiful on their end.
First up, we added some nice snapping set ups on crop planters for irrigation systems:
We love some satisfying snaps ✨
And then, some exploration of a really neat drip-water irrigation system to give your growing plants just the water they need, a little bit at a time.
How cool are our drip irrigation systems!
We also refactored (changed!) our quest system based on what we learned from building out a quick questline for our last milestone. Before, we simply had Quests and Quest Parts, and have now added in a middle layer, a Quest Step. This will let us group bunches of Quest Parts into a Step for better clarity and organization for the player. We also updated a whole bunch of the ways you interact with the Quest system -- triggering next stages of things in dialogue, checking whether various parts of your quests are completed. It is all easier and more streamlined than it was before.
The last big item to talk about is our Daily Cycle -- we have hooked things up so that time will pass during the game, and the world can change and crops can grow based on each interval passing. Right now, we have morning, afternoon, evening and night time, but the system is set up to let us super easily configure exactly what we have. Each day, we get new weather affecting Loftia, which currently lasts for the whole day. Sounds pretty simple and straightforward, right? Not when you are dealing with multiple servers across multiple times zones, starting up and shutting down all the time, having to coordinate and make sure they are all running the same weather and time of day at once!
Community 🌱
Just last week our Community Manager Sai held a beginners crochet class live stream for those interested in learning how to crochet - thank you to everyone who attended! If you weren't able to catch the stream, we have a recording of it on our YouTube.
We have even more fun events and activities planned for our community in June - including another fun art event 🎨 -so make sure to join our Discord server to come hang out with us and other Loftians!
💌 Dev Update #6: The sun, moon and stars! ☀️🌙✨
3 months ago
– Sat, Jun 01, 2024 at 05:43:16 AM
Hello Loftians, welcome to another dev update!! We can't believe we're already closing in on the midpoint of the year. We hope everyone in the northern hemisphere is looking forward to the warm, summery months to come, while folks in the southern hemisphere are snuggling up for the cooler, crisp days. And while seasons don't officially exist in Loftia yet, our team has been working hard to build the many environments of our cozy world - and that includes the starry sky above us! Keep on reading to find out what we've been up to 🤗
Art 🎨
This month our artists have become a little obsessed with the sky! From the moon, to the sun, to the stars, we've been exploring ways to make our experience in Loftia aesthetically pleasing no matter which direction you look.
For our sun, we've come up with a few different concepts. Let us know which sun you like the best in the comments below!
We love how radiant these turned out!
And of course if there's a sun, then there's a moon. Do you notice anything special? 👀
That moon crater looks oddly familiar...
And finally, we have the stars. We've always dreamed of having Loftia's night sky be filled with dazzling sparkles with a story to tell. So we've created some cute constellations to twinkle above us. We'd love to design a few of these with our community in the future too!
What other constellations should we add?
That's not all we have for art though! On the 3D side, we've been continuing to turn our concepts into beautiful assets for the game, and one recent addition we're particularly proud of is our new rain barrel! Rain barrels collect and store rainwater from rooftops via gutters and downspouts, allowing the water to be used for later - a great way to conserve water resources and be more sustainable.
We decided to go an extra mile and create some extra adorable rain water barrel bots that will assist you with your farming needs. Here are a few concepts of these bots!
Which rain barrel bot is your fave?
And here's the 3D render of one of them! We can't wait to bring more of these eco-friendly bots to life!
Should we give him a name? 🤔
Game design 🎮
We’ve spent the last month working on our core gameplay loop - exploring systems and mechanics to solidify a successful testing experience that will build the framework for Loftia in the future. These are early, compact looks at how the player is going to move through the game: farming, gathering, crafting, upgrading tools, unlocking new areas and setting their own goals as they go. With your feedback, this will help us determine if what we’re doing is going to work.
The design team’s approach to that is to build a “first act” of sorts, kicking off the major individual features that guide the player for a couple of hours, up until unlocking the first new area. This first act is meant to be a starting scope for Alpha, which we’re also aiming to expand upon as we evaluate its playtime and effectiveness. As with any game’s design, we’re taking inspiration from the genre’s standards, while also bringing in ideas and constraints unique to our own theme and goals. The core of our work is finding ways for every feature and concept to connect, make sense, and come together in the world of Loftia.
Farming may not be the best life choice for everyone but hay, it’s in our genes! 👨🏼🌾 Farming is going to be one of the core gameplay activities in Loftia. We believe the act of caring fits nicely with Loftia’s worldbuilding, and we want to make sure we capture that familiar cozy feeling while also trying to provide an experience that ties into our solarpunk aesthetic; from the tools you use to the upgrades you make, and how the crops grow over time! When the crops are ready to pull, how do we want it to look? How will we even know when they’re ready? For that, we’re toying with the idea of a 4-phase day-night cycle in the world of Loftia: Sunrise, Day, Sunset, and Night. After so much time has passed, your crops will be ready for harvest. This day-night cycle affects the world around you just as much as it affects your crops and gardens. Do certain shops close earlier? Are some of the NPCs somewhere they aren’t normally? Is there maybe a cute little activity you can do with friends based on the time of day? What sort of critters do you think you’ll find at sunrise or sunset? 👀
We’re also testing some major things on core gameplay actions: we know Loftia has plenty of technological-looking workstations and systems, but collecting resources is mostly going to be done via active tools in 3D space. Whether that’s watering your crops, pummelling a scrap pile to dust with a hammer, or using some pruners to carefully gather wild plants, every little detail needs to be conceptualized, detailed and iterated upon until it reaches a fine level of quality. At its core, we wanted to emphasize that it remains familiar and fun. Maybe we’ll have some more sneaky peeps on some of that in the next blog post 👀
These cute little doodles are courtesy of our lead game designer, Felipe!
Feedback Forum - NPCs 💬
Our feedback forums have been a massive success and a joy for the team to read. You all have the best ideas and getting to hear your thoughts is invaluable to our team. This month we talked about a variety of topics with you all, but NPCs was a HUGE hit! Thanks to your feedback, we have been exploring the pros and cons of the gaming world's characters and hearing from you all what you liked best. While we can't implement every feature that has been request or remove every discontent, the feedback you have given us has been hugely instrumental as we continue to develop our beloved Loftian characters.
Lore
So how exactly did Loftia come about? What makes it special? When is the game set? Well, we can't answer all those questions just yet, but what we can tell you is that our team has been hard at work fleshing out in more detail the big story of Loftia... you'll have to let the anticipation excite your curiosity. What are you theories about Loftia? We'd love to hear them!
Engineering 🛠
While our design team is hard at work coming up with new gameplay for us to build, we took a good chunk of this last month to work on general technical infrastructure and technical debt. What is technical debt? It is kind of just like real debt -- sometimes, it makes sense to take a shortcut to get something working quickly, like for the important demo build we were creating last month! But code that isn't designed to last and expand will cause more and more problems over time, slowing down development - similar to interest piling up on real debt. So, it is always good to take some time whenever it is available to burn down that debt, refactoring things to make them sustainable for the long term.
For example, some of the animations we had set up for player emotes like waving, actions like sprinting and gliding, and more were all set up individually, without using a common unified system. Each time, we would have to handle things like network prediction, linking the animations to inputs, restoring the prior character state after the animation finishes, etc. That's a lot of stuff to handle, each and every time you want to build a new feature! Luckily, Unreal provides the Gameplay Ability System for cases just like this, and we were able to implement it and shift a bunch of stuff to use this framework. Now, we just plug in what we need, and let the system handle the rest - faster to build on, more reliable, and easier for designers to understand. Making GAS work well in our system takes more work than implementing any one or two of these animations, but will save us a lot of time in the long run.
We also worked on a bunch of more general technical infrastructure pieces, such as:
Upgrading to Unreal 5.4, check out all the cool new stuff it can do!
Implement Cross-Server Chat - before, you could only talk with other players within the same server instance. Now, you can chat with your buddies even while you are at your player island home and they are off on an adventure!
Menu enhancements - better volume controls, mute in background
Accessibility Controls - Toggle sprint
Ability to have crafting recipes locked, and then unlocked for the player by acquiring the recipe.
Please note that the UI/UX here is not final
The most exciting news we have, though, is all our new faces! Two new full time engineers started over the last few weeks, and we have some fantastic interns joining us for the summer, to learn how we build games. We can't wait to share with you all the cool things they come up with!
Community 🌱
If you've been following us on our socials, you might have seen that we've been scaling up our team this month. A few positions we were hiring for include an Executive Producer, Senior 3D artist, Technical Artist and Marketing Associate, and we're extremely grateful to everyone who has applied and expressed their interest in joining our team. A few of these roles have now been filled, and we're in the process of interviewing for the remaining positions. You can check our job page on our website to see what roles are open, and turn on announcement pings on our Discord to get notified for any new spots that open in the future!
We also want to thank everyone for participating in our Loftia in Springtime event this month! We received so many beautiful submissions of flowers and spring themed art, and we'll be posting our final community mural across our socials and Discord within the next week! As for events for this upcoming month, we already have a few fun ones planned for y'all, so make sure to join us on Discord and follow our socials to join in 🤗
💌 Dev Update #5: Our time at GDC, farming gameplay, new mini-games and more!! 🌱😊
4 months ago
– Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 09:44:50 AM
Hello Loftians!! 🤗
Welcome to another development update! The past few months have been wild to say the least, with our founders wrapping up the Speedrun program at the Games Developer Conference (GDC), connecting with so many new folks within the gaming industry, and making significant progress on the game all at the same time. We’re sorry that this update is a bit delayed, but we hope all the content that we’re about to share makes up for it!
To kick things off, here’s a first look at the Hanging Gardens Network and farming gameplay (please click on the gif below to view the full, HD video on our Discord!):
As you all know, we’ve been in San Francisco for the past 3.5 months to take part in a16z’s SPEEDRUN program, the first gaming accelerator program in the world! This was such an invaluable experience for us, and we’ve learnt so many things about game development and the entire gaming industry, in addition to meeting amazing leaders and thinkers within this space. At the end of March last month, we also attended GDC and wrapped up the SPEEDRUN program at a special Demo Day, where we presented Loftia to a bunch of industry folks. This was a really special moment for us as it really shows how far Loftia has come, not only as a game, but as a new studio making waves in the gaming space!
Here’s a quick recap of how it all went down:
If you’re an aspiring games founder looking to build something cool in the space, we strongly recommend checking out the Speedrun program. There are just 2 weeks left to send in an application for the next rendition that will take place in Los Angeles later this year! You can find out more here.
Art 🎨
First up, let’s talk art. Building out the 3D world of Loftia is a mammoth task, and we’ve been continuing to create assets for the various features and systems in the game. Here are some of the amazing assets that we’re particularly proud of!
Crafting bench 🔨
Craft all your DIY creations on our new wooden crafting bench!
2D concept art:
3D model:
Recycling Machine ♻️
Turn trash into treasure via our automated recycling machine!
2D concept art:
3D model:
Charging Station 🔋
A convenient and efficient location to charge your portable batteries!
2D concept art:
3D model:
This one is still a work in progress!
There's many other assets and set dressed areas that we'll be showing off through our socials in the coming weeks! What do you think of these designs so far? 😊
Game design 🎮
Howdy and welcome back to the design side of things! For the month of March we’ve been on a roll with getting things done. So please romaine calm while we jump into all the details. We’ve been cooking up some new minigames, exploring our NPCs personalities a bit deeper, adding our new Friendship Starter Packs, and so much more. Thyme is money, so lets get started!
Minigames 👩🍳
Developing even the simplest minigame really takes a lot of moving parts. Coming up with the initial concept, designing a mock up, writing up all the details... and that’s before engineers do their magic!
Let’s use cooking as an example. We felt that our current cooking mini game was a bit dull and we wanted to spice it up a bit. “How can we make a mini game that’s made for an oven/fire?”. The concept of an old-timey bellows came to mind. But how would a bellows mini game work? We wanted to combine a temperature gauge and a puff of air. Maybe an arrow could make its way around, and you had to maintain it at the proper temperature? It sounded like it could be fun, and easy to make, so it was time to jump into mockup mode.
When making your initial mockup, it’s a good idea to determine all the different components that go into your minigame. For this minigame we needed the temperature gauge itself, a needle to measure the temperature, a progress bar to keep track of cook time, and the different temperature ranges.
Then we need to break this down into a step-by-step process on how the minigame works. When making these steps we have to make sure our directions are very clear with every possibility. “What happens if I press this button?” “What happens if I don’t press anything?”. This way when our directions get to the engineers they won’t have to ask too many clarifying questions. This allows them to jump right into developing a what is know as a wireframe. A wireframe is basically the skeleton of the design without all the pretty graphics. Once that it’s built it’s up to the artists to do their magic and make it pretty. And they did such an egg-cellent job! Look how cute this turned out!
Click rapidly to fill up the cooking progress bar!
Here at Loftia, we put a lot of value in accessibility. The more people who have access to our game, and the minigames within it, the more connected we can feel as a community. While we can’t promise that every possibility of accessibility will be there, we can promise that we’re going to do our best to ensure that we cover as many bases as we can. Accessibility is something that’s always at the forefront of our minds. For the example above, a few of the things we considered are larger strike zones, or even slower needles; anything we can do to make sure that the game is still playable, or accessible, to whomever interacts with it.
Friendship Starter Packs 💛
In order to welcome new users and encourage community, we've designed “Friendship Starter Packs” to ensure every member of Loftia feels loved and ready to play our game. The starter packs includes basic tools and items you need for life in Loftia, and every gift pack is packaged with love and care from another real Loftian!
There's even a quest that you can complete further along in your journey to assemble a starter pack for the next member who arrives in the city. You'll also get to leave a personalized message of encouragement to welcome into the game, and share any tips to get them onboarded.
Now, we all know that unfortunately the internet isn’t always a wholesome place like Loftia, so free-form notes of encouragement might get a little… spicy. Luckily, advances around AI text moderation tools in the last couple years make it possible for us to safely and easily ensure that each note is filled with thoughtful and encouraging words, and nothing unkind.
A first look at the Loftian Friendship Starter Pack!
NPC Personalities 🧩
The number of NPCs in Loftia is beginning to grow—slowly, but steadily. It’s been a learning journey for our team when it comes to how best to design and bring Loftia’s NPCs to life. For some games, NPCs are mere bystanders or faces to an aesthetic, while for others, the NPCs drive the main plot and lore of the story. And some games have a happy mix of both!
With Loftia, we're striving to make the game feel alive with personality and excitement—with unique NPCs around every corner. This involves a lot of mood-boarding, culture-learning, and Latin-root-searching to come up with the best possible characters and fun names. Some characters that you know and love already, like Hazel, have been further fleshed out. Iconic lines are already starting to grow from her sweet personality, and a staff favorite was her way of referring to the player as "peanut." 🥰
There's so much more to be explored when it comes to NPCs, and we’re always eager to keep learning and writing. As always, please feel free to use our Discord or the comments below to leave your suggestions. (Your writers do read them!)
Feedback Forum - Social Features 💬
In the world of Loftia, social features aren’t just the cherry on top. They’re infused throughout the entire sundae! Without them, you’re just spooning through plain vanilla ice cream. With them, every spoonful is a fusion of flavors, sprinkles, and those little bursts of joy that make gaming so good for the soul.
We want to make sure that we don’t disappoint you, so who better to ask? In Discord, we asked what some of your favorite ways to interact with friends were, types of activities you’d like to see, the kind of support you’d need to build genuine connections and friendships with others, and if you had any fun ideas for features we could maybe add to Loftia.
After collecting all of your feedback… wow! You all had so much to say and let me just add that we were so impressed! While the majority of you had similar sentiments and suggestions, we organized them all into categories to help us better visualize what you were sharing with us! 😇
Amongst the four categories and numerous selections within them, there were a few that stood out to us as personal favorites. While all of these suggestions were super cool to see and think about, we definitely had a few moments where we really bounced around with excitement. Heather really loved the idea of the crafting classes! The idea that there would be a place you could go to and learn a new recipe with friends is really exciting. Slap’s personal favorite was the arcade as a place to visit that’s full of minigames. He’s really into party games and having a place designed specifically for that would be a dream come true!
We at Loftia have already given social features some thought and your suggestions definitely helped us shape our ideas as well! For example, a lot of you brought up wanting emotes and ways to connect with and discover one another, so we- wellllll we can talk about that another time 😉
Your feedback and suggestions are incredibly important to us and our continued development of Loftia. If you’d like to have your voice heard, consider joining our Discord and jumping into the conversation! Feedback and Suggestions forums, when they’re posted, are the perfect place to share what you’re feeling about each topic as they’re presented. We’d love to hear your suggestions as well!
Engineering 🛠
The main focus of the engineering team over March was supporting building out our internal milestone build: a playable showcase of what we have built out so far! It is an important stepping stone for us, pulling the game together to be in a more playable state so that as we iterate on our game design, you can more easily assess how well each new idea is working.
The first step was building out a separate testing environment, so that we could have one stable build for the team to test, and another with all the latest goodies that are being worked on! Steam Beta Branches make this a snap, with just a little additional work needed to get the different client versions working with the correct backend servers for each version.
This build was one of the first times we have really had the design team dive deep into using the gameplay systems we have created for NPCs, Dialogue, Quests, etc. to create real content. Up till now, things were mostly just there as test data to prove the systems work. From this exercise, we added all sorts of improvements and fixes to streamline the process and support our amazing design team as they added content to the game.
For example, our initial internal playtests of the new quest line showed that players were sometimes getting lost as they went exploring Loftia City in search of the next NPC or location to continue a quest, so the engineering team quickly scrambled to implement a Quest Destination Indicator, to help guide you on your way.
The Quest Destination Indicator is marked by the glowing, white triangle at the player's feet
Core Gameplay continues to be a focus, and we created some mini-games for Foraging, Crafting and Cooking. We also added a slew of new dialogue events for our designers, for things like triggering weather changes, updating the state of quests, and more!
Community 🌱
For those in our Discord, we hope you’ve been enjoying the Loftia Potluck events we’ve been holding on a regular basis! A big congrats to the winners of our most recent Potluck who scored Alpha Keys and Plushies. We love seeing everyone come together and participate in our community events, and we’ll definitely be hosting more events where we’ll be giving away game keys and merch. If you have any suggestions for more bot events, feel free to leave them in our #suggestions channel. And for those who aren’t in our Discord yet, make sure to join our server to hang out with us and other Loftians while we wait for the games' release!
This upcoming month, we’re excited to be holding a new month-long event!! Yes, month long 👀 Details of this new event will be announced on Discord today and through our socials in the coming days, so keep an eye out for an announcement soon (make sure to turn on event pings)! As a sneaky peep:
Spring themed event coming this month yay!!
Bonus: bug of the month 🐞
When we thought there was a random watermelon sitting on the street, just to find out it was a watermelon skinned Pebble...😆
Watermelon skinned Pebble or Pebble shaped watermelon? 🤔
Backerkit surveys closing March 31st! 🔒
6 months ago
– Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 04:21:07 PM
Hello Loftians! 🤗
As we continue to work towards our Alpha playtests, we have some important updates for Kickstarter backers and those who have purchased items from our Pre-Order store:
Locking Surveys & Finalizing Your Pledge 🔒 We will be locking all Backerkit Surveys on March 31st. This will ensure we can proceed with the reward fulfilment process smoothly. After this date, your survey responses, including any upgrades or additional add-ons you've selected, will be finalized. Please review your selections carefully to ensure everything is exactly as you want it. To access or edit your survey you can either log into your Backerkit account or find your email from Qloud Games: [email protected]. From there you can click "Edit Your Order".
For those who have backed a tier requiring creating input (e.g. Recipe of your own, Outfit Designer, Make your mark, NPC designer), we’ll be reaching out to you in the upcoming months with more information, and next steps! For any survey related enquiries, please email us at [email protected].
Charging for Upgrades & Add-Ons 💳 If you've made any upgrades or added extra items to your pledge through the survey, your card will be charged on March 31st. This also includes purchases made from our Pre-Order store. To prepare, please ensure your payment information is up to date and that your card has sufficient funds to avoid any payment issues.
Need to Make Changes Post-Lock? 📝 If you need to make changes to your survey after this lock-in date, please reach out to us at [email protected]with your pledge number and request. While we cannot guarantee all changes can be accommodated, we will do our best to assist you.
Avoiding Payment Issues 🛠 It's common to encounter failed payments during this process. To minimize disruptions:
Ensure your card has adequate funds.
Check for any bank verification processes that might block the transaction.
Update your payment information if you've received a new card recently.
If you anticipate any issues with your payment, please contact us at [email protected]. We're here to help ensure a smooth process for everyone! Thank you Loftians!!
