💌 Dev Update #4: Day in Our Lives, feature updates, Q&A channel and more!! 🥰💬
7 months ago – Fri, Mar 01, 2024 at 05:44:59 PM

Hello there Loftians!! Welcome to another devlog! 🎉

As most of you know, we’ve been settling down in San Francisco this month after moving here for the a16z SPEEDRUN program (which you can read all about in our last update post). It’s been a busy month filled with team meetings, program activities, networking with other founders in the industry, and most importantly, building! 💪

Most days have been spent cooped up our lil Airbnb building Loftia, so we haven’t been able to explore and see too much of this amazing city just yet, but we’ve been able to visit some touristy spots on a few weekends! Here’s a little “day in our life” reel that sums up what an average day here looks like for us:

Game Design! 🎮

On the design side of things, the team has been hard at work creating a brand new core quest structure, exploring aspects of energy and various activities, as well as diving into our first adventure! We want to implement a familiar feeling for veteran gamers, while also giving it our own Loftian touch.

Quest Structure

There are so many things to think about when designing quests. What makes quests fun? What are common pain points and pitfalls when designing or creating quests? Currently, quests are a vehicle for leading the player around Loftia and the various systems we have to offer, like Player Customization, Community Projects, Farming, Crafting and Player Housing. Our priorities at the moment are making sure that the main quests:

• Have clear feedback around when a Questline has started or ended
• Clearly communicate which NPC to interact with
• Showcase the most unique systems and features of Loftia
• Is approachable for designers to add to, and
• Is flexible and extensible for future quest and game mechanics

We've achieved a real Loftian feel through our characters and each of their diverse and unique personalities. Characters have what our development refers to as “dialogue trees,” where we write out and implement into the game every possible interaction with said character and how they might respond to you! For example, if you talk to a character before you’ve finished an onboarding task, they might say something to get you back on track. Personalities will range in the world of Loftia just as they do in ours—anything from introverted, soft-spoken people to loud and energetic!

Design Exploration

When looking at activities we want to implement in the world of Loftia, we have to think about how they’re going to be introduced, approached, and eventually played. We want these activities to be fun and engaging without feeling like we’re reinventing the wheel. We accomplish this by asking simple questions along the way. What works? What doesn’t? Can it be improved? Does it need to be reworked or does it need to be scrapped altogether? What are some highlights and on the same token, what are some pain points?

With these questions in mind, our designers get to work on forming concepts. They create large lists of ideas as parts of a whole without going into too much detail. Once reviewed, the ideas either get approved or goes back to the drawing board. Approved ideas get fleshed out details with design concepts, sample UIs, menus, and even conceptual minigames! We try to keep in mind what these things might look like on screen to avoid extra clutter and confusion. Then, after more deliberation, the designers begin working on even deeper concepts surrounding the approved ideas.

In the last blog post, we briefly touched on Energy as a concept and its importance. Since then, we’ve been hard at work conceptualizing energy systems and how we want them to be presented in the world of Loftia. We’re accomplishing this by asking a few basic questions which we’ve begun to expand upon!

• How will energy be generated?
• How will it be used?
• Sustainability surrounding energy as a whole?
• How does weather affect energy generation & consumption?
• How will energy be managed?
• and much… MUCH more!

Art 🎨

On the art side, we’ve been focused on creating more props and assets to set dress our world now that the majority of level design has been completed. Stay tuned for our next update, where we'll show some sneak peeks at areas within the new version of Loftia City! For now, take a peep below at some of our 3D models that our artists have been busy modelling and sculpting!

Reuse, reduce and recycle!

Solarpunk is a core part of our game, and we really want the themes of sustainability to resonate through our the props and assets in our world too. In essence, we want to create a virtual world that mirrors what a sustainable city would look like in real life!

And one way that we’ve brought this vision to life in Loftia is to incorporate recycling into our design! We’ve been trying to use the same asset for many different designs, as a way to promote the theme of sustainability, and to cut down on the amount of assets we have to model. So we’re recycling both in game, and in development!

One item that has been recycled through many designs is the crate. 

We’ve created 3 versions of a crate, in different colors.

These crates will be used to display items, such fruit and veggies at the Loftia markets!

Or use them for more structural purposes, such as a makeshift table, with storage shelves below!

Or even a stage!

We have a few more of these recyclable props in the works that’ll we’ll reveal as time goes on, but for now we would love to hear your ideas and suggestions too. What are some items that can be used in multiple ways? 👀

Eco-friendly Transport

Many of you have asked us whether mounts will exist in the game, and while we can’t provide a definite answer just yet, we can definitely share some props that can be spotted throughout the in-game world. These bikes are currently decorative, but might become a form of transport later on for players! What do you think, would you be excited to ride a bicycle around in Loftia?

And not just single-seater bikes… but tandem bikes too! Imagine riding these with your bestie as you explore the streets of Loftia 👀

Engineering 🛠

Welcome to Dev_Sandbox! This level is where we throw all sorts of NPCs, gameplay assets, and other tools we use to test our gameplay systems in a confined place. When you are building out a new bit of gameplay, or a new questline, it is way more efficient for your initial tests to have everything in one place, and that is what we use this level for! Then, once things are working nicely here, they get ported over to the main levels.

This level isn’t anything new, it is in fact the oldest level in the game! Just a behind the scenes peek at how we build Loftia. As for what’s new this month, now that we have some amazing new team members on the design side, we have been reworking some of the existing gameplay systems to better fit the improved designs they have come up with, as well as continued work on usability and the look and feel of our UI implementations.

Decorations

We have a new decoration system! While the original implementation was a good way of testing some of our backend infrastructure, it wasn’t the most user friendly system, and didn’t allow us the fine-grained control we wanted – there was no way to say that a bookshelf has a specific area for things to be placed on, or that a painting should snap up to the wall. Beds could go through walls, and all sorts of other silliness.

Weather

Last month we mentioned our new weather system, and work has continued on integrating it more closely into the world this month as well. Making it so our design team can easily configure what the weather patterns will be, how long the last for, and how they affect the world has been a big focus – and the results are looking great!

Energy 

With our new weather system, we wanted to start rebuilding how energy works in the game, so that your solar panels and wind turbines can be affected by the weather, and we can start integrating the generation and usage of green energy throughout the game.

Gift Packs 

Who doesn’t like getting a present from a friend or a stranger? We have set up a new type of item where you can bundle up a few different items, along with a nice note, and send it off to another Loftian! What do you think of these "gift packs"? Let us know if you've got any cool ideas that could augment this feature in the comments down below!

UI Updates 

Work continues on building out bigger and better UI’s for everything we have built so far. Some highlights from this month include:

• Alert that shows over the players head when they gain items
• Recyclers
• Forges
• Crafting Stations
• Green Stamps system we talked about in the last update!
• Emote ring

Community Updates 🌱

If you’ve been in our Discord lately, you might have noticed a few changes to our server…and that’s because we’ve recently implemented a little server revamp! As we get closer to testing, we want to make sure our channels are planned and prepped accordingly. So for our Alpha backers, you have also seen several changes made to our Alpha Area. Chat channels have also been made more concise, and we’ve archived a few to make our space a bit less cluttered. But we’ve also introduced a few NEW channels in light of a few new community activities that we’ll be hosting going forward!

Monthly Team QnA! 🎉

You will be able to ask the Team your burning questions about Loftia! This can be questions about gameplay, mechanics, upcoming features, art, lore, music, the development process, or even what our favorite flavor of ice cream is! At the end of each month, roughly around when our Blog Posts go out, a new thread will be created and stay open for the next week. 

The team will peep through all the asked questions and and present the answers to you in the middle of the month. We hope this will satisfy your curiosity while waiting for the next Kickstarter blog post!

You can ask your questions for our first Team QnA thread here!! 👈

Feedback Forums! 💬

Something else we really want to do is have you even more involved in our development process, and one of these ways is with Feedback Forums, where we can gather your opinions on certain topics! We're ultimately building this game for you and our community, so we want to get your perspective and feedback as much as we can.

These forums won’t be on a set schedule like the Team QnA, but more free form as we need direct feedback with what we are working on internally. And the first one has already been posted!

Our first Feedback Forum is on the topic of set dressing. In particular we want more suggestions on how we can decorate the streets of Loftia! Leave your ideas here!! 👈

Bonus: Bug of the month 🐞

Loftians are always happy because they never have their hands full

Love from the Loftia Team 💛

✨ Instagram ✨ Twitter ✨ TikTok ✨ Discord ✨

Another cozy game shoutout! 🥰

Our friends at Rokaplay (who are the publishers behind Solarpunk - another game we’re superrrr excited about) are launching a Kickstarter campaign for Sugardew Island, a really adorable cozy farming game where you can run your own farm shop! They’ll be launching their campaign in March, and you can check out their pre-launch page here! Rokaplay really helped spread the word about Loftia during our campaign last year, and we wanna help spread the love in our fellow indie dev community too 🤗

💌 Dev Update #3: BIG NEWS and big updates! (We're now in Silicon Valley 🎉)
8 months ago – Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 10:30:27 PM

Hello Loftians, and welcome to our first update of 2024!! 🎉 This year is going to be a special one, and we’re thrilled to start it with some exciting news we’ve been eagerly holding onto for the past few months...

We’re overjoyed to announce that we’ve been invited to participate in a program called SPEEDRUN, which is run by the renowned venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, often known as a16z! SPEEDRUN is an accelerator program which supports early stage gaming startups in their development journeys. It’s a 10-week program in San Francisco (yup, we’ve moved across the world to be here for the next 3 months!) that’s packed with incredible coaching and mentorship by the games industry’s most seasoned and accomplished veterans. Participation in SPEEDRUN has also netted us a pre-seed investment from a16z, which will be going directly towards Loftia's continued development. And importantly, we retain complete creative freedom to continue building Loftia to be the best version that it can be!

We've also just posted a vlog reel on Instagram about the first week of our lives here in San Francisco! You can check it out here: https://www.instagram.com/loftia.gg/reel/C2y1CdwLp_6/

So in recent months, while we have been largely consumed by all of the work that’s required to plan and build a project of this size, we’ve also devoted a chunk of our time to preparing for the SPEEDRUN program itself - which is why we’ve kept a quieter presence on social media lately. To give some additional context, a16z reached out to us in August last year whilst our Kickstarter campaign was in full flight, and we applied for SPEEDRUN just two weeks after our campaign ended. This meant we had to put together a game demo in a much shorter timeframe than expected, in addition to many rounds of interviews with the a16z team. But now that the cat is out of the bag, we can’t wait to share our journey here in San Francisco and everything that’s still to come!

To start, here’s a little recap of what we’ve been up to this week:

This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and we’re so grateful to have this kind of support from one of the biggest and most reputable venture capital firms in the world to bring Loftia to life. This additional support - financial, developmental, and advisory - is a real game-changer (pun intended), and means that Loftia will be even bigger and better when it reaches all of you, our backers and players.

For any of you interested in developing your own games or founding a gaming-adjacent startup, we’d highly recommend checking out a16z Games and SPEEDRUN, as there will be more cohorts in the future. You can read more about the SPEEDRUN program here: https://a16z.com/announcing-speedrun-2024-accelerating-games-x-tech/

We'll also be posting vlogs onto our Instagram, TikTok and X (Twitter) accounts starting tomorrow, so make sure to follow us on those platforms to stay updated on our journey! Just in case you missed it above, you can watch our brand new vlog reel that we've just posted alongside this devblog update, here: https://www.instagram.com/loftia.gg/reel/C2y1CdwLp_6/

Now for the game updates! 

Game design 🎮

Iterating on Loftia’s game design has been one of our priorities in the past few months, and it’s something that we’ll be continuing to work tirelessly on as we build and test the game. We’ve been fortunate enough to have had 2 amazing game designers join us this month! Felipe is our new design lead, having led development and design efforts on successful titles like Wonderbox: The Adventure Maker. Monil is also joining our design team, having spent many years previously working on gameplay systems for Farmville 3.

Some aspects that we’ve been focused on include finding a single, cohesive vision for Loftia’s core gameplay loop and progression systems, as well as building on the lore and backstory of the game. Many of the design areas that we’ve been figuring out have already been touched upon in the engineering prototypes section above.

To give you an idea of what this looks like behind the scenes, this is a screenshot of just one of our very many game design planning boards! This particular board is what our new design lead, Felipe, has been working on, diving deeply into the many unknowns and questions that are still left for us to tackle as we continue on in our still (relatively) early phases of development.

Green energy generation, usage and storage is an important part of Loftia’s design, and we have been diving deep on concepts for how we can make this more interesting and fun to play! Here is a very early draft of some of these designs. They’re by no means final, and hopefully in next month’s update, we’ll be able to shed some more light on how the energy systems within Loftia will work.

Engineering 🛠

Our engineering efforts in this past month were mainly focused around prototyping new game systems that our design team has come up with. As usual, though, we’re juggling many tasks at once and always working on a little bit of everything, so here are some of the highlights!

(Please note that as game development is an extremely iterative process, any prototyped features have still yet to undergo extensive playtesting before they’re confirmed to be part of the core game!)

Prototypes for new game systems 

• Green Stamps - players will have the opportunity to take on various errands and tasks to do around the world of Loftia, all of which will contribute to the in-game community and environment!
• Sustainability Score - the name is a placeholder, but this is a system that incentivizes players to take the path that is more eco-friendly when it comes to in-game actions. For example, in order to acquire water, you could buy it from an NPC shop (neutral) or put out a rain bucket when it rains to collect water (more eco-friendly)!
• Weather - we’ve wired up a weather system into the world! Who knows if tomorrow will be a bright, sunny day, or a wet, stormy one (quick, run out and put down some water buckets!)
• Composting, Recycling, Furnaces - we’re testing out a couple of these additional activities, each with their own unique aspects of gameplay, that Loftians will be able to partake in during their journeys.
• Glider mechanics - we’ve been testing out some glider mechanics for when you jump from higher locations! We’re currently unsure if they’ll be here to stay. What do you think? Would you be keen to have the ability to glide around within the world? Let us know in the comments below!

Infrastructure

• Main Menu and Keybinds - this doesn’t sound particularly exciting but has been important for us to get out of the way sooner rather than later, as handling the keybinds has also forced us to lay out the groundwork for controller support for the future. It’s always a big risk to move forward in development too quickly without having a solid plan in place for features coming down the line, so figuring out controller support early on is most definitely a win.
• Improved AWS DynamoDB costs - we’ve made a number of backend optimizations that will bring down our database costs, allowing us to run the Loftia servers that will serve all the players for even longer!
• Added a dev-tool for testing questlines and gameplay mechanics - internal development tools are also often not particularly interesting to hear about, but nonetheless are an incredibly important aspect of the development process. Internal tools allow our team to automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks and ultimately ship the game more efficiently, and we’re investing the appropriate amount of time into developing these in-house tools as required.

User Interfaces

• Our UI is also an area we’ve made some great headway on! Thank you to everyone for helping us choose between design options. The Solarpunk tech aesthetic was the crowd favorite, and we’ve been working on iterating on a few different pieces of UI that showcases this theme. However, we know that the other designs were also loved by many of you, so we’re excited to announce that we’ll be giving you the option to choose from a variety of different UI skins! This option may come a bit later, after our initial release, but we’re open to hearing your suggestions! Here’s an example of what these UI skins may look like:

• Some UI pieces we’ve been working on include the dialogue box, quest log, and a generic NPC shop layout:

• We’ve also tested the values of all our colors to ensure the best experience for everyone, including those with color vision deficiency:

Art 🎨

On the art side, we’ve been making great progress on our modular building kits! These kits will include a variety of architectural elements and decorations that can be mixed and matched, allowing us to create diverse yet cohesive environments quickly. The final outcome will be a variety of buildings all in different layouts, shapes and structures.

These are some more concepts of buildings that will feature in various areas of Loftia City:

Community Updates 🌱

This month we were also super excited to announce that we’re bringing on two community managers for our Discord server! Mushy will be your go-to for all things Discord! She’ll be leading the moderation team to ensure our server is a safe and welcoming space, as well as planning community events and activities. Meanwhile, Slap will oversee our content creator program and manage community playtests, ensuring your voices are heard and valued in shaping Loftia. He’ll also help us grow our presence on some social platforms, such as Reddit!

And speaking of Reddit, we’ve recently revamped Loftia’s subreddit, and we’ve got a boatload of things planned for it. So if you’re a Reddit user, follow our subreddit to join our community: https://www.reddit.com/r/loftia/

Winter & Reuse Winners!

Thank you to everyone who entered our Winter & Reuse art competition last month! We received many entries from talented artist in our community, and had a super difficult time choosing the winners (as always)!

We can’t wait to host more events and competitions soon! If you have any ideas or suggestions, please let us know in our #suggestions channel on Discord, or comment below.

Full-time and volunteer positions:

A big thank you to everyone who applied for our full-time and volunteer positions! All positions have now been filled, and we are so grateful for each and every one of you who expressed interest in joining our team. We took our time with the hiring process to ensure we found the right fit for our current team's size and needs, and we really appreciate everyone's patience during this time. If we missed replying to your resume, sorry! There were literally thousands of applications, and while we tried to respond to as many as we could, we need to devote most of our time to building the game.

For those we couldn't bring on board this time, we'll be keeping all applications on file to revisit if we decide to open more positions in the future. We also encourage you to email us your resume/portfolio for any roles at any time, as we'll be keeping the door open for potential hires going forward!

Thank You! 🥰

We’re so excited to share our adventures in San Francisco in the next 2 months with you all! This almost feels like a beginning of a new chapter in our game dev journey, and we’re feeling both excited and nervous!

Now that news of our participation in SPEEDRUN has been announced, we’re looking forward to sharing even more of what’s happening behind the scenes. We highly encourage you to follow us on our social media platforms to get frequent updates from us! Instagram and X (Twitter) are two platforms we’ll be posting on frequently in the next 2 months, so make sure to join in on the fun!

Bonus: Bug of the month

Rock and roll 🤟🏼

Love from the Loftia Team 💛

✨ Instagram ✨ Twitter ✨ TikTok ✨ Discord ✨

💌 Dev Update #2: Expanding the world, new UI designs, continued progress on cooking and salvaging, and more! 🎄🌼
9 months ago – Mon, Dec 25, 2023 at 06:13:14 PM

Hi Loftians!

Happy Holidays to all of you! We hope everyone is enjoying the festive vibes, and if you’re celebrating Christmas, we hope it’s merry and bright 🎄🎉. This month has been as busy as ever for the team, but we’ve also had the chance to reflect on and truly embrace what a monumental year this has been for us. Grateful is an understatement to how we feel towards this community, and we’re so excited to make 2024 even bigger and better!

2023 in review ✨

As we’re feeling a tad nostalgic this time of year, let’s take a trip down memory lane and see where we were at this time last year, and visit some of the milestones we achieved throughout these past 12 months.

Believe it or not, this time last year our Loftian community on Discord was only at 4,000 members:

And now one year later, we’re at 40,000! This number still doesn’t look real to us.

Similarly, a year ago, we had only just started posting on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. Now we have over half a million people following Loftia across these platforms, and we’re beyond grateful to have received such an overwhelming wave of support from so many people from all over the world!

The game itself was also in its… very early stages of development. We had just made the switch from the browser to Unreal Engine a few short months prior, and essentially had to rebuild the entire game from the ground up. Our team at the time had begun to grow, but was also still very much in its nascent stages, developing as quickly as we could with a team comprised of just 2 engineers, 2 concept artists, 1 3D artist, and 1 game designer.

Here is what the game looked like in late 2022. We had the bare skeleton of the game in place, with character creation and multiplayer support implemented, but not much more than that. We already had our beloved goldfish wind turbine at this point (albeit still under construction), however!

As 2023 began, we had just started on the initial planning for our Kickstarter campaign. We knew that the trailer was going to be a huge part of showcasing our dream to everybody, and so our initial storyboard was born. It has never been showcased publicly before, so have a look! There are a couple of scenes that were naturally moved around or altered in the final version of the trailer, but we managed to adhere to the core vision pretty closely in the end, and we’re quite proud of that.

The road leading to our Kickstarter campaign in August was an extremely busy one, with the team needing to juggle many different tasks including trailer creation, campaign planning, website design, hiring and growing the team, community management and moderation, and last but definitely not least, continued development of the game.

We went through several iterations of our player character along with over 50 different facial feature options, hairstyles, and clothing pieces, created the main Loftia City map with its individual districts, created functional prototypes of multiple gameplay systems, and so much more.

We were elated to see that all of that hard work really meant something, as over half a million people have supported us across our social platforms, and 16,000+ of you from the community directly contributed to our Kickstarter campaign. And as we know, all of this has led to a whopping US$1.2+ million dollars raised, all going directly towards enabling the creation of the Loftian dream.

The year, of course, didn’t end there. In the final quarter of the year, with the Kickstarter campaign now largely behind us, we’ve continued to push full steam ahead, with our heads down and our entire efforts focused on development of the game itself.

Salvaging, cooking, crafting, NPC friendships, and world progress are just some of the systems that we’ve already implemented. And just a little bit further down in this post, you’ll be hearing about how we’re working on adding more depth to these systems, continuing to flesh out the world of Loftia, and looking towards an even brighter 2024!

Lessons Learned 📝

At the end of the day, whilst we’ve come so far in the context of actual game development, we’d like to think that the biggest change has been in ourselves - the team. The change has come in the form of how we view Loftia and ourselves, the mission that we’re on, and our ability to have an impact on the world around us.

In its absolute earliest days, Loftia was going to merely be a small, cozy, relaxing game with some cool sustainable technology. But as we continued to clarify our vision throughout this year, it became evident that there was more to it than that.

It’s clear to us now that Loftia should be a home-away-from-home for players. One which inspires hope for a brighter, more sustainable future. And one which brings people closer together, in an ever-increasingly more uncertain world. 

It’s also become clearer to us the power that games hold in this world. Much more than simply a means of entertainment and passing the time, games are an art form, through which truly important and revolutionary ideas can be shared and popularized. And despite the (relatively) small size of our team, we’re on a path to inspiring change and making a difference on this planet that we all call home. As well as providing everyone with countless hours of fun within Loftia, of course.

And for one final time before we dive into more concrete developments that have occurred lately, we want to thank you for coming along on this journey of a lifetime with us. Here’s to many more months and years of Loftia to come!

As always, with much love and appreciation,

- Mic, Martina, Eric, & the rest of the Loftia team 💛

So, what’s new? 👀

As another month wraps up, we’re excited to share the progress we’ve made and tease some upcoming features we have brewing behind the scenes! From new engineering updates, to adding new assets and splashes of color to our world, the team has been working hard to step closer to our Alpha milestone for next year.

Gameplay development

Salvaging

In our update last month we showcased some concept art we had created for our salvaging mechanic, which will allow players to collect discarded and abandoned items, materials and objects found in the world for crafting, decorating, donating and more. This month we’re happy to present some progress we’ve made on transforming those concepts into 3D assets! Our goal was to make the items look scrappy and aged, in a “pre-loved” kind of way.

Cooking

Similarly, last month we had also released some of the recipes and food items that we’re planning to add to the game. But what’s food without a cooking system?!

We’re currently in the thick of brainstorming concepts for unique cooking systems, including community cooking and dining areas that can be used together. Cooking can be a very complex system if we want it to be though, given there are so many different methods and techniques to cook food around the world. While we would love to eventually add many different cooking styles into the game, we’ll be starting with more traditional and simple cooking methods, in addition to more environmental friendly cooking techniques.

And of course, some of you may notice that there are some community-oriented designs here, given the social, community-driven world that Loftia is aiming to be.

 UI Design

If you’re following our socials, you might have seen our recent poll on our user-interface design themes! Our goal is to create a design that is intuitive, functional and accessible for everyone, whilst still aligning visually with Loftia's cozy, solarpunk aesthetic. We’re so glad you love all these designs! Thank you to everyone who left valuable feedback, we’ll be considering all your suggestions for the next round of iterations.

So, which one is the community favorite? While all of these designs were loved, the winner was the 3rd design, followed closely by the 1st design! A balance between technology and nature is exactly what solarpunk embodies, and we’re glad that these two designs align perfectly with our overarching theme.

However we understand that many of you love all of these designs, and so do we! Therefore, we’re considering building the option for players to switch and customize their UI theme according to their preferences. This includes switching between dark and light modes to meet accessibility needs. This feature might come later down the line, as we’re working towards implementing a basic version of the UI for now, but ensuring a great UI and UX is one of our priorities!

The next stage of our UI process is to smash out more wireframes for all the various areas that we’ll be needing UI, and this is a sneak peak of what this looks like for us internally:

Following the wireframes, our artists paint over the pieces to align with our theme, before creating a polished, high-fidelity version that’s ready for engine implementation. It can be a lengthy process with many iterations in between, and we’ll be conducting more polls for you to vote on style and design choices soon!

We’re also open to continuous feedback, so let us know your thoughts on our UI if you haven’t already, down in the comments below!

Level Design

One of the most anticipated aspects of Loftia is undoubtedly the city and the surrounding world, something both the team and the community are eager to see come to life! In level design for games, careful thought goes into not only how each space looks, but also how the space enhances the gameplay experience. This involves considering how players interact with the space, the sightlines and ability for players to understand where they need to go, the flow of the game, and generally ensuring that each area supports the overall narrative and mechanics of the game.

Since our Kickstarter, we’ve expanded Loftia city to accommodate all the new features that we’re intending to build for each district, meaning a larger city with more areas to explore. What’s even more exciting is that each district in Loftia city will be its own island, uniquely themed to reflect their distinctive character! In the past few months our artists and level designers have worked on several iterations of the city design, and conducted many internal playtests to ensure the best possible gameplay experience. While this is still a work in progress and we still have a lot of work to do, we’re really pleased with the progress our team has made, and the exciting direction it’s heading in!

We’ve included a sneak peak of our Hanging Gardens Network level design below. As you can see, level design is very much about designing the layout and general environment of a game, and this is achieved through “greyboxing”, which involves literally adding grey boxes as placeholders everywhere. Once the level design has been confirmed, the next stage will be “set dressing” - actually adding the assets that will actually make the city, look like a city.

Buildings, buildings, buildings!

And that brings us to building kits! Modelling and set dressing the environment following the level design is the heaviest task that takes up the art team’s time, as it involves modelling a huge number of different assets to fill up the space. With the large number of buildings that will be present within Loftia City and the small size of our indie development team, it’s simply not possible for us to create each and every building to be custom individually.

To make this process more efficient, we’re creating modular building kits that can be reused and customized across different areas of each district. These kits will include a variety of architectural elements and decorations that can be mixed and matched, allowing us to create diverse yet cohesive environments quickly.

Infrastructure improvements and upgrades 🛠

Localization

Translating Loftia into multiple languages so we can share it with as many people as possible is really important to us, and so getting a solid localization pipeline in place was quite important! We’ve got this set up now, so as we build things going forward, they will better support being translated to multiple languages.

Menu System

We’ve started work on setting up menu functionality with all the goodies you would expect to see – resolution and sound settings, keybindings, and more. Nothing super fancy yet, but another step on the way.

Buffs

We’ve set up a quick proof of concept for buffs, gained through eating cooked meals for right now. We don’t know yet whether these fit our long term vision, but we have things set up to try a few out and see how they feel. Moving faster, seeing hidden forage spots better, even a friendly little cloud that your hat generates to water your crops, we are experimenting with all sorts of ideas. Post your own ideas in the comments!

Decoration Infrastructure

We spent a good chunk of time working on enhancing most everything in the game to be more easily interactable and able to be moved around and used as decorations by the players. Up until this point, this only worked for things specifically built as ‘decorations’, now you can easily move planter boxes, crafting stations, and more!

Polish and Bug Fixes

A whole bunch of general polish tasks and bugs were handled this month, making sure we keep the game in a good state and not letting those minor issues pile up on us!

Community Updates 🌱

To celebrate the end of the year, we’re holding a final art event for 2023 called Winter and Reuse where you can submit “winter” themed craft projects using recycled or old materials! We really want you to explore different mediums to show off your creative talents no matter what they are!

You can find more information about this event on our Instagram or Discord, and you still have until the end of this month to submit your artwork. We already have so many amazing submissions, and we’re once again blown away by the creativity and talent of everyone in our community. Thank you so much for being a part of our cozy Loftian community, and we can’t wait to hold more exciting events and activities next year!

Thank You! 🥰

2024 is going to be a huge year for us, and we can’t wait to take you along for the ride!

Again, thank you all immensely for your continued support and belief in us. The team are working around the clock to make Loftia the best game that it can possibly be, and our community’s continued encouragement is such a big part of what keeps us going.

Bonus: Bug of the month

Just another day in the community farms…who says you need thumbs (or a neck) to have a green thumb? 

Love from the Loftia Team 💛

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💌 Dev Update #1: Salvaging, cooking, NPC friendships, and more! ✨🌱
10 months ago – Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 03:37:40 AM

Hi Loftians! 

Welcome to the start of our Loftia Devlog, where we’ll be providing regular development updates on how Loftia is progressing! 🎉 Since our Kickstarter campaign wrapped up, the team has been incredibly busy working on many aspects of development and project management - from project scoping, roadmap planning, hiring new team members, managing backer surveys and support tickets, distributing Discord rewards, setting up the Pre-Order store, updating our Discord LoftiaBot, along with continued work on the game. Building a solid plan for the year ahead was our number one priority, and we’re incredibly grateful for everyone’s patience during this time.

Now that we’ve been in post-campaign development for a few weeks now, we have a BIG update prepared for you all! As we're still in early-stage development, not everything can be made public yet, so there’s still a lot more work happening behind the scenes that we’ll share the moment it’s possible to do so. The details of some updates may also be limited to our private Alpha Group on Discord, but we’ll also share a general note publicly of what those updates pertain to. It’s also important to note that not everything mentioned in these updates will remain as is, and some features or concepts may be changed in the future. Game development is a very iterative process, and change is inevitable, but we’ll be keeping our dev journey as transparent as we can. 💪🏼

Now let’s dive into the updates! 

Gameplay development 🎮

Now that we are done with Kickstarter, the most important thing is to start banging out lots of game systems, so we can start testing and iterating on making them more fun as soon as possible! We have created a whole bunch of them over the last couple months, and really focused on making it super easy to add content to each of them, putting us in a good place for the future. Keep in mind that these are super early incarnations of each system, and are not in any way final, particularly the UI!

Salvaging

In Loftia, salvaging is a core game mechanic that will allow players to collect discarded and abandoned items, materials and objects found in the world for crafting, decorating, donating and more. For example, discarded furniture could be refurbished and used to decorate player homes, and rusty metal scraps from an old car could be melted down and used to upgrade equipment. This sustainable cycle will promote the idea of recycling and reusing, and players might also receive in-game rewards for cleaning up the city and repurposing materials instead of buying new ones.

Examples of some of the items you can salvage:

As an extension of salvaging, players might also be able to find “chests” scattered around the city with items and materials that can be useful in a variety of ways. Here’s a sneak peek at how some of these may appear in the game: 

Cooking

We’ve been working on a few concepts for food and cooking in Loftia, starting with a few basic ingredients and recipes that you can play with. Many of these food items have been inspired by community, as in August we ran an Instagram Q&A asking for recipe and food suggestions, and received more than 300 different ideas from all over the world! We’re so proud to have such an international community of Loftians.

NPC Friendship + Gifts

We’ve implemented a basic NPC friendship system that will allow you to build your connection with them over time. You’ll also be able to give them gifts, complete quests to unlock new dialogues, and find out more about their background story as you progress your friendship with them. NPCs will have different reactions to different items too.  

Recently we also introduced a new NPC named Herb, Loftia’s new Community Farm Manager! The name “Herb” was suggested by members of our community, and won several rounds of voting polls across our platforms. Thank you to everyone who participated in this community event. We know how invested many of you are in getting to know the amazing characters that will make an appearance in Loftia, and there’ll be even more NPCs coming in the future, so keep your eyes peeled!

World Progress Leaderboard

See how much you have contributed to a world progress story, and how much the top contributors have been able to donate. For those who need a refresher, World Progress is a game system unique to Loftia, where players can work with others in their server to unlock new areas and features in the world. It’s a cooperative gameplay system that prioritizes community building and socialization, but it’s by no means mandatory for those who prefer a “solo” gameplay experience. Our newly integrated leaderboards will allow players to track their individual contribution and see the ranking of friends and other players, for a touch of that competitive flair.

Speaking of world progress, some savvy Loftians may have already noticed that the LoftiaBot “Garden Event” minigame bears quite a few similarities to the world progress system that we’ve talked so much already.

Logbook

Completionists rejoice! We’ve implemented a logbook that lets you keep track of all of the items you have foraged, crafted, or otherwise acquired, with some rewards for collecting enough of each category. The UI of our logbook is something we’ll spending some time refining though, so let us know if you have any design ideas we can consider.

Updated Camera Controls

Previously, we had used a camera control system more similar to World of Warcraft, where you had a cursor at all times, and holding right mouse button down would let you control the camera orientation. We didn’t expect this default to work well for the Switch, so we swapped to right mouse controlling the camera orientation at all times, with a cursor popping up when you open up an inventory menu. This will force us to design everything going forward in a console-friendly manner, while still making sure the PC controls are as awesome as possible.

Crafting

Finding items, and transforming them into cooler items to decorate your home, customize your character, donate to world progress, or build up your farm is one of the absolute most key parts of Loftia, and so we wanted to get a basic crafting system in as soon as possible, so that we can start iterating on it and making it really fun. Our first version of crafting lets you gather up ingredients and transform them into different items, of course, but also allows for byproducts. Byproducts let you really focus on using every piece of your ingredients, reducing your consumption and recycling every usable part.

Recycling

Speaking of recycling, what is recycling except for backwards crafting? Put one thing in, get multiple pieces out! In Loftia, it’s all about turning trash into treasure. For items that you no longer want, we’re building a system that will allow you to recycle and reuse the materials for other crafting recipes, or donate the materials to world progress. Use catalysts as you recycle more complex items to help them break down safely and efficiently.

Community and Rooftop Farming

If you’re a city dweller, you might be familiar with the struggle of finding enough space to grow crops! Or maybe not. But nevertheless, it’s a problem that the residents of Loftia City are looking to solve: we’re exploring concepts where farming can take place on the rooftops of buildings!

Rooftop farming is a great way to transform under-utilized, urban spaces into nature-filled lush environments. Not to mention the aesthetic value of having more greenery in man-made concrete jungles. So we’ve recently begun the process of designing and prototyping gameplay systems based around communal farming, where players can come together and jointly caretake the city’s public farms.

The designs for these gameplay systems are still in their early stages, so if you’ve got any ideas you’d like us to consider, feel free to drop them in the comments below. Whilst we can’t promise that we’ll be able to implement all of the suggested ideas, we’ll be sure to at read each one and draw inspiration from them!

Housing decoration persistence

Decorating your home in Loftia isn’t a whole lot of fun if it doesn’t stay decorated. We’ve updated our player housing to persist the changes you make, so no matter how long you go adventuring for, your house will be just the way you left it. The only thing that should change is the size of your crops as they grow bigger with time!

Quests

A well-designed game quest log with user-friendly visual indicators greatly enhances the player experience and organization in a game. We’ve been updating our quest system to include more features such as quest titles, quest status indicators, objective tracking and information to show which NPCs are affiliated with each quest. Some more features that we would like to add within this include location information, quest rewards and more!

Music

The amazing background music tracks are now in-game, and let us tell you, they make Loftia feel so much more cozy. If you haven’t heard them already, check out these amazing tracks that you can listen to here!

These incredible soundtracks have been composed by the amazing Tomás Palazzi.

Art Development

We’ve improved our 3D asset pipeline and have made aesthetic improvements to the way 3D objects look in Loftia. Notably, our new material and texturing technique mean that assets now have a smoother and softer appearance, which gives the environment a more polished look. We’ve also shifted our color palette towards brighter tones so that objects are more eye-catching and visually appealing.

Some of our upgrades to our 3D assets are below, including a few before and after shots: 

Infrastructure improvements and upgrades 🛠

We have continued to build out our infrastructure, with some really important updates! For those who are more technically inclined:

Unreal 5.3 upgrade

When we originally started Loftia, and while we built out our Kickstarter trailer, we were using Unreal Engine 5.0. Since then, Unreal 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 have been released, so it was time for an upgrade! Doing an engine upgrade involves upgrading any deprecated engine calls we have, moving to the newest standards. It also required us to manually update some of our plugins that didn’t have available versions for the latest Unreal release. We get lots of bug fixes as well as cool new tools and technology to use from these upgrades, you can check out the details here:

• Unreal Engine 5.1 update
• Unreal Engine 5.2 update
• Unreal Engine 5.3 update

Linux Build

Running a Loftia server on Linux can be almost 50% cheaper than running the same server on a Windows machine, for the same level of performance. We set up a build pipeline for Linux, wrote a bunch of scripts to help do Linux server management, and had to manually set up pipelines to build several of our external libraries to use the Unreal toolchain for Linux.

Hathora Integration

We have integrated with Hathora to scale to larger player counts and easily spin up new servers for Loftia whenever they are needed. Hathora recently ran a test where they scaled a game to one million concurrent users! They have been a great partner, and will help us take Loftia to new heights. 

Enhanced input system

We upgraded our input system to use the modern Unreal enhanced input system. This lets us handle more complex input scenarios much more gracefully.

Data-Driven gameplay systems

We have spent a good deal of time on creating a unified architecture for data-driven gameplay systems, allowing us to very easily add content like quests, crafting recipes, items and everything else to the game. Instead of having to work with individual assets for each new item a designer creates, they are able to simple add rows to a spreadsheet (JSON file), or to the in-editor data table. To facilitate this, we have upgraded Unreal’s default data table to be backed by JSON, so it automatically loads from the file and saves when changes are made, allowing us to more easily edit gameplay content configuration without running into merge conflicts. 

Community Updates 🌱

In the past 2 months we’ve made several updates and changes to our Discord server, including updates to our LoftiaBot, and new channels for Alpha backers! Discord is the platform that we’ll be the most active on throughout our Alpha development phase, so make sure to join our server if you haven’t already. For Kickstarter backers who have completed their survey and provided their Discord username, you should have received your Discord role by now. If this isn’t the case, please DM our Discord ModMail Bot, or email us at [email protected] for assistance.

Community events

We’ve held a couple of community events on Discord recently, and there’s currently one running live right now! With the success of our Earth Day event earlier this year, we decided to bring back a similar event this month called the LoftiaBot Garden. But instead of growing a tree, the community is working together to grow the Loftia Garden by watering and donating crops. It’s been 2 weeks, and the Garden is almost 80% grown! All participants will also be able to redeem this Leaf Hat in the game:

Last month we also ran an Emoji Competition to add new emojis to our server. This competition once again showcased the immense talent and creativity of our community, as there were over 50 different emojis submitted. Thank you to all the artists who participated in this event, and our Discord community for voting on the winning emojis. Here are all of our winning artists:

We’ll be holding more community events and competitions, so make sure to turn on event pings to get notified by going to the #self-roles channel! If you have other ideas for community activities as we wait for the Alpha release of Loftia, you can drop them in the #suggestions channel on Discord.

What’s next? 👀

As mentioned previously, there are a multitude of other game features and backend infrastructure work that we’re currently developing behind the scenes. The addition of our new Kickstarter stretch goals has also expanded the scope of our game, which is why planning and game design have been our core priorities in the past 2 months. So while it might be difficult for us to share everything right now, trust that our team is working hard to deliver the best gaming experience we can build.

For our next update, expect to see more progress made on our gameplay systems, concepts, art, infrastructure updates, new UI/UX designs, and more! In the mean time, we’ll be running some fun community events for the holiday season (how is it Christmas next month already?!), and sharing bits and pieces of news wherever we can!

Thank you for being a part of our game development journey, and thank you for your continued support. We’re so grateful to have the opportunity to build this game for you all, and we can’t wait to share the world of Loftia with you soon!

Bonus: Bug of the month

Loftia devs: “How many pets do you want?”

Loftians: “Yes”

As much as we want an army of dogs too, players will just have one pet walking with them at a time. But here’s what a Loftian dog army would look like!

Love from the Loftia Team 💛

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Survey FAQ and Pre-Order Store LIVE! 📝🥳 (And NPC reveal)!
12 months ago – Wed, Oct 04, 2023 at 06:34:35 AM

Hi Loftians!

Pre-Order store is LIVE! 🎉

This is a reminder that our Pre-Order store is offering a limited selection of Kickstarter items until October 9th, 2023 for those who had failed payments and missed out on our campaign!After this date, only a few items such as game keys, digital art book and the whale turbine plushie will remain available. Please note that this period will be the final time in which the game keys will be priced at this level! The store will be accepting both PayPal and card payments. If you know anyone who missed out on our campaign, make sure to let them know! 🙌🏼

Survey FAQ 📝

All surveys have been sent now! The following is a list of survey FAQs that we've gathered from the community over the past week.

1. When do surveys close?

For those who have already submitted their survey, we will be locking your order on Tuesday October 31st, 2023. If you purchased additional add-ons within the survey, or made a pledge upgrade, this is also when your cards will be charged. If you would like us to lock your survey and charge your card before October 31st 2023 for any reason, please contact us at [email protected]

For those who haven’t filled out the survey, you will have until March 31st 2024, to submit your response. Please note that if you do not fill out the survey by this date, it may result in delays in the delivery of your rewards. Between October 31st and March 31st, we will be locking any new surveys on a fortnightly basis - ie. we will be checking submissions and locking orders on the 15th and the final day of each month.

Please note that the earlier you complete your survey, the earlier we can deliver your Discord rewards (e.g. Discord titles and access to the private Alpha Group).

If you would like to make an edit to your response (for example, your desired platforms to play Loftia on) after your survey has been locked, you can email us at [email protected] and we can make a manual change for you. However please note that all add-on purchases and pledge upgrades once your survey is locked will be final.

2. What’s the difference between Steam, Mac and PC keys?

Steam means we’ll send you a Steam key for you to download Loftia via Steam. Mac and PC means that we’ll be sending you a game key for you to download Loftia and install it onto your computer directly. You’ll be able to use the same Mac or PC key to download Loftia on other Mac or PC devices too.

3. How does the bestie pack work when filling out the survey for two people?

For those who purchased the Bestie Pack tier, your survey will come with additional fields for you to add information about your bestie, including their Discord username and platform preference. If you include their email, we’ll also be able to send them their game key to them directly. If you choose to skip this, we will send you both game keys and you’ll be able to distribute it yourself. If you want to add an email for your bestie after your survey has been locked, you can email us at [email protected] and we’ll be able to manually add the email address in.

4. I bought additional add-ons for my friend. How do I get these add-ons to them?

All add-ons will be sent to the main backer's email as unique codes, and won't be bound to a game key, so that you can distribute them to whoever you like once you have received them!

5. If we have bought the Alpha or Early Access keys does this mean we have bought the official game as well?

Yes! Both Alpha and Early Access keys will grant you access to the full game. Alpha Access keys also automatically comes with Early Access. You do not need to buy an additional Early Access key if you already have Alpha Access.

6. When will Discord roles be distributed and when will we be invited to the Discord Alpha Group?

Discord roles will start rolling out by next Monday October 9th.

For Alpha backers, you'll be able to access our private Alpha group once you have your title. This will be a private channel in our main Discord server.

7. What are the limitations for the Tree Hugger plaque?

If you have purchased the Tree Hugger plaque, there are two fields in the survey that you’ll need to fill out: name and message. For the name, it must be a maximum of 30 characters in length, with no special characters or emojis. For the message, it must be a maximum of 500 characters in length, with no special characters or emojis - however basic punctuation marks are accepted. As for format, paragraphs and line spaces are allowed, so you’ll be able to submit poems or other formatted text, as long as it is your original work and not copyrighted. All languages are accepted for both the name and message.

Please note that the team will be reviewing and approving all names and messages. We will reach out to you if there are any changes that need to be made.

8.What do I do if I still haven't received my survey?

If you still haven’t received yours, there are several things you can do to troubleshoot:

• Check the email on file with Kickstarter. Often users have old emails still tied to their accounts (Particularly if you authenticate through Facebook).
  
• Check your spam filters/archived emails. Look for a title containing "Response Needed -- Get your reward for Loftia"
  
• Check your account on Kickstarter, to ensure that you successfully backed the project, and weren't dropped from the campaign due to failed payment. If you did in fact back the campaign - take a screenshot that includes your pledge details,  Backer ID # and Pledge Number and send this screenshot with your email and Kickstarter username included in the body of the email to [email protected]. The support team can help you locate your unique survey link.
  

Backers who have pledged to the campaign using their AppleID but haven't completely set up their Apple Pay account (linking their email address to their Apple Wallet) will have issues receiving emails from BackerKit. For these backers, we have sent a Kickstarter message to you with your unique survey link, so please check your inbox on Kickstarter! To ensure that you’ll be able to receive future emails from us, please email [email protected] with your name and the email address that you would like us to use, and we’ll be able to update your contact details for you.

New NPC! 🌾

For those who haven't seen our update on our socials, we've now revealed our new NPC! Meet Loftia's Community Farm Manager! We'll be holding a poll to decide his name tomorrow, so if you have any suggestions, make sure to comment them below! 

Our Community Farm Manager is super passionate about sustainable farming, having even pioneered Loftia's first hydroponic machine! He can teach you everything you need to know about growing crops, managing nutrients, pH proficiency, and how to farm with maximum efficiency. In his spare time, he loves crocheting cute farming accessories (especially making little hats & decorations for his hydroponic machines), reading up on new farming techniques and baking cherry pies to share with the community. Cabbages are his favorite crop, so if you give him one he might give you a little treat in return 🥬👀

Thank you, and have a great week Loftians!

Love from the Loftia Team 💛

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