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Latest Updates from Our Project:
💌 Dev Update #6: The sun, moon and stars! ☀️🌙✨
almost 2 years 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!! 🌱😊
almost 2 years 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! 🔒
about 2 years 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!!
💌 Dev Update #4: Day in Our Lives, feature updates, Q&A channel and more!! 🥰💬
about 2 years 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:
day in the life of building our dream game! 🥰
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
UI concepts that you might see while accepting, progressing, and completing quests
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!
Various responses when interacting with Amani during a world project
Implementing the dialogue in engine
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.
Example of Heather’s work on concepts around Farming & Cooking!
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!
More of our thoughts on Energy & it’s proposed functions
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.
Which color and style is your fave?
We’ve created 3 versions of a crate, in different colors.
Eco-friendly and functional!
These crates will be used to display items, such fruit and veggies at the Loftia markets!
A great storage solution
Or use them for more structural purposes, such as a makeshift table, with storage shelves below!
The possibilites are endless 🤯
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?
Which one is your fave?
And not just single-seater bikes… but tandem bikes too! Imagine riding these with your bestie as you explore the streets of Loftia 👀
Who you riding these bikes with?
Engineering 🛠
Just another day in the engine
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.
With Decorations 2.0, creating and decorating your dream home and player island is going to be a breeze! Items can be moved around and placed in a very intuitive manner, and we are now set up for the future.
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
Icons are still placeholders!
A first look at our recycling mechanic 👀
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
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 🎉)
about 2 years 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!
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.
Felipe's game design board
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.
Mushy's exploration into energy systems
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!
Balloon glider
or hang glider, which one do you prefer?
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:
What other skins would you like to see?
Some UI pieces we’ve been working on include the dialogue box, quest log, and a generic NPC shop layout:
Let us know your thoughts on these! Still a work in progress :)
We’ve also tested the values of all our colors to ensure the best experience for everyone, including those with color vision deficiency:
An example of what our testing looks like!
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)!
Congratulations to these Loftians! 🥳
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!
