Skywatch #17 - Development Update

Welcome to this weeks Skywatch development update!

We open with some sad news this week - this will be the last Skywatch post of the year (boo!) :(

We know you'll all be disappointed with that news, sorry! We'll be back in the new year with lots of new development updates and we can't wait to share them with you. Whilst this will be the last Skywatch post of the year, we do have a few more pieces of content scheduled to go out across our social channels before the studio breaks for the holidays, so stay tuned!

We'll also be sending out the next wave of open development invitations next week! This will be the last wave of playtesting invites for the year and I've already started selecting people for this wave. Don't worry though, there will be plenty of opportunities to get involved in the open development community next year too.

When we announced Lost Skies back in May, the game was in an early stage of development. Although we were referring to the builds we were sharing with our playtesting community as “pre-alpha” for lack of a better term, it’s fair to say that the builds at that time were more like playable prototypes, shared to get feedback on early implementation of features and mechanics.

Over the past few weeks, the Lost Skies team have been hard at work on delivering the latest playtest build to our pre-alpha community. This build is the most ambitious build of the game so far, and we’re extremely proud to say that our game has now reached a state that we could truly consider “pre-alpha”. Pre-alpha does not mean that we are rushing towards an alpha though - this build is definitely not feature-complete, and is being shared with our community to gather feedback on some of the features and gameplay loops that are now starting to come together. However, it does represent a significant step forward for our open development program. We delivered this build to our playtesting community two weeks ago, and with it came the opportunity to capture some truly breathtaking cinematic shots of the game in action, some of which we shared in a press release earlier this week, and which we're now sharing in today's Skywatch for anyone who may have missed them.

Our lead designer, Luke Williams has provided explanations for these shots and the gameplay features they are displaying:

“Alongside our playtest of the game, we have also released a playtest build of our Island Creator tool, which allows players to build their own floating islands and upload them. Our current, pre-alpha playtest has added new islands to explore, including islands made by our community which already show off the complexity and beauty of our islands, and the fragments of ruined civilisations from before the mysterious event that shattered the world.”

“Players are equipped with many tools that can interact with the world in many different ways - islands are rich with resources that can be harvested to build better equipment and bigger, more ambitious sky-ships. We introduced this scary-looking energy sawblade in our recent playtest, to make cutting down trees for wood faster and more fun.”

“Our goal at Bossa Games is to build the best worlds for friends to have fun together in, while ensuring that no experience is locked off for solo players. If you can see somewhere, we want you to be able to reach it, alone or with your friends - whether you are climbing, gliding, grappling or flying.”

“Lost Skies is inspired by an earlier game made by Bossa, Worlds Adrift, and we have taken many popular mechanics and improved them. The crags and ruins of our islands make perfect playgrounds for grappling and swinging, with our physics-based grappling hook - our community is already finding new ways to reach unexpected places using agility and momentum.”

“Our most recent playtest has introduced new shipbuilding tools, but our goal is to give players an unprecedented level of freedom to sculpt and customise their floating homes. The heroes of Lost Skies are nomads, and instead of building a camp and defending it, players acquire resources and knowledge to build stronger, faster, deadlier ships able to venture out into fiercer storms and battle giant threats beyond the horizon.”

“The world of Lost Skies will be host to varied regions and biomes, with a range of lifeforms on the ground and in the sky. The deer, the flying mantas and the giant nautilus that these players are stalking can be sources of food and crafting materials - but the hunters can very quickly become the hunted.”

Aside from the screen captures, a lot of the team have been taking a well deserved break following the recent Milestone build delivery, so we don't have a great deal to share with you this week unfortunately, but below is a first real look at the games UI. First up, the following concepts are some of the early UI mock-ups that our UI artist, Ellen, created a while back. Ellen uses a combination of tools such as Figma and Adobe Creative Suite to complete her work, and you'll notice that she incorporated a lot of the Gall symbolism you'll see elsewhere in the game into the UI.

These next few images show the concept UI with different languages on the tabs. These mock-ups were for test scaling of the UI and how certain words being longer or shorter in different languages would need to be accounted for whilst designing the UI.

The UI is far from complete, but it's starting to take shape now and is looking really clean.

We'll have a full Skywatch post that's dedicated to the UI once it's closer to being completed, but we hope you've enjoyed this peek at how the UI is shaping up so far. The image below is what the in-game UI looks like so far in the latest build of the game.

In the last Skywatch, we shared a couple of stunning wallpapers that our talented artist Jonathan Betts had made, that were inspired by the tutorial island in the latest game build. Today I wanted to re-share those wallpapers, alongside a couple of in-game shots that try to re-create the scenes in Jonathan's art. You'll notice that the Ark model in-game at present is still a greybox blockout and is yet to be textured, but we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the textured model in the future!

That's everything we have to share with you from the development team this time. We're sorry that it's a bit lighter than usual, but when we return in the new year you can expect lots of cool updates, we hope you're as excited as we are!

Island Creator Showcase

We'll close out the Skywatch with some island spotlights again.

First up, this awesome house was made by our community member UgLY. We're super impressed with the attention to detail that UgLY put in to this piece. What do you think?

"Fake Lake.

Another experiment that got carried away!

Be sure to try 'fishing' at the end of the jetty! ;P "

Budgie once again knocked it out of the park with this island. With no water in the island creator, she used her imagination to make a "fake lake", and even utilised the recently added drone puzzle asset and pathing as fake "fish", as demonstrated in the video clip below. Budgie, we applaud your ingenuity.

And that's everything for this Skywatch. We can't wait to share more with you all in the new year, and get even more of you in to the open development playtesting community. In the meantime, if you haven't signed up to playtest the game then head on over to this page, which has all the info you need.

Thanks to all of our community members who have provided feedback about the game so far this year, you've all really helped to reassure us that this is a game you all want to see made, and we cannot wait to see you all in the skies.

Until next time, fair winds!