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Airborne Empire News

Flying city-builder Airborne Empire hits early access today with a new military element

In 2020's Airborne Kingdom, you cobbled together a flying city from sailcloth, smokestacks, wings and flippers, striving to meet a growing population's need for food and shelter while dealing with the more exotic problem of levelling your streets out and generating enough lift. In the process, you explored a beautiful, Orientalist world map of faded mosaic tiles and dusty gold fittings.


In Airborne Empire, out in early access today, you do much the same again, but this time the world is trying to murder you. A bit. You are no longer alone in the skies: there are merchant dirigibles you can barter with, and pirate airships who'll strafe your suburbs and set your bazaars on fire. As such, the sequel's new city technologies include a choice of offensive and defensive weapons. Here's a launch trailer.

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Airborne Empire Out Now

Hi Everyone,
Today Airborne Empire finally takes flight and is live on Steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2438680/Airborne_Empire/

We are super excited for players to get their hands on the game, to celebrate there will be a 10% discount on the game for a limited time.

While we celebrate this milestone today we know there is much more to come. We plan on working on the game for at least a year (most likely a little longer) and I've posted a very early and rough roadmap below. Right now its just a list of things we plan on doing. The idea is to expand on this roadmap with your input. We have a big game with a lot of cool features, we're happy with what we have but our goal is to make something great. We need your help; we need to know what you like, what you don't like and what types of additional content you want to see.

If you would like to provide feedback, or discuss the game with the team directly, please join us on our Discord. If you find a bug while playing the game please report it with the in-game bug reporting tool (in the pause screen).

Thanks again!

Early Access Roadmap

Features:
  • Creative Mode
  • Survival Mode
  • Weather System
  • Difficulty Levels
  • New Game +
  • Additional Language Support
  • Steam Trading Cards


Content:
  • New Biome
  • New Pirate Faction/Boss Fight
  • New Enemy Types
  • New Buildings
  • New Building Themes
  • New Starting Town Centers
  • New Weapons
  • New Relics
  • New Sidequests

Airborne Empire Launches in Early Access January 13th 2025!

Hey everyone,
Just a quick announcement, but really the title says it all. We are launching the game on January 13th 2025. We're super excited to get the game in your hands and start hearing your feedback. We've got a great game ready to go and a ton of awesome updates in the works.

We also released a new trailer to celebrate. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gr6SS4JjNo

Thanks again for all the support, see you next month!

September Dev Update

Hey everyone, sorry we haven't done any updates for a while but we're back on it! Going forward I will try to get one out each month.

First thing I would like to do is address the Early Access Launch Date. We still have not announced a specific date for launch but we are getting very close. Some folks noticed we updated our Steam page to say January 2025. That's the month we are targeting, we don't have a specific day yet but we will announce that ASAP.

We had originally stated our goal was to launch early access this Fall so let me quickly address why we ultimately decided to go for January instead. Anytime there is a big decision like this it is always a combination of things. January gives us more time to fix some crashes that we discovered during the demo. Fred and his wife had their first child in July (yay!) and we wanted him to be able to take more time off, instead of rushing back to try and fix the crashes before launch. A bunch of heavy hitting games, including within the city-builder genre, are coming out this Fall. Its packed! We're a small team and its hard to get discovered on Steam. We are hoping that January is less busy and we are able to have our game featured more.

Last thing I will touch on, since we're already talking about Early Access, is what players should expect from us when Early Access launches:

The entire city-builder aspect of the game will be complete. We will have all the core buildings (we may still add more later of course) and mechanics that make the city-builder work. You will be able to build glorious flying cities!

The World will have 3 biomes complete. Each biome will have a Main Quest as well as a number of side-quests. There will be Cities, Settlements, Ruins to explore, and tons of characters to meet. The 1.0 version of the game will have an additional biome that will have a Main Quest that wraps up the overall story and its own side-quests, locations, characters and hidden secrets as well. That 4th biome will likely be the largest in the game. We may also add additional locations beyond the 4th biome.

As we go through Early Access we know that we will build certain content, and I will post a road map for that at some point. We also plan on leaving space to be able to make more content that's driven by player demand. For us that's the main point of Early Access; to find out what player's like and give them more of it and then correct anything player's don't like.

We're very excited to get people playing soon and we appreciate the patience. I will post another update again in a month. If there are any specific topics our questions you would like me to focus on please let me know. Thanks for reading!

Airborne Empire Next Fest Demo Stream

Check out our designer playing our upcoming game, Airborne Empire. Demo available now for Steam Next Fest.