Airborne Empire News

Hey gang, we've had so many visual updates to the game this week, let's just share a bunch of pretty stuff!

BJ is working on our next biome lookset. Zach is experimenting with how to combine BJ's land pieces into a cool level, and in the meantime BJ's making new resource assets for the area. Here's a quick preview:



Amanda's creating the look for our ground enemies. Here's her grayscale kit and an example of how an enemy outpost might be put together:



She also created a first pass of the Charcoal Hut, on which Fred has since made a comment that I can't unsee. We'll see if it gets less (or more!) like cartoon characters with the next pass:



She also tweaked the colors in our new UI, so that it blends better with the game. You'll probably see many UI updates in future as I take a pass on designing each screen, and maybe updating some iconography and placement too:



I created some damage states this week, including wispy smoke and some shader tweaks to make the building tops look crispy when destroyed:



I also created a new puffy smoke effect for exhaust on the Town Center, which looks more inline with our volumetric clouds and explosions.



It even takes proper shadows, so at different angles and Time of Days it still looks good :)



We won't always have such a visual week, but I figured pictures are always better than words (and also Philomena from Stray Fawn told me that pictures are always better than words ;) so here's a dump o' stuff!

Is this better than a regular devlog? Would you like to see a weekly devlog like this, or more of a long-form written update like I've done in the past?

Let me know in the comments -- there's no point writing these if nobody's reading them, after all!

Hope you enjoy seeing the progress!

Hey followers, today let's talk about gak!

I love the idea of not just showing you something, but explaining why we have it, so let's try that now 🙂

Gak is a term we borrowed from our old art director at Visceral Games, Ian Milham. If you search for the term, nothing related to our use comes up, so we'll have to ask him where he got it.

It's become a part of Amanda's Art Bible, and to quote that document exactly, what we mean is "contrast of a few large shapes with a few mediums and lots [and lots and lots] of smaller details". Gak is all the girders hanging down, and the ropes swinging, and the random fins and propellers and gears and flaps and everything that just gives LIFE to the buildings.

Take a look at the base of our new Town Center in the screenshots below. On the left is Amanda's original blockout, and on the right is her adding tons of gak to it! See the difference?



We want players to feel like these are intricate, yet cobbled together pieces of technology. You look at something and can't exactly tell how it works, but all those pieces make it feel somehow just complicated enough that you believe it. "Mechanical Magic" is another term we keep coming back to.

Of course with this extra detail comes potentially lots of performance issues. So Amanda has to be judicious in her use of verts. But Fred is also deep in optimization land, making improvements to other areas of our GPU code so we can support many more details. And I have to make sure none of my own tech art is too expensive on the GPU too 😉

It's really a team effort to get this look that we want, but it's led by Amanda's vision for the buildings in the sky.

Hope that gives you some insight into what we're making! Let me know if you dig what we're doing here, or anything else you might want to know about, in the comments below. We'll share more in next week's devlog.

Thanks for the support ❤️

Hey all! Consider this the first Steam devlog update. I'll do these at least weekly, so keep tabs on Steam or on our Discord if you'd like to know more!

For now, I want to start by telling you about our team. Some members are here from Airborne Kingdom, but we have a few new faces too, and some of our roles have also changed! Consider this a wave hello from all of us!

I'll begin with myself. Last game, I did a lot of the design and all of the writing, as well as standing up the UI code. On this project, I've shifted roles a lot. I'm now doing all the tech art and rendering engineering, specifically around tweaking our rendering pipeline, writing custom shaders, creating our Visual Effects, and optimizing our GPU. I'm also wholly owning the UX Design and UI Implementation, which includes our new Dialogue tech. These are areas I have a lot of interest in, and I've learned quite a lot from working on our console ports -- enough that I know this is a full job for our follow-up! But then, who's designing the game...?

Much like the last game, it's ultimately a collaboration, but our captain for this voyage is Zach Mumbach. Last game he was our Producer and did a lot of the level design and world building, and much of our early QA. He's now picking up the big Systems Design mantle, and working out how our systems integrate and evolve with our new mechanics. Zach was so passionate about making this follow-up that it was hard to imagine another person helming the project. He has so many good ideas on mechanics and story, and it's exciting to see all of them getting implemented and written. Implemented by...?

Fred Gareau, our Tech Director Extraordinaire. His focus on this project has been quick turnarounds of new features, to give Zach lots of knobs to play with, as well as many many tech improvements -- to make our code more re-usable, maintainable, and much more efficient. While some of this stuff is very under-the-hood, there are plenty of tweaks that are easy to point to visually, like giving our Pirates really interesting flight paths, or adding arcs to our Cannon shots for better visibility. But while Fred can code, he can't write...

So we have Dante Douglas -- hey, the first new face! Dante's laying out the entire world lore right now! He and Zach are working on a story bible that we can pull interesting quests from. Something that gives our story history and depth. He'll also be the one actually writing the dialogue, too, which includes characters this time around, with their own goals and motivations. We'll see many different peoples in various cities and biomes, all made by...

BJ Timberlake - Art Warlock, our returning environment artist from Airborne Kingdom. Pretty much everything on the ground is his modeling -- the mines, the world geo, the rocks and various frills. He's already created the lookset for our starting region, which you can briefly see in our trailer, and now he's moving onto new biomes to explore. Places where you can find novel technologies, that lead to a variety of buildings once researched. Buildings made by...

Amanda Cheng -- another new friend! If BJ is making everything on the ground, Amanda is making everything in the sky. All the housing, production, lift, propulsion, morale, and many more categories of buildings flying through the air. That also includes all other flying objects too -- gather planes, enemy pirates... flying merchants??? Additionally, she's responsible for the overall cohesive look of the game. She's recently created an Art Bible, and has been adjusting post-processing effects, and tweaking any new materials or VFX I might give her to work with. That's a lot of new stuff, all tested by...

AJ Fraser, our part-time tester and full-time cheerleader! He played hours upon hours of Airborne Kingdom, and now he has been passionately breaking all of our new features -- thankfully, before they're broken by all of you! He'll also be recording a lot of our #content for sharing on social media, so if you see a GIF you like across the internet, make sure you let him know!

Those are all the people touching the game on a daily basis, but of course there are a few more folks helping fly this big contraption. Paul Aubry is returning to compose another masterpiece soundtrack. FiftyCC will still be doing our PR, especially around big trailers and launch. And of course we have the fine folks from Stray Fawn helping publish the game -- everything from submitting to events, to handling a lot of our social media, to goosing those Steam numbers.

(Speaking of Steam, have you wishlisted yet?! If anyone hasn't, it would be really really helpful if you do!)

With so many folks doing so many things, it'll be difficult deciding what to post about every week! But I'll leave it here for now, this update is extra long. I promise the next one will be less of a text-wall and feature many more cool images.

For now, thanks again for being so supportive, and I'm happy to have y'all along with us as we fly towards Early Access next year!

City-building game Airborne Kingdom was a really new, interesting twist on the genre, challenging you to balance the growth of your flying city with its physical needs: Keep it balanced so it doesn't tip over, keep it agile enough to move forward, and keep it supplied with supplies from the surface. It also had a world to explore, with a real story, ending on a cliffhanger reveal that gave your flying city a new mission. It was a critically-acclaimed city builder in the sky...
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