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!

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

The developer will livestream the new Airborne Empire demo!

Lots of things have happened in the past few months and we’re happy to present the result today @everyone :

The first ever demo for Airborne Empire is now live on Steam!
https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/2438680/Airborne_Empire/

The demo features the first biome you will encounter in the game: The Aeyrie. You'll meet our new characters, explore a brand new world, and battle our devious new pirate enemies. We hope it really gives you the sense of Open World RPG meets City Builder as you wander the vast green hills and take on many side quests.

Please keep in mind that the demo will only be available for a limited time before the game is launching into Early Access later this year.

We also have a brand new trailer for the game:
We hope you enjoy the demo and would love to hear your feedback!

Been a while since a devlog, but that doesn't mean that we've stopped working -- far from it! In fact, I've been so focused on actually making the game, it's been hard to justify spending the time to write a post! But approaching the end of the year feels like a good checkpoint to catch everyone up.

It's hard to summarize all the new things... so let's see...

These last few months has really seen the gameplay in Airborne Empire evolve drastically. The combat gameplay loop feels Very Good, testament to Zach and all the time he's put into tuning the basic Defense Tower, Cannon, and Hangar mechanics. Fred has also added a lot of functionality around workers repairing buildings and putting out fires. And my UI has finally caught up, allowing for better visibility into what you need to prioritize when your city is getting bombarded.

At the same time, we've added a ton more content! Amanda and the art team have created an entirely new biome -- an arid desert that evokes some elements from Airborne Kingdom while keeping this game's unique style. She's also gone back to our first biome and reworked the colors to keep the warm, cozy feel, but add vibrance to both land and sea. Even more ruins, treasures, and hidden secrets have been added.

And all the while Dante and our portrait artist Luke have been populating the increasingly huge landscape with character portraits and lots of quests. Our new portraits show off so much more personality, and I'm excited to showcase all the flair in our dialogue too!

Altogether, this has made the true character of the game finally emerge. It doesn't quite feel like anything you've played before. You're more than flying over a landscape, you're discovering a world; you're daring fate and finding adventure; you're defeating enemies in myriad ways by making distinct upgrade choices.

What we have here is truly an Open World City Builder RPG!

It's pretty special... and I'm excited to share it with you next year!

No updates in the last couple of weeks, huh? Well we were busy! We all met up in lovely Montreal, Fred's homeland.

At least once a year, all our full-time dev-team members get together and work from the same space. Unfortunately BJ couldn't join us this time, but our part-time QA fella AJ tagged along instead, since the drive wasn't too far for him!

Here's all of us at work in Fred's living room:

What did we do? Well, plenty of playing the game! Up until now, Zach has been the main player on the team, but as more features come online, the more of us want to get our hands on it. We made some crucial balance changes, but mostly... we had fun with the game!

Maybe this doesn't make sense to those not in game-dev, but the game isn't always fun to play -- and usually, not right-away, immediately after many features come online. And yet, this one is! I'm sure it helps that we're building a sequel, on top of features that are already enjoyable. But even the new stuff -- the exploration, the massive world, the dialogue, and the combat -- all feel cohesive already! Kudos to Zach for all his playtime and design efforts: we have something good right now!

Fred got lots of insights into both what to change in the current features and why he should change them. We also discussed the features currently not implemented, like the Attack Hangar ability, and where those might be useful.

Amanda and I also finally sat down and played with the world colors -- which involved changing a lot of our textures and materials and also tweaking the visual environments at various times of day.

Here's a look at the latest; definitely not 100% final, but closer to what we want. Oh, and included in that screenshot is the new build bar I've now designed implemented in the game too!

Hope that's enough of a catch-up for now, to those eager for development updates. I'll get back to regular weekly ones next week!

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[discord.gg] 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!