Flying into the eye of a hurricane on a giant rock with a sail strapped to it may not sound advisable, but it's exactly what players of upcoming survival crafting sandbox Aloft will be tasked with doing when the game enters early access in 2024. Aloft, which has a short demo available on Steam, takes the kind of environmentalist inspiration of a game like Super Mario Sunshine or Haven and marries it to the survival crafting systems inspired by Valheim.
It does this in a way that encourages players to unwrite the mistakes of the past through technology and ingenuity, not by simply removing human influence altogether. It then takes that premise and sets it on a collection of fungi-ravaged islands orbiting a hurricane in the sky. As studio Astrolabe was conducting its first multiplayer test for Aloft, studio CEO Manuel Bergeron sat down for an interview with The Best War Games about the game’s future ambitions and what has proven the game’s path to success during its demo–a time he called “early Early Access.” The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: Can you introduce yourself?
A: Yes - so I'm Manuel Bergeron. I'm the CEO and owner of Astrolabe Interactive. I founded it five years ago now, and we started in a living room—in MY living room—with like five people. Now, five years later, we are 16 people in a medium office in Montreal, so I'm pretty happy with that.
Q: What were the inspirations behind Aloft?
A: We've been doing other games before, and we started that game in 2020, I think?Our goal was to be a new project for the studio. We had a few kinds of objectives that we wanted to check. The first one is that regarding the size of our studio being an indie studio, we wanted to have something that could grow over time, that would be a good contender for Early Access, and be a game where we could add more and more content. That's how we decided to go with the kind of survival sandbox kind of experience, then we had the pandemic.
Obviously, we had a discussion about what would be the main question and concerns people of our age and new players will have. We took a lot of inspiration from Studio Ghibli stories, and how everything relates to nature and war, the struggles of our time. They focused more on climate change and nature. That’s how we decided to lean into an experience that was about the environment, and was also about having a space that is a place where you can feel good because during the pandemic we felt that good video games could be an actual safe space.
Even if the world around you feels difficult and stressful at times, games like Aloft can be a place where you can feel great, reassure yourself, and also spend positive time with your friends. That was behind the whole development of the game. We tried to find a setting, an environment, that would fit this kind of idea, so we set out to make this world a floating island in the sky, where the landscapes are always beautiful and inspiring. But, we also set out to make a world that’s hurt by some kind of corruption, and where the player is some sort of positive change that can happen in the world.
When you play Aloft, you have the opportunity to have a positive impact on the environment and to actually change the world for good around you. This was really in hopes of creating a safe space and a place where you can feel that you are relevant.
Q: Actually, that’s a good segue into another question I had: what causes the corruption?
A: Everything that’s related to the narrative is hidden at the moment, and it will be revealed more in the game when it’s released. However, the idea is that it was kind of unleashed by people like the player in the past by some things that happened before the time of the player. As you explore, you will uncover how it came up to be, and it’s everywhere. How can you remove the source of it and maybe not repeat the errors of the past?
Q: Your approach is more people of the past have caused this, but through the same ingenuity that created it, humanity can fix it. Is that kind of empowering environmentalism the core message here?
A: Yes, I think it's definitely the line that we're trying to walk on. Even more than that, everything that's related to the ecology system and its symbiosis system is not in the demo at the moment but will be implemented for the full game, so people will discover it for the first time when the game releases.
Our goal with this game is players will have some space to create the same errors of the past, but to also learn from that. Not everything is traced in front of them and linear. We want them to learn, and to maybe learn a different way to approach survival games.
Q: What makes Aloft stand out from other survival crafting games?
A: A lot of little things, like obviously the setting. There are a lot of survival games out there on Steam, obviously, or any platform, and the setting of those is definitely something that sets games apart. Being on floating islands, it's obviously already really different, and just having this special setting of being in the sky, with clouds. If you played in the latest demo, you definitely saw the new clouds that are really volumetric and creative. It's a whole landscape of its own.
Also, in a lot of survival games, you create your little base, you go out, get resources, and come back to your base. At some point in the game, you'll probably build a new base somewhere else because it's closer to where you are in the adventure. In Aloft, your base moves with you because you can transform any of the floating islands that you find and add the sails to it, add a helm, and then it's become a flying ship. You can travel the world with it, so instead of going back and forth to your home base, you move your home base with you, and it evolves with you. It evolves with the new technologies that are discovered and the resources that you find, and the new animals and friends that you make along the way.
The ecosystem aspect of the game, obviously, that's not in the demo at the moment, but you can find a little bit of the corruption that is in the game already. Sometimes you find islands that are corrupted, and the player needs to remove the corruption, at first by combat and later on by using cures that needed to be developed through alchemy. The battle against corruption is going to be more advanced and more complex as the player progresses in the game. And sometimes, if you do not take care of the environment, corruption can also grow back or can grow in places you don’t want. Sometimes you'll just find some islands that have a failing ecosystem, and some things need to be fixed for it to be okay. The rewards of this will obviously be having a better environment and all that comes with it, as well as a healthier world.
Finally, I think a lot of survival games have multiplayer or co-op, but we expanded on this in multiple aspects. One of them is that your home island that you move around in your world is also part of your character, of your save file, so that if you join the game with your friend, you can also bring your home island. If eight players join and do the same game on the same server, we can all bring our little island. We now become a village. Not only can we share these islands together, but you can showcase the creation that you spent so much time building stuff on.
Compare that to, for example, if you play Valheim, and you create a beautiful castle, and you spend so many hours doing something really cute and cozy. Your friends need to leave their own game to join yours to see your creation, and you have to do the same to see them. In Aloft, you can just bring your island to another game and share that, live, with other players. I think this is going to be super nice.
Oh, another thing is all the islands that are made in the game that you discover are made by hand. They are not procedurally generated. They are created by our own island editor, and this island editor is actually part of the game. In the game menu, you can go into the editor and create your own island. We've seen a lot of players doing that already. The idea is these islands can be shared to other players, and then populate other players' worlds. Our goal for the game release is that the community can also get creative not only in their little home, but also on creating islands to populate the world of others.
Q: I have to say that bringing your island with you is incredibly cool.
A: Thank you. It's not in the demo at the moment again. Obviously, it's a demo, so a lot of things are not there yet, but we played with it internally. It's going to be amazing, I think. It’s going to be a really good opportunity for players to share their creations, and that's what we see a lot all over on Discord. So, yeah, that we like.
Finally, we took a lot of inspiration from what made Valheim successful, obviously being one of the biggest survival games in the last few years. One of the things that we hooked on is the fact that Valheim has a positive approach compared to a negative approach in a lot of the survival aspects. We're kind of walking in these footsteps, where you get positive results for doing things that are typically survival, like having better food, having shelter, drinking water, and stuff like that, but you will not ever be punished for not doing so. It's just a positive switch on the thing, so you won't die of thirst or hunger. That's why we call it a soft survival.
What changes–you are not in a stressful experience, you're more like, “Hey, you did something great. Here's your reward.” And it's going to be a better experience for you because you prepared. And in Aloft, we wanted to make sure that players can have the type of experience that we want to have at their specific moment. So if you want to have a challenge, you can prepare yourself and go on adventures and fight in the storms or corrupted islands and stuff like that. But if you just want to be just like cozy on your island, build stuff, cook your meal, or spend a lot of time decorating a little home, you won't be subject to immediate danger. No monsters will come and destroy the details that you added to your home after spending a lot of time to make it cozy. Do you want to have a challenge? If so, then you'd know what you're coming into.
Q: Yeah. Are there any particularly cool or interesting things you've seen people build in the game and share on your Discord?
A: Yes. So obviously, houses of many sizes and shapes. We've seen people recreating things that look like the Castle in the Sky from Studio Ghibli. A lot of people are creating ships–massive ships out of wood that hide the little island as they create a massive ship.
I think people are so creative. I’ve seen something like a giant robot. And now, with the animals in the game, they can create beautiful pens, beautiful little environments, and we just added decorations and furniture to the game. People have been getting super creative, creating little houses, cozy environments, and places where they can chill with their friends now, so yeah, there are a lot of things.
Q: What has reception to the demo been like?
A: Super strong and super positive.
A few weeks ago, we celebrated achieving over 100,000 wishlists on the game. Since the demo is out, we always have people playing the game, a lot of people at all times, and it's super impressive. Our Discord is booming, we have over 3,000 players at the moment. Almost 70,000 players downloaded and played the demo, and the average playtime is over three hours in a demo that can be beaten in less than one. We get a lot of engagement. People, even if it's a demo, spend a lot of time on it. For us, it's a really good green flag that we're doing something right, and that we actually created a place where people feel comfortable and enjoy being creative. It is really amazing.
On our Discord, people are sharing a lot of suggestions and comments, and we read them all. We also integrated a photo mode really early into the game, so people can create really beautiful pictures, sceneries, and so forth. We have some players that created islands and shared them on Discord so that other players can experience them in their game. We realized that our community is super engaged and super positive too.
Since the beginning, we have always had an approach of transparency with the players, so we communicated as much as possible. We do dev live streams when we can and when we have new comments and new content. Players would come into the dev stream, and we would answer their questions. Almost every week, we do some behind the scenes on Discord where we share the progress of any team member, whether it be 3D animation, programming, development, etc. We also listen to some bugs players might have found or suggestions they have. And with every new update that we do to the demo, I think that players respect that a lot and see that they are heard, and that it makes a difference in the game development. They're really part of it. And with the demo being live for so long, it's almost as if we were in an earlier access before the early access. It's a really collaborative approach that we have with the players, and it works well for us.
Q: How will the demo compare to the full game?
A: At the moment, the hurricane from the demo is definitely the goal in the full game, but reaching there won't happen until there is a lot of gameplay built up towards it. At the moment, there is only one biome in the game where we're planning multiple for the release. There's a lot of extra content, and there is lore. There are some quest elements, storms, and monsters; there are a lot of things that are coming up. We're working on all of that all at once.
I'm super excited for what's coming up for the release, but obviously, the main aspect of the game, the survival aspect or resources or crafting the building, and the gliding will always stay similar to what you have seen in the demo, just with a lot more variety, quality of life improvements, and new content.
Q: I have absolutely loved the weather effects in the game, and I'm really looking forward to the big storms that you talked about. What both from an inspiration and a practical standpoint went into developing these weathers?
A: Well, obviously, if you are in the sky and around a hurricane, you would expect to be able to feel the weather and to feel the environment. And for us, it was really important to experience it and feel the strength of nature. There are a lot of things that we said, to make it like a feel-good space and a place where you actually want to protect this environment. We want to have some sort of contemplation moments.
For example, you can rest by laying down on the ground. If you're at the edge of an island, you would have your little feet dangling in the air. It's just a moment where the storms are more present, and you can appreciate the scenery, and just have a moment of contemplation in the game. I think that the weather effects and the sound effects that we have, and that sound is muffled when you are inside, all contribute to embracing the environment and just appreciating it.
Q:You just began a multiplayer test. What's been the response to the game's multiplayer?
A: A huge increase of players. I think there's a lot of people that have been waiting for that. That's what we heard over the last year; people want to experience this game with friends, some have waited on the demo until multiplayer was there. Obviously, it's a big feature that took some time to make right, but the response has been super great.
As we speak, the multiplayer test has been open. We always have players and a room open with players playing the game on the Discord. It's always free to join other players. We had very minor bugs and details that have been fixed, so it really looked good for the future.
Q: What animals are we going to come across and be able to, hopefully domesticate?
A: At the moment, there are some elements in the demo that you find right now that will probably be spread a bit more across the experience, but the main animals that we have at the moment are sheep and alpacas. When they are happy with you, they will provide their wool, and we'll be able to weave that into fabric to create better sails to move your island. We also have pheasants. We wanted to have a bird, but something a bit more original than a typical chicken. We have pheasants that have golden feathers that will be used for arrows and their eggs for recipes. We have planned a lot of other little creatures that might happen as companions, but this would be later in the future and not for the beginning of the year.
Q: What can you share about Titans?
A: Titans, yes. So it's something that we showed really early in development. That's something that we think makes so much sense in this world. Titans are huge creatures that are as wide as multiple islands together. It's going to be one of the big features in the game later on. The idea is you will find these creatures that are all corrupted and are a representation of, in some sense, the status of the surrounding environment. It will be some sort of huge challenge to not kill the Titan, but instead work together with friends, just like a big challenge or raid, to actually heal the Titan and remove the corruption on its back. And that would be like a huge milestone later on in the game.
Q: Are there any windows that you're targeting for Early Access, perhaps?
A: It's definitely going to be 2024. Now the window is… any window at this point might be a little premature. We're still figuring some things out, but it's for sure going to be 2024
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
A: I think maybe another thing that we can say might not be in how we differentiate ourselves between a lot of things from other survival games. We worked a lot on dynamic music. A lot of things like the music are shaped by the actions of the player. Say, she started building, it adds up and creates its own melody. The first time that you glide and do some exciting stuff, it kind of follows the player, and you don't get the same music if you go on an adventure or if you're coming back to your home island. There's a lot of work that has been done on making the music as dynamic as possible based on the player's action. It's something that's little, but that creates a lot of weight in the whole experience of it. The difference with the weather and the fact that we worked on dynamic sound design a lot, I think, is environmentally pleasing.
Another thing that the players have been sharing that they love about this game is our character creator. We went with something with a bit of complexity, where you can choose between six body shapes, and I think about 10 different faces, and obviously hair, facial hair, etc. But all of them are exchangeable. So that players can actually create a character that they really identify with, and that is not limited by gender. This has been really, positively received in the community.
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Aloft has a demo currently available and will enter Steam Early Access in 2024.