Today we’re releasing our 1.0 version of Cloudborn and leaving early access. This update has been a long time in the making and is focused heavily on updating the visuals of the game, as well as optimization and finishing up on features that were half-completed or waiting in the pipeline.
NOTE: Your savegame progress will be reset when you play the 1.0 version.
There have been so many changes it wouldn’t make sense to post a full changelist, as almost the entire game has been touched in some way, but here are the highlights:
Art
Improvements of our shaders for better visuals on architecture, rocks, and vegetation, bringing them closer to the original vision of the game. Architecture in particular has seen lots of improvements and added detail.
All shaders have been optimized to increase performance across the board.
Lighting has been completely redone for improved quality and performance.
Levels & Gameplay
Interactable props have been added! There are now pots, rocks, and other fun stuff to pick up and play around with on all levels.
Added narrative content.
Improved climbing mechanics and paths in all levels.
Improved wall-tossing prediction systems, it’s now easier than ever to awesomely throw yourself from vine to vine like Tarzan.
Improved cage and floor overlay options.
Made auto-rotation on climbing default to off. It’s still available in the options menu and is useful for players using a 180 degree tracking setup. Players can also choose to rotate themselves with the thumb stick while climbing like before.
Tons of code optimization and bug fixing.
Sound
Optimization across the board.
Improved spatialization.
Bug fixes where some audio was played at incorrect positions.
It’s been a long road but we’re really happy with the result. We hope you will enjoy Cloudborn as much as we have. Our work isn’t finished however, as there is still things to be fixed and some additional features we want to add down the line as we move on to post-launch updates.
To cap things off, here are some fun numbers for the project:
5,089 commits to our repositories
2,064 art assets produced
70,289 lines of code
1171 bags of tea consumed
678 cups of coffee consumed by our sound designer Joakim
1 baby born
2 more babies to be released later
Finally, thank you to those of you who have been with us on this journey so far. We hope you will stick around to see what we have in store for Cloudborn in the future as well as other projects.
Hi everyone, I’m Daniel, the Lead Programmer here at Logtown Studios, and I’ve got an interesting update to share with you! We’ve added a ton of settings to Cloudborn! In total there are now 49 different settings to help personalise your experience in Cloudborn. They are sorted into the following categories.
Main changes
Quick Access This menu hasn’t changed and contains settings for quickly turning off or on things like the Comfort Cage, Haptics, as well as setting Rotation and Locomotion options.
Audio You are no longer limited to muting all the sound in Cloudborn, but instead our sound designer Joakim has (grudgingly) given you control over the Ambient, Sound Effects, and Master Volume in the form of sliders.
Gameplay You can now control if you want to play Cloudborn with a Stamina system or not. If you disable this, you’ll get a more casual experience where you are free to climb around at your leisure, without the fear of falling from holding onto a single handhold for too long.
Rotation With regards to rotation, it is now possible to pick how fast you rotate with Free Rotation, with what angle you want to snap with Snap Rotation and if it should be smoothed or be instant.
Climbing Rotation You may now turn on or off the automatic alignment of the thing you grabbed when climbing. This was previously turned off for Vive users, and automatic for Rift users, but is now your choice. You can also control how fast this rotation happens if you choose to keep it on.
Locomotion We’ve added a plethora of new options for controlling your locomotion. If you use Armswinger, you can now choose how the direction is chosen, from the gaze of your head to a single controller. We hope this will give you more freedom and comfort as we truly believe Armswinger is the ideal way to play Cloudborn.
However, even if you choose Sliding, you can now control your speed. This is also possible with Armswinger.
Comfort Grid and Comfort Cage We provide a Comfort Grid and a Comfort Cage for you, that provides a locked frame of reference. The Grid is locked to your playspace, while the Cage is locked to your feet, so it moves with you when you walk around in your playspace. You now also have the ability to control if you want them while climbing, being in the air, or being on the ground, as well as controlling the opacity of them.
Tunneling With Tunneling, we offer more comfort for you, giving you control over how much we should cover your Field Of View, what angular velocity is needed to trigger it, etc. This helps limit effects of nausea caused by objects in your periphery moving more than those in your direct view. We’ve also added a new option in the form of Velocity Tunneling that works with Armswinger, where we limit your field of view depending on how much velocity you have.
Haptics Not everyone wants to have haptic feedback and vibrations in their controllers for various reasons, so we’ve now given you control over the strength of the haptic feedback in various scenarios.
Other changes
In addition to all the settings we’ve now exposed for you, we’ve also made a bunch of tweaks to the gameplay of Cloudborn.
Sliding has been revamped so that you no longer get stuck in walls or next to objects
Corruption hot spots now have physics so can be stretched and boxed
Walltossing has been revamped to better help you get to the hand hold you were aiming for
Fixed more bugs relating to standing up onto a ledge
Tweaked death triggering so that you can save yourself in a fall by grabbing a hand hold
Tweaked physics for falling when walking off a ledge
Thank you for playing, we hope you enjoy these new features and please give us some feedback on what your experience was. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
/Daniel - Lead Programmer
Small update - Steam Achievements, bugfixes and tweaks
Hi everyone!
We hope November is treating you well and that you're not too down from the fall...Get it? Down, fall, climb... It's a pun... Ok right, let's move on :S
We have a small update for you that we hope will enhance your experience as we've adressed some of the issues that have been found.
Please give us some feedback if you find your experience to be improved or if there's something you feel we've missed. Have a great day!
/Logtown Admin
Updates:
<*> Steam Achievements added!
<*> Walltossing (when you throw yourself from ledge to ledge) has been fixed.
<*> Ledge-up (climbing up to standing from a ledge) has been fixed.
<*> Misc. audio optimizations and improvements
<*> Misc. gameplay tweaks and bug fixes
Dev-log 1: The road ahead
Hello again, it’s been a little over a week since the early access launch of Cloudborn and we’ve been hard at work with the first update of the game. This post is also a bit later than I would have wanted so apologies for that, it’s been a busy week!
Today we will dive into what our first update will be, but first how we are looking at updates in general.
Our updates will fall into one of two categories - Major or Minor
Major updates contain new content or modifications to in game content. These change or add new levels, gameplay systems or art. Minor updates contain bug fixes or other small updates to existing content.
But let’s talk about the future and what’s coming in the first major update!
The first major update will focus on adding interactivity to the existing levels. To make the world feel more alive we’ve added a number of interactive props that can be picked up, played with, thrown around etc. This addition also puts a number of systems in place that will be helpful down the road to create more dynamic things, like water surface physics!
We’re hoping to have the interactions update in your climbing hands next week.
Beyond that? Our artists are working on a major improvement of the game visuals, we’ll talk more about that in a future post. We are also working hard on creating new level content as well as gameplay tweaks.
Before I go, I would again like to thank those of you that have reached out to us with bug reports and feedback on what you would like to see in Cloudborn.
Stay tuned!
Alberto
Minor update
Today we are rolling out a small update fixing some of the bugs that have been reported since launch.
Release 0.1.1.4
Fixes
Fixed a bug where players would sometimes be launched in the air when climbing a ledge.
Fixed a bug where players would sometimes spawn at the wrong position after dying.
Dev-log 0: Hello world!
It’s the eve of our early access release of Cloudborn on Steam and I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and the team to you.
My name is Alberto and I am the lead designer here at Logtown. When I’m not working on games I enjoy playing Rocket League, Stellaris or playing bass. I’ll be penning (..keyboarding?) these weekly dev-logs to keep you up to speed with what we’re doing and what we have planned for Cloudborn.
I founded Logtown together with some old uni buddies and game-dev acquaintances because we wanted to make VR games and do it on our terms. We all believe VR is the medium of the future and all agreed that movement was the area where it needed to develop the most. So the idea for Cloudborn was uh... born.
I hope you will have as much fun climbing and throwing yourself around our levels as we’ve had during development. If you feel motion sickness playing Cloudborn I would love to hear from you as that is an area I want us to always be improving on. Our internal testing has been great but there are so many different people out there and every experience is good feedback.
We are already hard at work on the first post-release update, which also happens to be the topic of devlog 1 which we will have for you later this week. Until then I was wondering what you would like to see in future dev-logs. Is there anything about game development that excites you that you would like to know more about? Let me know!
Our goal is to make Cloudborn the best possible game it can be over the coming months, and your feedback and engagement will be crucial to make that happen. We welcome you to interact with us through one of the following channels:
