FOREVER SKIES - SPECIAL BACKERS EDITIONS COMING VIA KICKSTARTER
Greetings scientists,
We’re happy to announce that we have created a special Backer's Edition of Forever Skies that we will make available to everyone through Kickstarter in the next few days.
PLEASE NOTE: FOREVER SKIES EARLY ACCESS IS FULLY FUNDED. THIS CAMPAIGN IS ONLY TO ADD SPECIAL BONUS REWARDS.
Regardless of the campaign outcome, the game will still be delivered as promised. This campaign is just our way of answering those who want to support us now and get something extra in return.
Since revealing Forever Skies, some members of our community have regularly been asking:
1. Is there a way to buy the game now and support the studio? 2. Can we get any sort of special bonuses for supporting before release?
After looking at numerous options, we saw that by doing this through a crowdfunding platform such as Kickstarter, we can easily and safely allow people to support the game and let us create various options to pick from. We understand that crowdfunding is normally associated with the idea of “We need your help to get this game made”. In our case, we simply needed an existing and trusted platform that would allow us to do a Backers Editions with a lot more flexibility.
We will be launching our campaign in the next few days which is when we will share details about rewards, prices etc. In the meantime, you can hit the follow button on our “Coming Soon” page and you’ll get notified once we are live🔗Click here.
Got any questions about the campaign? Feel free to write to us below.
Have a great day! The Far From Home Team.
BETA SIGN-UP NOW CLOSED
Greetings scientists!
Thank you to everyone that signed up to playtest, we’re in awe at the amount of players that applied! We've now closed the official sign-up form and won't be taking on more players.
We have already started to notify successful players. This is a process and will take a few days to get the NDA’s out to you. These will be sent to the emails you left with us, so please keep an eye on your inbox and spam folders!
We will be contacting only the selected applicants.
Once we have heard back from all players that were sent NDA’s, we will be able to start the playtesting!
We appreciate your support here. The feedback you provide us will be vital to the success of Forever Skies globally!
You’re all awesome, The Far From Home Team
SIGN UP FOR THE CLOSED BETA!
🎮 🎮 🎮
Greetings lone scientists, it’s that time again…
We’re once again on the lookout for playtesters! We will be holding closed playtests in the coming weeks. What do we need from you?
1. You will be required to sign an NDA as what we will be sharing with you cannot be publicly broadcast and shared. 2. You will be asked to play a significant portion of the game with new systems and content not present in the demo. This is around 3 hours of expected content. 3. You will be asked fill out a feedback form.
If this is something that you’re still interested in, then please fill out the form below to apply. 👇
We will be selecting people based on various criteria so please be completely honest
Thank you in advance for your continued support, we can’t wait to hear your feedback.
Forever Skies Music Preview - Composed By Paweł Błaszczak
Greetings scientists!
It's time we announced our talented Composer & Sound Designer behind Forever Skies, introducing Paweł Błaszczak!
Paweł has previously composed tracks for well know games such as Dying Light, Dead Island & The Witcher Franchise.
Here is one of the tracks, “Lone Scientist”. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for new locations. We recently dragged Pawel away from his keyboards to find out more about him!
For those who don’t know, can you tell us what other games you’ve composed music for?
I have composed entire soundtracks for games such as Dying Light, Dead Island, Call of Juarez, The Witcher franchise and most recently, The Ascent. I have also done individual songs for the likes of EVE Online and War Thunder to name a few.
Who would you say are your biggest musical heroes in general?
I have a special place in my heart for synth and electronic music, especially from the 80’s. Composers such John Carpenter, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Vangelis or artists such as Tangerine Dream and Ultavox spring to mind.
But my biggest musical love still to this day is the old Commodore 64 system. That odd piece of hardware had so much music built into it, even though it was limited to just 3 channels. Getting hold of something like that in my early days sparked something in me that continues to this day.
Are there any films or TV shows that got you in the mood for composing the music to Forever Skies?
I only turn to film and TV (or other games for that matter) when I need to immerse myself more in a similar setting or environment to the game I am composing for. The music always comes from an original place, but getting into a headspace that matches what you are working on always helps.
Since Forever Skies is a game about isolation, apocalypse and mankind’s downfall and the need to start building again there were a few that got me into this mood. Films like - The Martian, Annihilation, Prospect and The Book of Eli and shows such as Dark or even certain episodes of Love, Death + Robots.
On top of that the book “Second Sleep” by Robert Harris also really got me into the mindset as it looks closely at the idea of systemic collapse and how people would try to continue on with life somehow.
With the holiday festivities in full swing, we figured we'd join in on the fun and update our demo with something specail!
The Forever Skies Demo: Holiday Update include some cool new features:
<*> A new holiday-themed mini quest to complete 🔎 <*> A few festive collectables to decorate your airship 🎁 <*>A *HIGHLY* requested reward when you complete the new quest! ☠️🕐
The update launches today. We look forward to seeing you back above the dust, scientists!
Forever Skies Early Access Moves to the First Half of 2023
Hi everyone.
As the title says, we have made the decision to move our Early Access window.
We will now be launching in the first half of 2023.
Why? Well in the last month, 80000+ players tried our demo and many provided a mass of positive and constructive feedback. We have decided to take a lot of this feedback onboard now and expand the scope of the game that will launch in Early Access. But to do so, we need a bit more time.
WHAT FEEDBACK STEERED US TO THIS DECISION
To put it bluntly - we simply didn't expect so much positive attention and feedback from our demo and we’re immensely thankful for this. On the surface everything seemed great. 83% of respondents rated the demo as 8/10 or above. But when we looked deeper, we started seeing things that a lot of players said they missed.
We’re now looking at a much larger influx of players picking up the game during Early Access than originally predicted. So we want to lay down better foundations for more of our core mechanics so everyone can get a much clearer idea of what else to expect from the future of Forever Skies.
WHAT WE’RE EXPANDING
1. FUNDAMENTALS OF UNDER THE DUST
So far, we've only shown locations above the dust so we're quite excitied to finally show the first screenshots from when you descend onto the surface of Earth. The world that has evolved under the toxic clouds is a substantial part of Forever Skies. This is still deep in development so the initial plan was to add this as one of the first major updates in Early Access. But the feedback and questions about what happens under the dust has shown us that we really should have some fundamentals of under the dust in place right from the start.
Under the dust is meant to be dangerous, so there are various risk/reward systems we want to put in place here along with notable progression systems. There will also be new mechanics, blueprints and viruses. Now the groundwork for all this will be in players hands earlier than we planned.
What’s more, after seeing how much valuable insight we gathered from our demo, we are now strongly considering publicly playtesting our under the dust gameplay before we add it in. Whether this happens as a public demo, with a closed group of players from our Discord community or in some other capacity is yet to be decided.
2. DEEPER LOCATION VARIETY
The derelict towers and locations that break through the toxic dust are part of the main exploration loop in Forever Skies. The way our system works is locations are created by our level designers and then put into a pool or database. A procedural generation system then looks at all the available locations and creates a custom map for each player.
In the demo we only activated two locations and a lot of the feedback was that the game would benefit immensely with more. Our initial plan was always to have more locations at launch and to keep adding more through updates. This is still the route we will go but we have decided we need to ensure our existing locations have much more variety and reasons to explore them.
3. FUNDAMENTALS OF AIRSHIP DAMAGE AND REPAIR
This brings us to another complex system which we left out of the demo entirely: the airship damage and repair systems. Our toxic ravaged Earth is meant to be a substantial threat to both the player and their airship, yet what we have developed right now still needs work, so we opted to leave it out of the demo entirely. And a lot of players noted this was a crucial element they wanted.
However, we don’t want this system to feel like some chore that needs to be dealt with in order to keep playing. Your ship will take damage, that is inevitable. But what we want is to have a system where it allows you to weigh the options. Do I deal with this now or can it wait? Do I prioritise problem A or problem B? This is without a doubt a system that will continue to evolve throughout Early Access, but again, we see that deeper, more solid foundations need to be in place at least from the start.
4. MORE AIRSHIP CUSTOMIZATION
The previous point ties in quite a bit with another key element we want fleshed out more - airship customization. This covers quite a few things though. The building mechanic as a whole, the modules you can build to attach to your ship, the various tools you can craft for gameplay purposes, the accessories you can create to personalise your airship etc. We want to expand on all of these aspects for the start and will of course continue to keep adding more throughout Early Access. Your airship is your home and sactuary in Forever Skies so we want players to feel like they can really make each feel like their own custom creation.
You can check out the video to get an idea of what we mean here.
5. THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO SURVIVAL
Forever Skies is being designed around the idea of “a scientific approach to survival” and our demo only hinted at this. While there are a few elements to this design, our virus research mechanic is the main pillar. The final vision is a variety of viruses that are contracted from various sources, impacting your character in different ways. So naturally there will be a need to discover cures and remedies. On top of that, we plan to add an entire system where you can further research and alter these viruses to give you new abilities and boosts. Some will be tied to enhancing your character while others will be tied to mission progress. This system is also something that will develop and evolve throughout Early Access, so it’s important to have a notable foundation in place from day one.
CORE FEATURES STILL COMING DURING EARLY ACCESS:
We also want to quickly highlight the features we’ve already announced that will be added later during Early Access.
The first big one is co-op, up to 4 players. Everything we design takes into account that at some point 4 players will be playing. This isn’t a feature we’re just adding in after the fact. That said, the game keeps evolving and the co-op system we have at this point is very basic. So we know co-op is going to be something we work on for a notable part of our time in Early Access.
A compelling story about how Earth fell into such a state and what our scientists are doing there was also always a big part of the plan for Forever Skies. We just need the time to have enough of our game mechanics locked in place so we can build our story around gameplay. Therefore, the plan is to finish and fully implement the story towards the tail end of Early Access. Underlying elements of our story will be made present at the start. How we roll out the full story is still to be decided (chapters vs one major update).
There are also quite a few more features we have in the prototype phase so expect more along with ideas that emerge from player feedback.
NEW RELEASE WINDOW
So, with all of that in mind the team has decided to move the Early Access launch of Forever Skies into the first half of 2023. This way we can launch the Early Access with a much better foundation which will allow us and our community to shape the next phases of the game right from the start.
We are saying the first half of 2023 because that is exactly what we have set within the team. We ourselves do not have an exact day picked, so we’re telling everyone exactly what we know. Once we feel we are comfortable and ready, we will announce the PC Early Access release date to everyone.
FINAL WORDS
We want to thank everyone again for their support and help to get us to this point. And we hope our transparent explanation of everything going on lets you better understand why we have chosen to move our Early Access launch by a few months.
Please do keep talking to us, be it here or Discord which you can join using the button below. We will be doing another AMA at the end of November 2022 and will be collecting questions for it throughout the month.
And in case you missed the news, we also added back our Steam demo after making some quality of life adjustments players asked for that we saw we could implement now, along with extending the timer on the open world exploration.
