Bossa Games, makers of I Am Bread, I Am Fish and Surgeon Simulator, have announced their next game. It’s called “Lost Skies” and in many ways it’s a big departure from Bossa’s previous humorous sandbox efforts.
Lost Skies is an upcoming open-world co-op adventure in which up to six players work together to explore a world of floating islands, build flying ships, and battle giant monsters. The PC version is set to launch in 2024, but later this year it will enter what Bossa calls “open development,” where the community will be able to access and test vertical slices and provide feedback to shape the development of Lost Skies. It will be available.
expect the unexpected
According to Bossa Games CEO Henrique Olifiers, Lost Skies can be played in single-player or co-op, and in fact single-player play is sometimes encouraged to support cooperative efforts across groups. Combat, he says, involves two elements. One is “ground” combat. According to Olifiers, the term “on the ground” is used a little loosely because everyone is hookshotting “Spider-Man style” in a very vertical space. Another one is ship combat, where he uses customizable airships built to fight much larger creatures that act as both enemies and puzzles.
While he’s not going to reveal too many gameplay details just yet, Orifaias said that two gameplay “drivers” survived the world, along with their friends, one in each region of Lost Skies, and these giant monsters. I explained that I was fighting a “guardian” creature. With these two drivers, players feel a sense of freedom, similar to the freedom of Bossa’s previous small sandboxes, of “always looking at something on the horizon” that inspires curiosity and strategy. Mr. Orpheus added, He wants players to feel like they can do anything they can imagine.
“There’s a saying, ‘A good game is when the unexpected happens,'” he says. “My fondest memory of multiplayer games is standing there in Ultima when someone abused the game. [fire field] When you use a bug that kills Lord British in-game, or when you go on a raid in World of Warcraft, and a friend asks, “Who’s got the potion?” And we looked at each other, “What drug?” Therefore, we want to create them in Lost Skies. one of them every hour [experiences] The only way we can do that is by giving players the means to play the way they want. ”
When I spoke with Orifias ahead of the announcement of Lost Skies, he asked me why, after years of playing games where you play as a slice of bread making your way through a room to a toaster, the studio wanted something so grand and adventurous. I asked if I was heading in the right direction. Full of danger. Olifiers acknowledged that Lost Skies is a “formal and thematic” change from his previous Bossa games, saying that the studio’s reasoning comes from a years-long development process that has led to constant game jams internally. Stated.
According to Olifiers, all Bossa games are made from game jams, and the studio has dozens of prototypes in-house that have never seen the light of day. However, he continues, this historically meant that all of Bossa’s games started from scratch. These games aren’t built on top of anything else, so they take a lot of time to develop.
So Bossa Games wants to focus, and the team found through discussions that many of its members were excited about co-op survival games like Valheim, Project Zomboid, 7 Days to Die, and building. Bossa came up with Lost Skies by focusing on that space and cramming games into it for a while.
Return to the Drifting World
Notably, Lost Skies is meant to take place in the same universe as the previously closed MMO, Worlds Adrift. Worlds Adrift he entered early access in 2017, but was discontinued after two years because the game was no longer commercially viable. We asked Orifias why Bossa would revisit that universe, even though the first attempt was a struggle.
“We tried to capitalize on all the results we got with World Adrift,” he says. “What worked and what didn’t, and about creating a whole new game in that world that so many people were obsessed with and that we never fully realized… Hindsight “It’s very helpful. You have the advantage of going back and doing something again, but with that experience, it’s like riding a bike. You never ride a bike well when you first ride it.”
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One of the ways Bossa is working to ensure the success of Lost Skies is to release it early with “open development.” According to Olifiers, Bossa now has a group of hundreds of his community members who have full access to game builds, providing feedback and telling the Bossa developers what to expect from Lost Skies. are actively discussed. The plan is to grow this community slowly over time.
While this may seem like a risky strategy, Orifaias said it’s a strategy Bossa has had a lot of experience with in past matches. The company has his website, Bossa Presents, where he shows off “weird and wonderful prototypes” to get feedback from the community. According to Olifiers, I Am Fish, in particular, is the result of a prototype of his jam, a game that his members of the community have become obsessed with.
“I remember watching videos of people doing things in Surgeon Simulator that we never thought possible. I’ll add achievements if you do,” he says. “So this kind of positive feedback his loop is what we’ve been trying to do with Lost His Skies from day one.”
Lost Skies is currently in development for a full PC release sometime in 2024, and Olifiers said a potential console release is still under consideration. And we have big long-term plans. Hoping the game can support Lost Skies for years to come, Bossa has a “massive post-launch roadmap” in mind for long-term Lost Skies support.
“It’s supposed to feed us from now on, isn’t it?” Olifiers says. “Our life.”
Rebekah Valentine is IGN’s Senior Reporter. you can find her on her twitter @duck valentine.
