Disclosure: Humble Bundle, the publisher of Lost Skies, is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of IGN. Humble Bundle and IGN operate completely independently, and no special consideration is given to Humble Bundle announcements or promotions for coverage.
Bossa Games, developer of I Am Bread, I Am Fish, and Surgeon Simulator, has announced its next game. It’s called Lost Skies, and in many ways, it’s a significant departure from Bossa’s previous humorous sandbox efforts.
Lost Skies is an upcoming open-world, co-op adventure where up to six players work together to explore a world composed of floating islands, build flying ships, and take on gigantic monsters. It’s planned for a PC launch in 2024, but will enter what Bossa calls “open development” later this year, allowing the community to access and test vertical slices and offer feedback to shape Lost Skies’ development.
Expecting the Unexpected
According to Bossa Games CEO Henrique Olifiers, Lost Skies is able to be played single player as well as co-op, and single player play is in fact incentivized at times to assist the overall cooperative efforts of a group. He tells us that combat includes two components. One is “ground” combat, where “ground” is used a bit loosely because, per Olifiers, everyone will be hook-shotting around “Spider-Man-style” in very vertical spaces. The other is ship combat, with customizable flying ships built to tackle much larger creatures that serve as both enemies and puzzles.
While he’s not willing to share too many deep details about gameplay just yet, Olifiers described the two “drivers” of gameplay as surviving the world, and fighting these massive “guardian” creatures with friends, one in each of Lost Skies’ regions. With those two drivers, Olifiers adds that he wants players to feel a sense of freedom – similar to the freedom of Bossa’s previous smaller sandboxes – that they are “always looking at something on the horizon” that sparks curiosity and strategy. He wants players to feel they can do anything they can imagine.
“I have this saying that ‘A good game is when something that you didn’t expect took place,’ ” he says. “The fondest memories I have of multiplayer games was when in Ultima I was standing there when someone exploited the [fire field] bug to kill Lord British in the game, or when I go into raids in World of Warcraft, and my friends ask, ‘Who’s got the potions?’ and we look at each other: ‘What potions?’ That’s what we go to the pub later to talk about. So we want to create those in Lost Skies. Every hour one of those [experiences] happens, and the only way for us to craft that is to give players the means to play in the way they want.”
When we spoke with Olifiers ahead of Lost Skies’ announcement, we asked why the studio was going in such a grander, more adventurous direction after years of games where you play as a slice of bread trying to make its way to a toaster through a room full of hazards. Olifiers acknowledged that Lost Skies was a shift in “form and theme” from previous Bossa games, and said the studio’s reasoning came out of its long-standing development process of constantly doing internal game jams.
According to Olifiers, every Bossa game is made out of a game jam, and the studio has dozens of internal prototypes that never see the light of day. But, he continues, this means that all of Bossa’s games historically have been started from scratch: because they’re not building on the foundation of something else, development takes a lot of time.
So Bossa Games wants to focus, and through discussion the team found that many of its members were excited by co-op survival games and building such as Valheim, Project Zomboid, and 7 Days to Die. In focusing on that space and game jamming in it very specifically for a time, Bossa came up with Lost Skies.
Returning to Worlds Adrift
Notably, Lost Skies is meant to take place in the same universe as its previously shuttered MMO, Worlds Adrift. Worlds Adrift entered early access in 2017, but was discontinued two years later due to the game no longer being commercially viable. We asked Olifiers why Bossa was revisiting that universe despite the struggles its first endeavor had.
“We tried well to put to good use all the hindsight that we had with Worlds Adrift,” he says. “What worked, and what didn’t work, and to create a brand new game in that universe that so many people fell in love with and we never could fully realize…Hindsight is super useful. You have the advantage of going back and doing something again, but, with that experience, it’s like riding a bicycle. You never ride a bicycle well the first time you do it.”
You never ride a bicycle well the first time you do it.
One way Bossa is working to ensure the success of Lost Skies is by releasing it early in “open development.” Olifiers says that currently Bossa has a group of a few hundred community members with full access to game builds who are giving feedback and actively discussing with Bossa devs what they want to see from Lost Skies. The plan is to slowly grow this community over time.
While this might seem like a risky strategy, Olifiers says it’s one Bossa has a lot of experience with in its past games. It has a website, Bossa Presents, where it shows off “weird and wonderful prototypes” for community feedback, and Olifiers says I Am Fish specifically was the result of a game jam prototype that community members fell in love with.
“I remember we were watching videos of people doing things in Surgeon Simulator that we never thought possible, and then going back to the game, updating it, and putting achievements if someone else did that,” he says. “So, this kind of positive feedback loop is what we are trying to do on Lost Skies from day one.”
Lost Skies is currently in development for a full PC release sometime in 2024, and Olifiers says Bossa is still considering a potential console release. And there are big plans long-term, too. Bossa has a “huge post-launch roadmap” in mind for long-term Lost Skies support, in hopes the game will sustain them for years to come.
“It’s meant to be our bread and butter, going forward, right?” Olifiers says. “Our life.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
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