This sprint, seven of our crew headed to EGX to showcase Sunless Skies! New and veteran fans alike stopped by to give the game a try and we were delighted to chat with everyone and hear their feedback. On Friday, Chris, Lottie and Adam headed to the EGX stage to chat with Eurogamer’s Johnny Chiodini, which you can watch on Eurogamer’s YouTube page.



ART
With the Early Access launch finished, Paul has departed for a well-deserved holiday, so the art this sprint has primarily been done by Tobias. One of the things he’s been working on is another locomotive: the Altani-class outrider, an evasive locomotive from the Khanate.



Alongside the Altani, he also tackled some Discovery homesteads. There are currently five types of homesteads: eerie, friendly, recently abandoned, hostile and pro-trading.




CONTENT
Content have been continuing their work on Albion and its ports. James and Olivia have been finishing up the writing for ports such as the Serene Mausoleum and Brabazon Workworld, which Caolain has been mechanically QA'ing afterwards.

Chris created the art briefs for Discoveries and Spectacles, which aren't yet in-game.

Discoveries are points of interest in the High Wilderness. A Discovery could be something simple, like a floating crate of munitions, or could be the (hopefully) empty wreck of a crashed locomotive. These Discoveries will provide resources and stories for bold explorers to find.

Spectacles are awe-inspiring locations in the High Wilderness. Some will strike terror into the hearts of your crew, while others may bring them comfort. A wise skyfarer will learn routes that will keep their crew's dread at bay.


GAMEPLAY AND DESIGN
Before heading off to EGX, Barry worked on the Legacy system. This included selecting a Legacy and how new characters are created after a previous character dies. Under the Legacy system, captains may find they inherit a few bits from the expired captain, such as their ship and some donations from the old captain’s acquaintances.

Liam has been tending to the UI work for Character Creation while Henry and Mac have continued the tech work involved in implementing this system.

Mac has also been implementing Experience Gain within the game, so that players will receive the proper figures upon passing landmarks. He's also been working on the Banking Service, which is a feature that will allow players to store some of their items in New Winchester to save space in their locomotive's hold.

Shipyards are also being implemented, which give players the ability to rename their locomotive. Prospects and bargains have also been started. Once these are implemented, players will be able to scope out potential deals for trading.

BUGS AND FEEDBACK
This sprint we’ve started focused feedback sessions on our game forums. The first Feedback Focus we’d like to dive into is Terror. You can find these threads here on our Steam forum or on the FBG forum.


REMINDER: Any backers who have not received their game keys yet please email skies@failbettergames.com, as it appears that quite a few people’s keys got eaten by spam filters.

Our next FBG Podcast will take place this Friday 29th September at 16:00 BST! Come with your content questions at the ready, as we’re hoping to have a writer join us this week.

This sprint, seven of our crew headed to EGX to showcase Sunless Skies! New and veteran fans alike stopped by to give the game a try and we were delighted to chat with everyone and hear their feedback. On Friday, Chris, Lottie and Adam headed to the EGX stage to chat with Eurogamer’s Johnny Chiodini, which you can watch on Eurogamer’s YouTube page.



ART
With the Early Access launch finished, Paul has departed for a well-deserved holiday, so the art this sprint has primarily been done by Tobias. One of the things he’s been working on is another locomotive: the Altani-class outrider, an evasive locomotive from the Khanate.



Alongside the Altani, he also tackled some Discovery homesteads. There are currently five types of homesteads: eerie, friendly, recently abandoned, hostile and pro-trading.




CONTENT
Content have been continuing their work on Albion and its ports. James and Olivia have been finishing up the writing for ports such as the Serene Mausoleum and Brabazon Workworld, which Caolain has been mechanically QA'ing afterwards.

Chris created the art briefs for Discoveries and Spectacles, which aren't yet in-game.

Discoveries are points of interest in the High Wilderness. A Discovery could be something simple, like a floating crate of munitions, or could be the (hopefully) empty wreck of a crashed locomotive. These Discoveries will provide resources and stories for bold explorers to find.

Spectacles are awe-inspiring locations in the High Wilderness. Some will strike terror into the hearts of your crew, while others may bring them comfort. A wise skyfarer will learn routes that will keep their crew's dread at bay.


GAMEPLAY AND DESIGN
Before heading off to EGX, Barry worked on the Legacy system. This included selecting a Legacy and how new characters are created after a previous character dies. Under the Legacy system, captains may find they inherit a few bits from the expired captain, such as their ship and some donations from the old captain’s acquaintances.

Liam has been tending to the UI work for Character Creation while Henry and Mac have continued the tech work involved in implementing this system.

Mac has also been implementing Experience Gain within the game, so that players will receive the proper figures upon passing landmarks. He's also been working on the Banking Service, which is a feature that will allow players to store some of their items in New Winchester to save space in their locomotive's hold.

Shipyards are also being implemented, which give players the ability to rename their locomotive. Prospects and bargains have also been started. Once these are implemented, players will be able to scope out potential deals for trading.

BUGS AND FEEDBACK
This sprint we’ve started focused feedback sessions on our game forums. The first Feedback Focus we’d like to dive into is Terror. You can find these threads here on our Steam forum or on the FBG forum.


REMINDER: Any backers who have not received their game keys yet please email skies@failbettergames.com, as it appears that quite a few people’s keys got eaten by spam filters.

Our next FBG Podcast will take place this Friday 29th September at 16:00 BST! Come with your content questions at the ready, as we’re hoping to have a writer join us this week.

With Sunless Skies now officially available for Early Access / Games in Development, the MALMQUIST BIAS sprint was focused on analysing feedback and bug fixing. A few departments such as art have also begun to explore our next region: Albion.

QUALITY ASSURANCE

Quality Assurance, or QA, is a very important role in the games industry, especially during Early Access, where there are bound to be plenty of bugs about. QA testers are responsible for all things to do with bugs: finding, tracking, reporting, and being the relay between our community and our developers, not only for bugs but also for more general feedback.

Even before launch, our QA Lesleyann was in charge of setting up the bug reporting pipeline for players, which you may have seen on our How to Report a Bug and Known Issues pages. Since launch, she has tackled over 300 bug report emails as well as scanning the Steam, GOG and FBG forums for community feedback.

From there she has designed a lovely feedback grid spreadsheet (you know how much game developers love a good spreadsheet) to share with the development team so that we know generally how players feel about certain features, game balance etc. As we upload new builds of the game with bug fixes and feature additions or adjustments, Lesleyann will update the spreadsheet. From there, other members of the team can stay up to date with the players’ thoughts.


ART

Each region of the game will feature a distinct mood and ecosystem and thus one of the first steps for creating our next region, Albion, is deciding on its art direction. Paul and Tobias began the design and discussion by creating a colour journey. Colour journeys are quite common for things like film and television—it’s basically mapping out the colour palette for the region, in this case via outer ring, inner ring, and core. Below you can see a purposefully pixelated version:



From there, Albion’s ports can be conceptually sketched out, combining the writers’ descriptions and the decided colouring/mood. After it’s concepted, they check back with the writers to make sure that they’ve met the descriptions but also to make sure that the actual design of the part will work logically with the content they’ve created.





This also helps Paul and Tobias refine the art pipeline, so that they are designing the ports in the most efficient way possible. We wouldn’t want to have an artist fully map out, define, and polish a port only to find out a small detail about its construction that won’t work in-game alongside content.

Tobias has also been continuing asset creation, such as the hefty cargo ship the Pellinore, as well as the devilishly handsome Kickstarter stretch goal, the Moloch.



Meanwhile, the Moloch is a beast of brass and steam! A midnight miracle of hydraulics! Furnished in the most indulgent luxury, with carpet so thick you'll lose your toes in it, and mahogany as dark as the inside of a confessional.



Manufactured by refugees from Hell, the Moloch is an experimental engine available only at the Royal Society.

Tobias explains a bit about the influences on the Moloch: “With the Moloch, aside from the existing description created for the Kickstarter, my notes from our Narrative Director, Chris, were simply ‘luxury and brass.’

I wanted to avoid any immediate Hell Train cliches—no skulls and spikes—and instead looked at luxury cars from the early part of the 20th century, since there's something innately devilish to me about those sinuous cars that seem like 90% bonnet. They're a little ahead of our time period in Sunless Skies, but given how special this vehicle is, and that it was manufactured by devils, I felt alright about giving it an unusual twist.

I also took inspiration from brass coated instruments such as saxophones for the pipework on the body, and added fins to give the silhouette a bit of extra character.”





Along with these locomotive models, Tobias also created a future Discovery.




CONTENT

The writers have spent most of their time this sprint designing the foundations for Albion and its ports. Chris and James has been tackling the art briefs, while our freelance partners like Meg Jayanth and Richard Cobbett have been busy pitching their ports.

We are also very excited to announce that Harry Tuffs, the developer behind A House of Many Doors, will also be working with us on a port for [irl]Sunless Skies[/ir]!

TECH
The Tech team have devoted quite a bit of this sprint towards working with Lesleyann to iron out the bugs being reported from Early Access. When we update the game on Steam / GOG with new builds that include bug fixes, we will be posting Patch Notes so players can see exactly which bugs have been fixed and which new features have been added.

Mac and Barry have also begun working on some of the larger systems that we hope to get into the game in the coming months such as Character Creation and Legacies.



NOTE FOR BACKERS: Please get in touch with us at skies@failbettergames.com along with your pledge tier level if you have not yet received your Early Access keys - thank you! It appears spam filters may have eaten quite a few of our key emails.

Join us on Friday at 16:00 BST for the FBG Podcast! We’ll be there to take your questions and delve into the creation of Sunless Skies.

With Sunless Skies now officially available for Early Access / Games in Development, the MALMQUIST BIAS sprint was focused on analysing feedback and bug fixing. A few departments such as art have also begun to explore our next region: Albion.

QUALITY ASSURANCE

Quality Assurance, or QA, is a very important role in the games industry, especially during Early Access, where there are bound to be plenty of bugs about. QA testers are responsible for all things to do with bugs: finding, tracking, reporting, and being the relay between our community and our developers, not only for bugs but also for more general feedback.

Even before launch, our QA Lesleyann was in charge of setting up the bug reporting pipeline for players, which you may have seen on our How to Report a Bug and Known Issues pages. Since launch, she has tackled over 300 bug report emails as well as scanning the Steam, GOG and FBG forums for community feedback.

From there she has designed a lovely feedback grid spreadsheet (you know how much game developers love a good spreadsheet) to share with the development team so that we know generally how players feel about certain features, game balance etc. As we upload new builds of the game with bug fixes and feature additions or adjustments, Lesleyann will update the spreadsheet. From there, other members of the team can stay up to date with the players’ thoughts.


ART

Each region of the game will feature a distinct mood and ecosystem and thus one of the first steps for creating our next region, Albion, is deciding on its art direction. Paul and Tobias began the design and discussion by creating a colour journey. Colour journeys are quite common for things like film and television—it’s basically mapping out the colour palette for the region, in this case via outer ring, inner ring, and core. Below you can see a purposefully pixelated version:



From there, Albion’s ports can be conceptually sketched out, combining the writers’ descriptions and the decided colouring/mood. After it’s concepted, they check back with the writers to make sure that they’ve met the descriptions but also to make sure that the actual design of the part will work logically with the content they’ve created.





This also helps Paul and Tobias refine the art pipeline, so that they are designing the ports in the most efficient way possible. We wouldn’t want to have an artist fully map out, define, and polish a port only to find out a small detail about its construction that won’t work in-game alongside content.

Tobias has also been continuing asset creation, such as the hefty cargo ship the Pellinore, as well as the devilishly handsome Kickstarter stretch goal, the Moloch.



Meanwhile, the Moloch is a beast of brass and steam! A midnight miracle of hydraulics! Furnished in the most indulgent luxury, with carpet so thick you'll lose your toes in it, and mahogany as dark as the inside of a confessional.



Manufactured by refugees from Hell, the Moloch is an experimental engine available only at the Royal Society.

Tobias explains a bit about the influences on the Moloch: “With the Moloch, aside from the existing description created for the Kickstarter, my notes from our Narrative Director, Chris, were simply ‘luxury and brass.’

I wanted to avoid any immediate Hell Train cliches—no skulls and spikes—and instead looked at luxury cars from the early part of the 20th century, since there's something innately devilish to me about those sinuous cars that seem like 90% bonnet. They're a little ahead of our time period in Sunless Skies, but given how special this vehicle is, and that it was manufactured by devils, I felt alright about giving it an unusual twist.

I also took inspiration from brass coated instruments such as saxophones for the pipework on the body, and added fins to give the silhouette a bit of extra character.”





Along with these locomotive models, Tobias also created a future Discovery.




CONTENT

The writers have spent most of their time this sprint designing the foundations for Albion and its ports. Chris and James has been tackling the art briefs, while our freelance partners like Meg Jayanth and Richard Cobbett have been busy pitching their ports.

We are also very excited to announce that Harry Tuffs, the developer behind A House of Many Doors, will also be working with us on a port for [irl]Sunless Skies[/ir]!

TECH
The Tech team have devoted quite a bit of this sprint towards working with Lesleyann to iron out the bugs being reported from Early Access. When we update the game on Steam / GOG with new builds that include bug fixes, we will be posting Patch Notes so players can see exactly which bugs have been fixed and which new features have been added.

Mac and Barry have also begun working on some of the larger systems that we hope to get into the game in the coming months such as Character Creation and Legacies.



NOTE FOR BACKERS: Please get in touch with us at skies@failbettergames.com along with your pledge tier level if you have not yet received your Early Access keys - thank you! It appears spam filters may have eaten quite a few of our key emails.

Join us on Friday at 16:00 BST for the FBG Podcast! We’ll be there to take your questions and delve into the creation of Sunless Skies.

This patch is our first update and contains a number of bug fixes, listed below. Two big issues which have not been fixed as part of this update however are the disappearing ports bug and the corrupt save file issue which leads to a black screen overlaid with the HUD.

Having looked at the code in question these bugs are not simple, quick fixes. We want to address these issues properly as we refine these particular areas of the game, especially since it also ties into the current work we are doing on Legacies. We don’t want to push out a temporary fix that may have other knock-on effects, however minor, only to have to revise again later down the line.

I know how frustrating both these issues are, so this bit of news may be disappointing. But please rest assured we are working on these issues and we'll get solid fixes out for them as soon as we are able.

We really appreciate your continued help and support, and of course your patience as we iron out all these kinks. Your bug reports over the last fortnight have been really helpful and your feedback has been excellent. Collecting it all has been quite a mammoth task, but the first batch is ready for our designers and writers to look at.

Please keep all that feedback coming and together we'll make an awesome game.

P.S. Please also remember to check out our Known Issues. Any workarounds are in red text.



* We have made some improvements to the framerate.

* Loot can now be collected from Chorister bees.
* The Scrive-Spinsters now fire accurately towards an enemy vessel.

* The icon for weapons now appear in the Hold when purchasing duplicates.
* Duplicate weapons can now be equipped.
* Equipped weapons cannot be sold.

* Players will no longer get trapped in the Regent's Grave storylet at Traitor's Wood.
* Several typos and grammatical errors have been fixed.
* The Sovereign reward value has been boosted for many of the early quests.
* Apollonian Cinders can no longer be farmed for Sovereigns.
* You can no longer exceed your maximum Crew compliment by collecting miners from Lustrum.
* Items are now removed when handing them in to Melusine at Lustrum.
* The branches to reduce your Condition at Magdalene's can now be seen even when you do not have the requirements to play them.
* You will always be able to obtain a Pane of Stained Glass from New Winchester no matter the balance of the War.
* The Journal message now updates correctly once you have delivered a settler rather than telling you to drop them off at L&S Nature Reserve.
* When helping the Strongwoman, Magician, Acrobat and Clown at Polmear & Plenty's details will be shown in the Journal.

* Overflowing the cargo hold should no longer cause the UI to lock up and prevent Must Events (e.g. Loot) from firing correctly.
* We’ve made a number of fixes to the Jettison interface.
* Increasing the UI scale no longers causes elements within the Profile and Possessions interface to become inaccessible.
* Icons within the Hold interface no longer overflow the UI when increasing the UI scale.
* The Hold UI now updates automatically when open after jettisoning cargo.
* The Hold UI now updates automatically when open after purchasing items from shops (but not when gaining/losing items from slets).
* You can no longer move with storylet interfaces open.
* We've tweaked the way Peculiarities display on the Profile interface to reduce confusion.
* The Hold UI now updates correctly when unequipping weapons on Linux machines.

* Scout's discoveries no longer persist when continuing a save game.
* The Alexander-Yang Claim label now appears next to its graphical asset.
* The scroll function now works on the build notes on Linux machines.
* The cargo hold value can no longer be exceeded by selling equipped weapons.
* Shop purchases and changes to equipped items are now saved when quitting the game from the main menu.
* The bridge at Carillon no longer disappears when loading a save game.
* Certain shops become inaccessible when a player no longer meets the requirements.
* The fallen London plug no longer overlaps the patch notes on the title screen.

This patch is our first update and contains a number of bug fixes, listed below. Two big issues which have not been fixed as part of this update however are the disappearing ports bug and the corrupt save file issue which leads to a black screen overlaid with the HUD.

Having looked at the code in question these bugs are not simple, quick fixes. We want to address these issues properly as we refine these particular areas of the game, especially since it also ties into the current work we are doing on Legacies. We don’t want to push out a temporary fix that may have other knock-on effects, however minor, only to have to revise again later down the line.

I know how frustrating both these issues are, so this bit of news may be disappointing. But please rest assured we are working on these issues and we'll get solid fixes out for them as soon as we are able.

We really appreciate your continued help and support, and of course your patience as we iron out all these kinks. Your bug reports over the last fortnight have been really helpful and your feedback has been excellent. Collecting it all has been quite a mammoth task, but the first batch is ready for our designers and writers to look at.

Please keep all that feedback coming and together we'll make an awesome game.

P.S. Please also remember to check out our Known Issues. Any workarounds are in red text.



* We have made some improvements to the framerate.

* Loot can now be collected from Chorister bees.
* The Scrive-Spinsters now fire accurately towards an enemy vessel.

* The icon for weapons now appear in the Hold when purchasing duplicates.
* Duplicate weapons can now be equipped.
* Equipped weapons cannot be sold.

* Players will no longer get trapped in the Regent's Grave storylet at Traitor's Wood.
* Several typos and grammatical errors have been fixed.
* The Sovereign reward value has been boosted for many of the early quests.
* Apollonian Cinders can no longer be farmed for Sovereigns.
* You can no longer exceed your maximum Crew compliment by collecting miners from Lustrum.
* Items are now removed when handing them in to Melusine at Lustrum.
* The branches to reduce your Condition at Magdalene's can now be seen even when you do not have the requirements to play them.
* You will always be able to obtain a Pane of Stained Glass from New Winchester no matter the balance of the War.
* The Journal message now updates correctly once you have delivered a settler rather than telling you to drop them off at L&S Nature Reserve.
* When helping the Strongwoman, Magician, Acrobat and Clown at Polmear & Plenty's details will be shown in the Journal.

* Overflowing the cargo hold should no longer cause the UI to lock up and prevent Must Events (e.g. Loot) from firing correctly.
* We’ve made a number of fixes to the Jettison interface.
* Increasing the UI scale no longers causes elements within the Profile and Possessions interface to become inaccessible.
* Icons within the Hold interface no longer overflow the UI when increasing the UI scale.
* The Hold UI now updates automatically when open after jettisoning cargo.
* The Hold UI now updates automatically when open after purchasing items from shops (but not when gaining/losing items from slets).
* You can no longer move with storylet interfaces open.
* We've tweaked the way Peculiarities display on the Profile interface to reduce confusion.
* The Hold UI now updates correctly when unequipping weapons on Linux machines.

* Scout's discoveries no longer persist when continuing a save game.
* The Alexander-Yang Claim label now appears next to its graphical asset.
* The scroll function now works on the build notes on Linux machines.
* The cargo hold value can no longer be exceeded by selling equipped weapons.
* Shop purchases and changes to equipped items are now saved when quitting the game from the main menu.
* The bridge at Carillon no longer disappears when loading a save game.
* Certain shops become inaccessible when a player no longer meets the requirements.
* The fallen London plug no longer overlaps the patch notes on the title screen.

The time has come! Sunless Skies is now available for Early Access here on Steam and also Games in Development on GOG!

We are delighted to invite you from the depths of the Unterzee to join us in the gusty, undiscovered vaults of the High Wilderness. The stars are dying; they leave behind territories rich in secrets and opportunity.

Explore the Reach—the first, and most verdant, region of Sunless Skies. The Reach is designed to be a small but functional piece of the entire game. Fly a locomotive, engage in combat, experience Terror and Hunger, interact with stories, and die. A lot.

Over the coming months we’ll be adding more stories, more regions, and more complexity to its gameplay—more of everything really. If you’d like an idea of what will be initially available from the 30th August, check out our development blog from yesterday and our FAQ.

Over the past three months, 900 delicious alpha testers have been helping us uncover bugs, but if you’re looking to experience a complete game void of tech issues, we strongly recommend you wait until the game’s full release. However, if you are happy to traverse the High Wilderness first, reporting bugs and sending feedback along the way, then we hope to see you out there Skyfarer!

The feedback we received during Sunless Sea’ Early Access absolutely made it the exceptional game it is today and we can’t wait to see what you think of Sunless Skies.

And, if you’d like to pick up Sunless Sea for iPad, it’ll be on sale in celebration of the Sunless Skies Early Access launch for £6.99 / $6.99 from 30th August - 3rd September!

Thank you for your support through everything, we have the most delicious fans. See you out in space!

The time has come! Sunless Skies is now available for Early Access here on Steam and also Games in Development on GOG!

We are delighted to invite you from the depths of the Unterzee to join us in the gusty, undiscovered vaults of the High Wilderness. The stars are dying; they leave behind territories rich in secrets and opportunity.

Explore the Reach—the first, and most verdant, region of Sunless Skies. The Reach is designed to be a small but functional piece of the entire game. Fly a locomotive, engage in combat, experience Terror and Hunger, interact with stories, and die. A lot.

Over the coming months we’ll be adding more stories, more regions, and more complexity to its gameplay—more of everything really. If you’d like an idea of what will be initially available from the 30th August, check out our development blog from yesterday and our FAQ.

Over the past three months, 900 delicious alpha testers have been helping us uncover bugs, but if you’re looking to experience a complete game void of tech issues, we strongly recommend you wait until the game’s full release. However, if you are happy to traverse the High Wilderness first, reporting bugs and sending feedback along the way, then we hope to see you out there Skyfarer!

The feedback we received during Sunless Sea’ Early Access absolutely made it the exceptional game it is today and we can’t wait to see what you think of Sunless Skies.

And, if you’d like to pick up Sunless Sea for iPad, it’ll be on sale in celebration of the Sunless Skies Early Access launch for £6.99 / $6.99 from 30th August - 3rd September!

Thank you for your support through everything, we have the most delicious fans. See you out in space!

Since our Early Access launch is just around the corner—18:00 BST 30th August (!)—we thought we'd go into a bit more detail about what you can initially expect in Sunless Skies.

Our initial version for the Early Access release will include one of the four game regions: the Reach. We designed this to give players something akin to a vertical slice—an industry term that means a small but functional piece of the entire game.

This is one of the major reasons we decided to launch with only one region at the start, so we could give players a small taste of what the final game will be like rather than a big taste of an emptier, less representational world.

Things you will be able to do immediately:

• Explore the Reach in your locomotive
  
• Use your bat to scout for nearby ports
  
• Dock at 11 ports available in the Reach
  
• Interact with stories
  
• Engage in combat with sky-beasts and other locomotives
  
• Experience Terror, Hunger, and Heat mechanics

Throughout development we will release updates that add polish and more complexity to the mechanics you see initially. We’ll also of course be adding more regions, locomotives, ports, sky-beasts, loot, equipment, discoveries, wrecks, characters, and stories.

Things that will be added in later:

• Character creation and progression: being able to select your character portrait, character name, and all the specific choices that makes your character yours
  
• Spectacles: awe-inspiring locations in the High Wilderness. Some will strike terror into the hearts of your crew, while others may bring them comfort. A wise skyfarer will learn routes that will keep their people's dread at bay.
  
• Discoveries: points of interest in the High Wilderness. It could be something as simple as a floating crate of munitions, or the (hopefully) empty wreck of some terrible locomotive crash. These will provide resources and stories for bold explorers to find.
  
• Legacies: death is hard to avoid, but thankfully where one captain fails, another may continue on in their place and hope to further their great work. They will begin their journey with equipment and contacts gained by their last captain, as well as their charts and a portion of their worldly wealth.
  
• Trade: there are lots of ways to make a living, and trade is one of the more reputable ones you can undertake. Whenever you dock at a port, you may find people willing to sell you goods at a cheap price, allowing you to turn a profit provided you can find a buyer. Alternatively, you may hear of people who have a need some specific goods. If you're able to source and deliver them, you will be richly rewarded.
  
• Kickstarter Exclusives: Owl scouts and delicious rabbit mascots! We will be sure to inform backers anytime a Kickstarter reward has been implemented
  
• [b}Difficulty settings:[/b] this is definitely a long-form task we’ll need player feedback on
  
• Accessibility features: currently UI and text scaling is an option but we have many more tasks to tackle
  
• Controller support: it’s mouse and keyboard for now but we’ve designed with controller support in mind

This is of course not a full list, as that would make quite a long blog post! These are instead some of the larger, long-form pieces that will be added to the game in future updates.

Opening the game to players in Early Access will provide us with crucial feedback to help us create a game of corruption, compromise and jeopardy. With Sunless Sea, you helped us discover what type of combat worked, what accessibility features were necessary and how much cannibalism truly meant to you.

We’ll be looking for similar feedback in Sunless Skies, for example:

• Is the game fun? What bits work and what bits don’t?
  
• Have you found any bugs or glitches?
  
• How does flying your locomotive feel?
  
• Is combat balanced? Are there areas of it we can improve?
  
• How is the difficulty within the game?
  
• Is your time respected enough?
  
• What accessibility features would help you play the game?

We’ll be hanging out in the Steam, GOG and our own community forum to see what players are discussing. Feedback and bugs can also be sent to skies@failbettergames.com, after checking our How to Report Bugs and Known Issues pages.


We’ll be continuing development blogs just like this one even after we launch on Early Access, though things will change slightly.

We’ll need to take some time to analyse the player response to the game once we go live—there’s a big difference between having 900 Alpha testers and at least 11,000+ Kickstarter backers flooding into the game—not to mention any new Steam or GOG players that want to purchase the game.

That initial player response to the game will affect both the development schedule our producer Lottie plans, and the Sunless Skies Development Roadmap that Haley takes care of. We may find that things will change only slightly, but there’s a chance things may change dramatically, and so in the first few weeks our team will be busy with internal discussions before deciding on a designated path forward.

Once that’s been determined we will be able to share with you:

• A new Development Roadmap to follow along with our development in Early Access.
  
• Development blogs which will continue, though after the Early Access launch we will be posting them on Wednesdays.
  
• Patch notes will also begin appearing in Steam and GOG so you can see exactly what has been added to the game each time we update the game.
  
• And of course any time we have massive updates to the game (new regions added, full-release etc.), we’ll be sure to post special announcements to let everyone know.

We are currently buzzing with so much excitement people may begin to think we’re made up of bees. A huge thank you to those who backed Sunless Skies, and to the Alpha testers who have given us some excellent feedback—we couldn’t have done it without you all!

We’ll be holding a special Early Access focused podcast 1st September at 16:00 BST in case you want to ask us any delicious questions.

See you in the skies!