Description

Aloft studio is a group of design professionals with a consumptive passion for game design. Our emphatic preference is for games that absorb the player's fullest attention in borderline-psychoactive visuals and ambience. We are inspired to create work which leaves a lasting impression on our users, and perhaps inspires them to new fields of interest and expression. We are also fans of Sci fi that evokes humanist ideals in the spirit of Carl Sagan and Gene Rodenberry, and we would like our games to be a celebration of what mankind is capable of given the chance. 

Our Start

The group was founded in 2012 by Chris Bolton, a game industry coder with 10 years of engine design experience, and Dennis Varvaro, a classicaly-trained architect with a background in painting, computer modeling, environmental design, and music. The group also extends to our associates and collaberators in the areas of engine design, voice talent, and general graphic design. We currently have two titles in development: Sticks & Starships, and the Atalanta Saga. Sticks & Starships is our flagship title, and is receiving the vast bulk of our efforts at this moment.

Sticks & Starships

Sticks and Starships is the title which we are actively developing and promoting at this moment. It is the story of a race of humans or human-like beings who inhabit a textured-voxel galaxy. They belong to a tribe with lost history, which is in the process of re-learning their place in the world. The player will explore the sprawling shadows of former civilizations, as they piece together artisinal and scientific knowledge.  The player will roam across a procedurally generated globe, learning to survive and thrive in over a dozen diverse biomes. They will venture into unkowable systems of tunnels that stretch on for hundreds of kilometers in length, and many strata over a kilometer deep. They will rebuild their people's civilization, as they learn crafts such as masonry, metallurgy, glazing, alchemy, animal husbandry, and millwork, to name a few. They will practice the art of architectural design, and perhaps painting and musical composition. They will eventually develop an industrial-age culture, with a voracious appetite for energy and raw materials. They will build massive mining gantries and drilling rigs. They will grow fields full of solar collectors, and construct nuclear reactors. When they are ready, they will even develop a space program, and construct, launch, and man interplanetary exploration and mining missions, as they colonize their solarsystem. One day, they will even set sail for the stars in fantastically complex ships of their own design, in search of the final mysteries.

Atalanta Saga

Our version of the Atalanta story retells the myth with an emphasis on Atalanta's nativity, which is the part of the tale most often neglected. The story is focused on the dynamic relationship between the abandoned child Atalanta, and the she-bear who is her protector. The player follows Atalanta as she uncovers the mysteries of a lost Greek Island off the coast of Crete where she lives in utter isolation. A vast and imposing landscape of desolate wastes and whispering pines, and agave-choked cliffs awaits; the player will also explore labrynthine ruins which may be the key to uncovering Atalanta's past.  The play style will range from open-world exploration, to acrobatic platforming, to spatio-temporal puzzles involving Atalanta finding ways for her much less mobile companion to follow her progress, in the spirit of Ico.

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