DevLog 05: Piercing the Veil

While we’ve already explored the Mist as a corrupting force that endangers your people, today, let’s turn our attention to the uncertainty of exploration created by the Fog of War.

In Above: Colonies of the Mist, the landscape isn’t just scarred; it’s hidden. We want every expedition to feel like a high-stakes gamble, where the line between a great find and a total disaster is shrouded in the dark.

The Mystery of the Unseen

The lands of the Nytherran civilization are a graveyard of heavy, industrial, and imposing ruins. But you won't see them coming until they’re revealed by your scouts. By implementing a dense Fog of War, we are leaning into the sense of discovery.

• Risk and Reward: When you send an expedition into the unknown, you are gambling with your colonists' lives. The cost of an expedition increases the further your colonists venture, making every journey a calculated tradeoff.

• The Lure of the Ruin: Is that shadow in the distance a broken mech full of technology, or an Ancient Factory requiring blasting powder to enter?

• Dynamic Threats: The Mist hides more than just knowledge; it conceals dangers of all kinds, not just environmental ones.

Engineering the Unknown

No Sneak Peeks. In many strategy games, you can "cheat" the fog by seeing silhouettes of trees or other valuable assets before you arrive. Not here. Only general shapes of the hills and massive ruins are visible in the fog of war.

Thanks to our updated rendering pipeline, resources, vegetation, and structures appear only at the moment they enter your Scouts' line of sight. This ensures that every discovery remains a genuine surprise. You can't plan an Ancient Laboratory exploration until your scouts are standing at its rusted gates.

The "Gamble" of Exploration

Exploration in ABOVE is the source of your colony’s knowledge. Because the tech tree has additional “Branches” that only unlock when you find specific monuments. The Fog of War creates a natural tension and locks away optional but much-needed upgrades or even whole new buildings. Do you push your scouts further into the mist to find that one blueprint your blacksmiths need, or do you retreat to the safety of your mountaintop colony before the night falls? The choice is yours, but the Mist ensures you'll never have all the answers.

Are you more of a "cautious scout" type of player, or do you prefer to charge blindly into the mist in hopes of finding the best tech for your colonists?

Bug Of The Day

While setting up our vegetation system this week, we accidentally cranked the density values a little bit too high - actually, very high.

The result was a completely overgrown surface. Not only was the horizontal ground buried, but the vertical cliffsides were covered in a thick layer of grass and bush mix. Instead of our desolate, cold, and misty tundra, the game looked more like a lush tropical jungle! It was beautiful in its own way, but a bit too "vacation vibes" for a game about desperate survival in a scarred land.

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Stay tuned for more and join the expedition today!

Best,

The Docklight Games Team

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Check out the Forklift Interactive publisher page and follow it to see new games and updates as they arrive.

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