More than five years ago, Bossa Studios had a tough decision to make: Kill off a beloved game or face possible bankruptcy.
"We were at this sort of crossroads," Lead Game Designer Luke Williams said in a recent interview. "We either had to double down and reprogram the whole game, at least from a networking point of view, or be sensible and not bankrupt the studio."
So, the studio shut down Worlds Adrift on July 26, 2019. But the game and its soaring potential never left the hearts and minds of the studio, especially those who worked on the massively multiplayer sandbox game.
"I don't think there was ever a time that those folks weren't thinking about what made that project great and exciting," said Mark Dugdale, principal game architect and lead developer. "And what we would need to do better if we ever came back to it."
The idea of a spiritual successor floated in the air, but with it was also the concern of once more putting the studio on the line to make it happen. That was until Bossa discovered coherence, a multiplayer-focused network engine with an eye on both stability and preservation from the co-founder of indie studio Playdead.
"coherence gave us the confidence that we could pull Lost Skies off," Williams said. It's the sort of company, he added, that would ensure neither the studio nor the players would get burned.
Bossa Studios was founded in 2010 and quickly made a name for itself with award-winning Facebook games like Monstermind and the 2013 release of Surgeon Simulator.
Like Surgeon Simulator, the concept for Worlds Adrift came out of a game jam event. Worlds Adrift, which hit early access in 2017, had players exploring an open world of floating islands using player-crafted ships. Players created the islands themselves.
While the game quickly found a passionate audience, in the background, Bossa was dealing with "endless tech problems" tied to the game's multiplayer and server infrastructure, which was provided by a company they partnered with, Williams said.
Eventually, the studio decided to shut the game down rather than risk it pulling the company under. While Bossa continued its work on games like Hogwash and Surgeon Simulator 2, they never forgot about Worlds Adrift. And then, in 2021, Valheim was released, and for many at the studio, it was a trigger to start seriously reexamining the idea.
The studio had just wrapped development on I Am Fish and decided to do an internal game jam to see what they should work on next.
"Some of the people who were quite passionate about the idea of Lost Skies and Worlds Adrift dove in and did a game jam trying to bring together the vision of what Lost Skies could be," Dugdale said. "I don't think there was ever a time when those folks weren't thinking about what made Worlds Adrift great and exciting."
Bossa soon found a business partner and started pre-production on the game. However, one primary concern remained: How would they handle multiplayer?
Shutting down Worlds Adrift over issues that felt out of its hands left those who worked on the game with a sense of fear when it came to working with tech partners, Williams said.
"It was definitely like, 'God, can we avoid having a partner?'" Williams said. "There was lots of trepidation about opening that wound again. Just saying there's this other tech partner we could work with set all the alarm bells ringing."
But then Bossa found coherence.
coherence came about as a solution to a problem that Dino Patti, co-founder of Playdead, saw troubling indies and small devs: how to build multiplayer games as a small team without specialist network engineers.
“I wanted to create multiplayer games,” Patti said, “and there were no good, easy-to-use network engines out there.”
He knew that multiplayer games have a huge social impact and create the deepest emotional responses in players. As more creatives enter the space, more and more players are becoming interested in games with some form of social interaction online, but adding multiplayer to a game for a small developer can sometimes be a challenge.
coherence was meant to be a tool that would make it fun to make multiplayer games while reducing the complexity and lowering the barrier to entry.
“Tools and different mediums are what have revolutionized all creative industries throughout history,” he said. “Chisel, pens, camera, movie camera. In games, it was the first graphic framework and physics engine. Then, with Unity, it all changed: accessibility to easy tools used to create games lowered massively, and suddenly, everyone could make games. This created a boom in the evolution of indie games.
“coherence gives all of those developers an opportunity to turn their creations into multiplayer games,” he said.
In early 2022, Bossa started the process of evaluating technology for supporting the multiplayer ambitions of Lost Skies. One of the early frontrunners was coherence, but to be sure, the studio made several expansive prototypes to test out the tech.
"Each concept team tried a couple of different networking libraries," Dugdale said. "Each ended up settling on coherence because we felt satisfied with the initial progress."
In the fiction of_ Lost Skies_, the world was destroyed centuries ago, and the player awakens with amnesia and a desire to explore the world. Players must build a flying ship first and then embark on a journey from isle to isle across the skies.
While it's not meant to be a sequel to Worlds Adrift, it was definitely inspired by it, and it hopes to both exceed the original game's concepts and ensure a lasting experience.
One reason Bossa thinks it can deliver that is because of the care it used to select coherence as a tech partner for the game. There were, Dugdale said, three key pillars the Bossa team looked at when deciding which tech partner to use for Lost Skies: speed, performance and reliability, and quality of the partner.
"Part of the initial speed to results was a really important factor," he said. "That's definitely the one we start with: determining if we can go from something that is not multiplayer to it working in multiplayer and a player being like, 'Hey, that works.'
"We had some team members who had some multiplayer experience and some who didn't. We found that coherence is really smooth and effective to get started. It's just a great tool that does not add a bunch of complications."
The next pillar is tied to the technology and how a partner looks at a studio—essentially, knowing that a tech partner won't dismiss your needs or what you may want.
Some potential partners might tell Bossa not to worry about something too soon or think a specific ask wouldn't be a need an indie has.
"It's easy to dismiss it and say, 'Hey, you don't need a huge game world,'" Dugdale said. "But sometimes a game world is really simple, and what it requires to share the vision is space. coherence is a really strong offering, and we are able to build pretty big concepts at scale with developers who have a mix of expertise. That performance is definitely a pillar."
Finally, the culture and quality of a partnership were essential to Bossa.
"We knew that even if it had some great performance, it had some great workflows, it had a few features that others couldn't do if the partnership wasn't there or the confidence in the team wasn't there, we wouldn't have done it," Dugdale said. "It just wouldn't be something we’d consider. You need some people and a relationship to underpin all of that."
Work on Lost Skies started in late 2022, and Bossa knew almost immediately they had made the right decision both on their new project and their tech partner. The decision to use coherence even impacted the staffing for the game's development team.
"When they started thinking about the multiplayer side, what we realized was that development's going to be quite different because we're not spending half of the team on technical concerns that are going to hopefully work out two-thirds through development," Dugdale said. "Instead, what starts becoming clear is that coherence as a tool and a few of the other pieces we've chosen are really great supporting pieces to start running early on."
The result of that streamlined multiplayer process also meant that the team could focus more on Lost Skies' gameplay and player experience.
"There's nothing worse than when you're trying to make the game, but all you can think about is, 'But it doesn't even run' or 'We can't even connect or play multiplayer' or something like that," Williams said. "So the fact that it hasn't been a forefront concern throughout the whole of development just means that it just frees up that mind space."
The team also appreciated coherence's focus on solving some key technical challenges for Bossa. Among them were providing a flexible authority system and world origin shifting.
"It lets a player take simulation control of a piece of the game," Dugdale said. "And you can break up how you want that to work as you choose. This was something many multiplayer libraries did not do. Some AAA games made tech that was starting to do this, but it wasn't available in any off-the-shelf solutions.
"We really appreciated that those early kinds of problems and steps were a priority for coherence to solve."
Bossa devs also soon discovered that things like Lost Skies physics networking were better than they ever were in Worlds Adrift.
"They’ve got this really simple smart solution," Williams said. "It's rock solid and synched up. That opened up a lot of options for physics gameplay that we didn't have in Worlds Adrift or didn't dare take on."
For instance, one of the new things you can do in Lost Skies is make use of ship-to-ship harpoons, which allows you to tether your ship to another or wreckage and pull it somewhere where you can build it into a new ship.
"That was a big win," Williams said. "When we trusted it enough that we knew that we could actually throw a bit more at it, it opened up the design scope a little bit, which has been so much fun."
One of the most significant impacts for the team is just how transparent working with coherence and its tech has been, Williams said.
"With Worlds Adrift never knew what the tech was doing or how it was working," he said. "In contrast, with coherence, I am seeing it every day.”
Williams said the previous system was much more like a black box, where coherence's transparency means he can more quickly identify problems and deal with them.
One final note, one tied deeply to the philosophy of coherence and founder Dino Patti's view of games. Both coherence and Bossa want to ensure that Lost Skies will be around even if the publisher, the tech partner, and the developer aren't.
"We felt very strongly—and I think that would have determined whether the partnership with coherence would happen or not—it's really important to us that if the worst was to happen again that we don't turn around to the players and say, 'Sorry, we have to close this one down too,'" Williams said. "coherence's network technology is great, but if, for whatever reason, disaster strikes twice and we have to shut it down and stop development, the game is still there. It's still playable. With coherence we can make sure that it can be played offline."
This is possible because coherence offers the ability to host a game on the coherence cloud, on a studio's servers, or using peer-to-peer, meaning the game would be playable even if both coherence and Bossa were no longer supporting it.
Earlier this month, Bossa dropped a new trailer for Lost Skies and announced it would be releasing its first demo during the Steam Next Fest.
It's a surreal moment for some on the team.
Williams, who also worked on Worlds Adrift, said the strong partnership with coherence is what made Lost Skies possible.
"I'm always going to be thankful for having this second chance because it's been a little passion project of mine for the last ten years," he said. "Not everyone gets that."
While the Worlds Adrift team will never forget the unexpected need to shut down a game because of tech issues, thanks to coherence, Lost Skies will now be forever available, leaving a lasting legacy that includes some small piece of Worlds Adrift.
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