With the current launch planned for about a month from the time of writing this announcement, I want to go ahead and give you a list of the major features you can expect right at launch, and then I’ll go into a little bit of detail about where I plan to take it in the future and what I plan to add.
What you can expect at Early Access launch is a combination of a few different genres. The core is somewhat of an incremental or even idle kind of game. On top of that, there is an industry element where you place structures, gather resources, unlock new buildings, and build up your production line, but there are definitely other features that set the game apart.
Obviously, there is the tower itself. This acts as the tower defense part of the game. You're trying to build it from the ground up all the way into orbit to act as your space elevator. But here's the catch: the more you build, the more likely you are to be attacked. So, you'll want to add a bunch of weapons. You get those weapons through blueprints, and if you have the resources, you can build them and place them directly from your inventory onto the tower. When you get attacked, they will automatically fire using the ammo you've produced.
Once you build up into orbit, you'll be able to place the end-to-end elevator that allows you to send resources up to the top of the tower, and that's when you start building out your Hub. This is a place where you can have storage, other types of defense, and eventually things like hotels and bars. That way, NPCs can come visit, stay, and eventually live there and start up their own shops. Depending on how you build it, you're essentially creating a miniature colony above the planet. You build the Hub by placing modules, sending resources up to your storage, and connecting them. Just like placing the tower, you place module blocks and run tubes between them so they connect all the way back to the root of the elevator.
Some modules won't be for NPCs, things like generators and oxygen makers that you have to fuel and fund, but you'll also have spaces specifically for NPCs to visit, interact, and trade. There will be a comfort system for these modules, where you'll want to place specific furniture, fixtures, and decorations inside to customize it and give it a personal touch. And of course, you'll want to defend your Hub with weapons similar to your tower, keeping fuel and backups ready so you're planning for the worst-case scenario.
Since there is limited space on the planet's surface, you will eventually be able to go to different planets and establish new operations from there. While the tower is the defensive side of things, space expansion is the offensive side. This uses a separate blueprint system where you roll ship blueprints to build out a fleet. Different ships generate with different stats, and you can reroll them, but doing so takes away the durability of the blueprint. Once you've built the best fleet possible, you open up your system map and send them in to take over a grid sector. They'll sweep through the selected grid, scavenge, and fight off the current enemies, sometimes a few, sometimes a boss. Once they finish their rounds, your fleet returns, and you can click the system map to go to the new planet and start building.
But just like the Hub, you don't have resources ready to go right away. You need to send them from another planet using the Dispatch System. You print out dispatch orders, which can be one-time runs or consistent supply lines. You figure out what you want to build, maybe some basic mining structures to get local resources, and then send the dispatch ships over. They take containers from the old planet, transport them to the new one, and drop them off, which adds to your max storage there. Then you can kickstart your mining and even build another tower and Hub system.
During development, I actually planned to have a logistics system with conveyor belts in a platform setting, but it just didn't feel that good. I honestly didn't like it, so I took it out. Now, you place your storage and structures, and it just fills up. I feel like there are plenty of games that do the logistics part of industry very well, and I didn't think a cheap version of something like that would bring anything to the game.
So instead, I focused on this: while your industry and production are very deterministic, there is a whole other element that affects how you get resources and interact with the environment. There is a non-deterministic personality system for the agents. They have their own associations, belong to their own factions, and have their own preferences, wants, needs, and personalities. Instead of a standard dialogue box where they say a line, you respond, or a trade window pops up to slide things back and forth, I built a unique agent interaction system.
It’s a completely sandbox, alchemical social interaction dialogue system that you're going to want to experiment with. Basically, it’s a 4x4 grid with 16 total slots. You have tabs of different token types, trade tokens, currency, items, information, blueprints, and documents, that you can drag into any slot you like. The four rows are Ask, Demand, State, and Offer. You can fill up all 16 slots, or put none at all.
The agent looks at the terms you’ve given them and assesses it. If you make a reasonable offer, they'll accept or decline it. If you input complete nonsense, the game actually treats it like you're speaking complete gibberish; your reputation might go down, or they might just think it's funny. You can combine anything: slip jokes or insults in with your offers, threaten them, demand things, or be incredibly charitable. You can even trade the game's lore documents and blueprints. Some agents will love the information, others won't care, and some might be insulted. There is no good or evil meter, just a reputation that is entirely subjective to every faction and can vary in every direction. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, but you can use this system to make connections that further your industry and growth.
Alongside that, there are a few types of mission systems. Baked into the core is the deterministic expedition system. Then there is the contract system, which you get through interactions or as rewards. There's also a bounty system where you can hunt down agents at the request of others. When you battle another agent, instead of the dialogue grid, a Hostile Grid opens up. Instead of conversation tokens, you use attack tokens in a specialized auto-battle system. It's a bit more complicated than I can explain briefly, so I will probably make another post just for that. But you can collect bounties, move across the galaxy, boost your reputation with one faction, ruin it with another, or just do your own thing entirely.
While most incremental and idle games have a prestige system, Sky Scaffold has something a bit different. It’s not necessarily something you choose to do, though I guess you could, it happens when your character dies. Your character's body will regenerate in a new system and you will start fresh. Depending on how much industry you had built up, you'll be given an amount of Arc Tokens, which you can use to buy permanent starting bonuses for your next run.
I should talk a little bit about the balancing here. It may be difficult, but I'm trying to build a system where you don't have to prestige or start a new run if you don't want to. I would love it if someone could go from the start to the endgame without ever dying. I want that to be a possibility, though admittedly, it takes a lot of balancing to enable that specific path. Progression is relatively straightforward otherwise. There are offline gains, and ways to progress faster or slower. The game is designed around long-tail progression. For people who play long-term, there are certain stages and progression beats where the core gameplay itself will change, and depending on the paths you take, your choices will have a direct effect on how future runs play out.
Those are the main features you're going to get during Early Access, plus other minor things you'll discover during gameplay. For example, your character will have hunger and thirst, and you'll want to keep them alive. They can get sick, and if they are attacked directly, they can die. I have it set up so that you're basically the last line of defense. I am a little worried that losing progress when your character dies might scare some people off, but I think that risk is an important part of the game. If you expand too fast, you're going to have more thrown at you than you can manage. But if you play conservatively and want to take it slow, the game will react to that.
This kind of long-term balancing won't be fully dialed in until I have players giving me input and showing me a variety of playstyles. It’s not going to be balanced for one specific way to play. The idea is that you rise fast and you fall hard, but if you play smart, make the right choices, and build carefully, you can take it as far as you want. That's the exact feeling I'm going for.
Secondly, I'm trying to balance for the specific type of gameplay session you want to have. In a lot of idle and incremental games, the start is a slow slog and a grind. I'm not saying this will be vastly different, but you can get started and rise to the top in an evening or a couple of days, or you could take it slowly and have everything concretely laid out. If you want to hyper-focus for a couple of hours to get everything perfectly set up, you can. If you want to play it in the background and just let it do its thing over a long period of time, you can do that too.
Since this is a single-player, buy-it-once game, I don't need to worry about microtransactions. I don't have to enforce a single persistent online save. You can have multiple saves and do whatever you want because, ultimately, it's a single-player game. However you find fun in it is how you should play it. The core principle for the design was to take the good meat of how these games handle idle progress, but completely strip out the predatory stuff. There will never be microtransactions, and there is no forced always-online play.
However, there are strictly opt-in online features. I’d call it semi-multiplayer, it's not even enough to label it as co-op or multiplayer on the Steam tags. There is a sort of co-op meta-gameplay with a stronghold and raid system. I don't want to spoil too much, but you can essentially wager resources to meet requirements and attempt a raid, coming back with either more or less.
Beyond that, there is a meta-agent system that persists across players. While everything you do is local, you can opt into having the agents you interact with jump between other players' games. I’m still working out the exact details to prevent duplicates, but essentially, an agent might visit your game, you interact with them, and then they carry that history into someone else's game. You might give an agent resources that they later sell to another player. There’s also an in-game "intranet" where you can trade resources to a limited degree with other players. I will go into much more detail on all of this on Substack or in another announcement, but those features already exist and will be ready either at Early Access or shortly after.
Looking ahead, there are a ton of features that are about halfway done that probably won't make it into Early Access but are planned for the full 1.0 launch, which I’m aiming to release about three to six months after Early Access.
One major feature is a terraforming system. This was in an early build, but I’ve built so much around it that I’ll probably have to start fresh. Essentially, it will let you follow a chain of processes to add an atmosphere and life to a dead planet. This grants access to new resources and defenses, and other factions will even want to sanction and protect your terraformed planets because of their increased value. It’s a long-tail process that involves complex off-planet production chains.
Another big one is surface exploration. I want to include a panning foreground where your fully rigged character can walk around off the normal screen limits. You'll be able to interact with NPCs outside the Hub, build specific planetary structures, form your own little cohort, and construct automated buildings. It's partially implemented right now, but I’ve broken it fifty different ways while making other changes, so it might need a complete rebuild. It won't be ready for Early Access, but it will be there to some degree for full launch.
Character customization is another feature I really want for full launch, though I'm still evaluating if it's strictly necessary. What will definitely be in the game, however, is a deep history, narrative, and lore. I have almost half a book's worth of origin stories and world-building written. I'm just trying to find the best way to deliver it so it’s not thrown in your face, but it's there if you want to dive into it. I’d also love to expand the in-game entertainment, things like fake ads, in-world podcasts, and weird lore-appropriate radio stations. Right now, there is a generative background music player built into the in-game phone that lets you change the tempo (which gets pretty glitchy if you push it too far), but I’d love to add different stations to make the world feel more alive.
The last thing I'll touch on is mini-games. For example, right now in the battle app, you can advance a wave faster by pressing a sequence of inputs. I’d love to add small interactive bits like clicking on a structure for an efficiency bonus by playing a little cleaning mini-game or putting out a fire. I want to add as much tactile interactivity as I can.
That’s pretty much it for now. There are many other minor features I probably didn't mention, but this covers the core of it. If everything goes to plan, the Early Access release will be July 28th.
I did kind of shatter my entire left arm. It's currently in a pretty big cast, making it really difficult to type. But it hasn't slowed me down too much, and everything should be good to go. If I feel like I can't get it to the state I want for Early Access, I might push it back another month, but I don't see it delaying much beyond that. Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks I'll be posting more announcements, updates, and expanding on some of the things mentioned here. You can also check out my Substack for deeper dives into specific mechanics.
Other than that, I’m just one person working hard on this game. If I'm quiet, it just means I'm focused and building, which is a good thing!
For anybody who read this far, I really appreciate it. Check out the game, show your support, and hopefully, I can make it worth your while.