Lightyear Frontier immediately caught our eye when it was revealed during the ID@Xbox Twitch Showcase, with its vibrant, colourful art style and an interesting mashup of genres. In Lightyear Frontier, you’ll be farming on an alien planet; base building, crafting, discovering alien plants, handling wildlife, and more. Lightyear Frontier only sounds more promising the more we hear about it, so we reached out to Swedish developer Frame Break for more info — and CEO Joakim Hedström was kind enough to chat with us about all things Lightyear Frontier. What is Lightyear Frontier?Lightyear Frontier sounds like an intriguing mashup of genres — it’s an open-world farming and exploration game set on an alien planet, with base building and crafting elements.When does Lightyear Frontier launch?We don’t yet have a release date for Lightyear Frontier, but we’ll be sure to update here when we do!What’s it about?In Lightyear Frontier, you’re building your new home on an alien planet, discovering the strange new fauna and flora, and taking care of your farm. According to the game’s site, we’ll also be setting out to “venture into the unknown, discover ancient ruins, and uncover the secrets of your planet to decipher a message that has waited for eons to be heard.”How does Lightyear Frontier play?You can play both first-person and third-person in Lightyear Frontier, and can be joined by up to three friends online. Exploration and farming are a major part of the core gameplay loop — we’ll be building our farm, discovering new resources, finding and growing crops, improving our mech, exploring the planet and its mysteries, protecting our farm from environmental hazards, and just generally living our best frontier life.Aside from discovering and growing alien plants, we’ll also be looking to domesticate alien wildlife, and one of the most intriguing aspects of Lightyear Frontier’s farming elements is that there will be a full breeding and genetics system in place. This sounded like an interestingly complex mechanic to add to an already varied game, so we asked Hedström to tell us more. Now, just a reminder before we dive in, that Lightyear Frontier’s breeding and genetics system is still in the “early design stages” and that things might change before the game launches. With that said, let’s take a look at how the system currently functions. “Each animal has two to three traits that affect things like the resources they generate, their disposition, or how easy they are to sustain,” begins Hedström. “If two healthy and happy animals of the same species share an enclosure, there’s a chance they’ll have an offspring that inherits a trait from each parent, with a small chance to mutate and get a trait not found in either. At its core it’s about optimization,” Hedström continues. “You want to be selective about which animals to pair up and strive to introduce the most beneficial traits to your flock.” The devs say they don’t want traits to just be tied to numerical bonuses, but instead to “be about trade-offs and what suits your playstyle. An example of the kind of traits we’re designing is “Large appetite”, which increases the amount of food the animal needs each day but also increases the amount of manure it produces, which is good if you want to make lots of fertiliser but bad if you’re low on food.”What’s the world like?Since exploration is such a huge part of Lightyear Frontier, Hedström was keen not to give too much away. We did get a few hints, however: “The environment shown in our announcement trailer is just the starting area of the full map, intentionally designed to look more earth-like to ease the players into the environment. The further you explore, the more alien and fantastic the landscape becomes.” Lightyear Frontier introduces a range of alien fauna and flora, with the game featuring a bright, futuristic art style. It seems like quite the challenge, to come up with each new type of alien plant or animal: “Normally, we approach it from the direction that there’s a certain mechanical role we want the plant or animal to fulfil, like what kind of resource it generates and the mechanics involved in maintaining it,” explains Hedström. “We usually have more than one design idea for the same mechanical purpose, and after narrowing it down we opt for the design that has the most interactions with other systems. Once the concept is set, we explore different visual designs until we find one that clearly expresses the mechanics and fits in with the rest of the environment.” However, the devs do sometimes use a different approach. “If our artist comes up with a really cool visual design that just adds greatly to the mood and atmosphere of the alien planet, we can work backwards and instead find inspiration for new mechanics from it,” Hedström says. Taking the farming genre to an alien planet is an interesting twist. “We were drawn by the possibilities opened up by alien plants and environments,” explains Hedström. “Without the restriction to real life plants, we can bend the rules and introduce all kinds of interesting mechanics and quirks for the strange flora you find in Lightyear Frontier.” Any news on the Lightyear Frontier achievements?It’s too early for us to have the achievement list, as Hedström adds that they haven’t started achievement design yet. “Once public playtests begin we’ll keep an eye on how players interact with the world and each other and keep that in mind when we begin adding achievements,” Hedström adds. “We do want to reward the players not just for exploring and collecting, but also for maintaining their farm and growing their plants to perfection. We’re really looking forward to seeing what the players might do once they get their hands on the game!”Has Lightyear Frontier piqued your interest? Let us know in the comments!
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