5livesstudios

[5livesstudios]

Windbound Revealed

After years of quietly toiling away, 5 Lives Studios is excited to emerge from the shadows and reveal our latest creation. Once we had completed the rain-slicked neon streets of our debut title Satellite Reign, we turned our attention to the beauty of nature and set sail on our next adventure: Windbound.

Windbound takes place on a long-forgotten archipelago, once home to an ancient civilization. The game begins shortly after Kara — our protagonist — is separated from her fleet during a fierce and mysterious storm.

Awakening on the shore of a strange island, the player’s initial motivations are purely survival-focused, with the goal of simply returning to their tribe. However, with the storm seemingly surrounding the whole area, it’s immediately apparent that there’s something unusual about these islands, with strange structures and monuments left behind by a long-gone people.

As players progress through the world they’ll uncover the history of the ancient people, their relationship with the sea and the mysterious sea creatures that still swim beneath the waves. Survival will be their initial focus, but the world is also rich with materials they can use to craft items to make their journey easier.

Critical to success is building seafaring vessels. Starting with simple grass canoes and escalating to large multi-hull boats with a number of sails, players will learn to harness the power of the seemingly never-ending wind to traverse uncharted waters. But the seas are not always friendly, and the player is certainly not alone in the water.

Throughout their adventure players will travel to unique islands, featuring a cornucopia of flora and fauna in varied environments. Truly no two adventures will be the same with the archipelagos procedurally generated every time a new adventure begins. Each environment has different resources available, from wild berries to hitherto unknown beasts. To truly prosper players will need to craft new weapons and develop new strategies to neutralize natural threats.

Explore the scattered ruins and artifacts, unlock pieces of the islands’ past and uncover Kara’s connection to it. Unravel the mystery that enshrouds the islands and you may find your way home.

We can’t wait for you to set sail into the world of Windbound, coming to PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch August 28.

[5livesstudios]

Unity Awards and Mod Support!

Hi everyone!

It’s been a while since we updated everyone on how things going here at 5 Lives.  For starters, the Satellite Reign box copy mixup we posted about previously has been sorted, and those affected have had their copies mailed out.  Sorry again for the wait!

Unity Awards Finalist

Secondly, Satellite Reign is a finalist in the 2016 Unity Awards, in the Best Desktop/Console Game category!  We were blown away by this, it caught us completely off-guard!  Voting is now open, so go ahead and vote for your favourites in each category at the official site: https://unity3d.com/awards/2016 (the page seems to be under heavy load at the time of writing, so try again later if it doesn’t work for you)

Mod Support

We’re also please to report that Satellite Reign now has some basic modding support.  Please bear in mind that we haven't actually created modding tools—rather we’ve opened up the ability for tinkerers out there to write their own code to interact and modify the game in any way they please.  Mods are packaged into .DLL files which the game will execute on load.

We’ve made a basic example mod you can grab from GitHub here.

We look forward to seeing what cool things the community can do!

5 Lives Team.

[5livesstudios]

Satellite Reign Co-Op Officially Launches! Backer Rewards Shipped!

What a huge week!

It’s almost been a whole year since we first hit the launch button on Satellite Reign.  Since then, we’ve been hard at work implementing that final, hefty Kickstarter stretch-goal we never reached—full co-op multiplayer.

But the wait is over!  Satellite Reign has now been updated—for free—to allow for the entire campaign to be played cooperatively with up to 4 players.

We created an FAQ on the Steam Community forums back when the beta first launched, so feel free to have a look if you’ve got any questions.

As a side note, if you want to play Satellite Reign with your friends, now’s a perfect time to do so!  For a limited time, Satellite Reign and all DLC is 50% off.  Tell your friends!  Or buy it for them!

Physical rewards are on the way!

But that’s not all!  We’ve finally been able to get our physical rewards shipped out to backers.  Thanks to the incredibly helpful people over at BackerKit and Fulfillrite, rewards have started leaving the warehouse and are already on their way to their new homes.  We’re excited for everyone to finally get their hands on physical copies of Satellite Reign, along with shirts, art books, and more.

Thanks again for all of your patience and support.  It’s been a long time coming!

5 Lives team.

[5livesstudios]

Multiplayer beta updated to v1.11.0

Hi everyone, We've updated the co-op beta branch with some more fixes. A full list of the changes can be found at the link below: https://steamcommunity.com/games/268870/announcements/ We're still trying to track down the cause of a major connection issue, where players will stop receiving data from the host (everyone in the world seems to just stand still), but everything still appears fine on the host's end. Please let us know if you see this occur. There's also a minor issue where full servers will not show up in the server browser, regardless of your filter settings. 5 Lives Team

[5livesstudios]

Satellite Reign Uplink Co-Op Beta is Live!

It’s finally here!  As of RIGHT NOW, you can jump in and play the co-op beta for Satellite Reign Uplink.  We’ll cut right to the chase—here’s how you can get it on Steam:

Go to your Steam Library and right-mouse-click on Satellite Reign in your games list.

Select “Properties”

Go to the “Betas” tab

From the “Select the beta you would like to opt into” pull down select “coop_beta” (you may need to close and re-open steam for this option to appear)

Click “Close”

Wait for the Satellite Reign to download and update.

Profit

We’ll also be providing the beta on Humble, so any backers who’d prefer not to play via Steam will be able to download the beta build there.  It will be available in the next few hours.

Satellite Reign Uplink is also cross-platform, so you can play with Mac, Windows and Linux users.

Please keep in mind, this is very much a beta.  All multiplayer features are in place, but there are still bugs to squash.  If you’re connected to a game and you see your agents (or anyone else in the world) behaving strangely, please let us know.

We’ve thrown together a short FAQ as well, so have a look at that if you have any questions about the beta.  It also contains instructions on submitting bug reports.

FAQ Forum Thread

We’ll update soon when Humble Builds are live, or we have anything else useful to say!

Have fun out there!

5 Lives Team

[5livesstudios]

Co-Op and Chill

Hi everyone!

We’ve been rather quiet for a while now, so we wanted to let everyone know that we haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth.  We’ve got a few important things we wanted to share with you all.

Physical Rewards

First of all, after many, many, MANY delays, the physical boxed copies of Satellite Reign are finally in production at this very moment.  A long chain of hiccups kept things just barely out of reach, but we’re happy to say that it’s finally all sorted.  This means that we will actually be locking down postal addresses at the end of next week.  You’ve got time to double-check your postal information if you’ve moved recently, so head over to the Satellite Reign Backerkit page to give it a once-over.

All other physical rewards are already manufactured, so everything will be going out at the same time.  We apologise deeply for the delays, we want to see these goodies delivered just as much as you do!

Multiplayer Beta

The co-op multiplayer update—which we’ve titled Satellite Reign: Uplink—is coming along nicely, and we’re pleased to announce that all backers and owners of the game will be able to jump online and play as of the 3rd of June.  That’s only a week away!

We’ll be uploading a multiplayer beta to Steam which you can opt-in to play.  Anyone who was playing the Nightly branch during the Early Access period will be familiar.  We decided to do this just in case there are any bugs which may interfere with the single-player experience.  This way, anyone not interested in beta-testing the multiplayer won’t have to worry.

We’re also planning to make the multiplayer beta build available on Humble, so any backers who don’t want to use Steam will be able to access it from there.

New Website and Forums

We recently launched new and improved websites for both Satellite Reign and our official 5 Lives Studios homepage.  Along with the update comes a new forum.  Rather than having a forum attached to the Satellite Reign page, we’ve decided to have one official 5 Lives Studios forum which will act as the hub for all future 5 Lives titles (hopefully there’ll be a lot!).  This does mean that the old forums are no longer going to be updated.  They’re still viewable at the moment (http://satellitereign.com/forums), but will be shut down in the near future.

That’s all for now.  We’ll have another announcement next week with instructions for playing the multiplayer beta.

5 Lives Team.

[5livesstudios]

Satellite Reign Updated to 1.07.06 and More!

 We've got a new update out now for Satellite Reign! This has loads of fixes for abilities issues, missions, AI, and general bug fixes. Too many to list! Cloth has finally been re-enabled after receiving a fix from Unity, the initial load times are improved, and we're now on the latest version of Unity in preparation for multiplayer.

Please let us know if you have any issues. Here's a new thread for any feedback:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/268870/discussions/0/357284131782843033/

Backer Physical Rewards

Apologies for the continued delays with shipping physical rewards. It seems we've had a comedy of errors as we awaited the update from Unity which would fix the cloth bug we were having, which in turn introduced more bugs and so on. Things are finally looking more stable again and with a little more testing we'll be sending the final masters of Satellite Reign to get printed to disc.

With that in mind, it's been a while since we took addresses from people, and no doubt some of you may have moved or changed shipping addresses. If everyone could log into their BackerKit profiles at satellite-reign.backerkit.com and check or update their details to ensure we're not sending your rewards to the wrong house.

Multiplayer Co-Op Info

Once we've locked down that stable build on the main steam branch keep an eye out for news on the Multiplayer Co-op which will be coming to the nightly branch for testing!

We haven't discussed much on what the multiplayer co-op update contains. The entire single-player campaign is playable cooperatively between you and up to three of your friends.

You'll be able to drop into an existing single player or multiplayer save game with your friends and watch the chaos ensue. You can allocate the 4 agents as you please—if you have 2 players, one player can take 3 agents and the second player can take 1, or you can have 2 agents each, or even change on the fly.

You'll be able to upgrade your agents and weaponry independently but the money resources are pooled so you'll have to keep an eye on those big spenders on your team.

Both LAN and Internet options will be available, along with Steam integration, allowing you to join directly from your Steam friends list.

We look forward to letting you all get your hands on it and can't wait to hear your feedback in the near future.

[5livesstudios]

The 5 Lives Studios team will be at GDC this year!

If you’d like to meet and discuss Satellite Reign or our future projects, please contact us! We’ll be present for the entire GDC week.

[5livesstudios]

Welcome to the brand new 5 Lives Studios website!