Opalfall has been out for a little under three weeks. A quick thank you first, then the fun part.
Thank you
The launch went well. Opalfall went live on iOS and Android on August 27, and more people downloaded it and played it in the first weeks than a solo release has any right to expect. Thanks to everyone who did — and especially to everyone who left a rating. The first weeks decide whether the stores show a new game to anyone else, and yours got Opalfall in front of people who’d never heard of it.
A few things stood out watching those first weeks. The Surge is the thing people keep sending screenshots of — the meter fills, the world’s own element sweeps the board, and someone screenshots it. Players are finishing all ten worlds and finding the endgame past them, which was the real question going in. And Roy’s idle lines — “THE BLOCKS MISS YOU” and the rest — got quoted back at me more than anything else in the game.
If Opalfall has earned a rating from you and you haven’t left one yet, it still helps just as much now as it did on day one. And if something’s broken or off, tell me.
What comes next: the Landing
Right now you fly between the ten worlds. You chart them, play on them, and jump on. You never actually set down.
Soon, you will.
Cindara, from a test build. This is work in progress — the final look and feel may change.
That’s a planet’s surface: built from blocks like everything else in Opalfall, wider than the screen, with lava running through it. Every one of the ten planets gets one, and every one is its own place. Thalasis is ocean to every horizon, with the landing on a shelf of rock above the tide. Voltra is basalt flats under a storm that never breaks, with live current running through the low ground. Sylva is jungle — canopy above, undergrowth below. The Drift is plates of hull and rock hanging over a drop into nothing.
What you do there:
- Roy walks. Tap the ground and he paths there, one step at a time. Tap the lava and he tells you exactly what he thinks of that idea.
- Every landing starts dark. There’s a cooled clearing with a handful of plots, and each planet has its own buildings to raise on them — Cindara has a Forge-Lantern and an Ash Garden; the other worlds have their own. They’re made of blocks, and they grow in stages.
- Buildings cast light. Build and the planet lights up around you. A fully built world has its light back — which, if you’ve been following the story in the opal shards, means something.
- The landing keeps working while you’re gone. A lit outpost gathers chroma between sessions; set down, tap the pad, Roy collects.
Each planet has a small ritual of its own before you can build — cooling the molten crust on Cindara, bailing out the tide pools on Thalasis, sinking a grounding spike on Voltra — and its own way across the channel that cuts the map in two. The surface rhymes with the board you already know: the same tide that washes a row on Thalasis every few placements is the sea its landing sits in.
Until now the ten worlds have been stops on a route. The Landing makes each one somewhere you can stay.
The plan
Opalfall at launch is the complete first journey: ten worlds, the Surge, the ship, the traders, the story, the endgame. It’s the ground the rest stands on.
The plan is one major release every quarter, each adding a real system rather than a handful of levels. The Landing is the first. The one after it builds on the surface — the things you raise there, the parts of each map you can’t reach yet, and what lives out there. There are a couple of things past that which aren’t ready to talk about yet.
So Opalfall will keep growing in scope over the next several quarters, and the aim is for every addition to feel like part of the same game — a place to build and explore between runs, not a second game bolted on.
There’ll be a post here as each release comes together. The first Landing posts will be the fun kind: walking around the planets and showing what’s there.
Ten worlds wait in the void. Soon you’ll be able to stand on them.
Thanks for playing.
— Alex