Ambrosia Sky news & patch notes

We are on the road to Act Two... and we have a few surprises for you along the way!

Have you wanted to get a closer look at Ambrosia Sky: Act One, like a really close look? Well, squint no further and stop pressing your nose against your monitor as we now have a new weekly video series to solve that exact predicament. Introducing Exploring Ambrosia: part devlog, part full playthrough, and part behind-the-scenes look. Every week, we will be joined by a new guest from the dev team to share insights into the game as we revisit all of Act One.

The series streams every Tuesday at 12pm PT, 3pm ET over on our Twitch channel. The videos will also be archived every Wednesday on our YouTube channel.

Yesterday, we streamed our first episode! We were joined by Narrative Director Kaitlin Tremblay to explore B-Ring Evacuation Point and Parker & Walsh Farm, the first two levels of the game. You can find the archive right here:

Here's our full upcoming schedule:

This is just the first entry on The Road to Act Two (aka August 6th)! We won't be posting every future episode as a Steam blog post, so be sure to follow our social channels for updates.

✨ See you in the stars,

Ambrosia Sky: Act Two arrives as a free update on August 6th! 🎉

In Ambrosia Sky's second act, Dalia closes in on the truth behind the disaster consuming The Cluster.

Dalia continues her search for her ex-girlfriend, Maeve, while laying the dead to rest and collecting DNA to advance research into human immortality. The final act resolves the major threads introduced in Act One while expanding the experience with new mission locations, fresh exo-fungus types to harvest and survive, and a reworked progression system with additional upgrades.

Act Two launches as a free update for all existing owners. The price will increase to $24.99 USD after the launch sale promotional period.

We'll be sharing more about Act Two in the next couple of months: keep an eye out for more from us! 💜

Want to read more about Ambrosia Sky?

We have three articles that might interest you, including two interviews with our development team and also a playthrough of our one-page (free!) TTRPG. Check 'em out:

Toronto’s Soft Rains made one of 2025’s most original games — now, it’s doing it again

Mobile Syrup (Bradly Shankar)

GLAAD Gaming Spotlight: Kaitlin Tremblay and Sofy Kabachek on Queerness, Honoring the Dead, and Closure in ‘Ambrosia Sky: Act One’

GLAAD (Annabelle Cook)

You left home, became a sci-fi death cleaner, and now you must return home

The Soft Rains' Weather Report (Colin Cummings (okay this one is just me))

✨ See you in the stars,

Myths, Superstitions, and Folklore of the Cluster!

The following is taken from the Cluster’s premier encyclopedia, a community-driven digital archive that collects and catalogues the Cluster’s culture and way of life. The exact author is unknown, as all articles are contributed, fact-checked, and edited by intrepid yet anonymous scholars across the Cluster.

The Cluster is full of its own particular folklore. Living amongst the stars hasn’t cooled humanity’s inclination to understand the currently unknowable through story and superstition.

The most widely known of the Cluster’s superstitions is, of course, the scrimshaw bone charm! These charms are found everywhere throughout the Cluster as they are tokens of goodwill and good luck!

When the early settlers of the Cluster discovered the asteroids were made of decomposing leviathan, they weren’t repulsed. Instead, they looked to the dead leviathan under their feet as a sign of goodwill and fortune. Early settlers would whittle charms/talismans from exposed pieces of leviathan bone, and these were thought to confer good luck. Those who were less superstitious still collected the charms as a reminder of humanity’s place in the cosmos: we are part of an ecosystem, not masters over it. 

These charms were often given as gifts during difficult periods for people, a token of goodwill and a supposed transferral of luck. During the worst days of the crisis, people looked to these charms, carrying them with them, giving them as gifts, or hiding them in corners of the Cluster, hoping the charms would help ward off the fungal contamination.

But what other, lesser-known superstitions persist in the Cluster?

For instance, what about the defensive capabilities of dried Earth flowers?

During the first generation of the Cluster, Earth expats believed that dried flowers, when left at the foot of a door, would ward off certain species of exo-life. While we now know this is entirely folkloric, it was born from a true encounter. One of the original founders of the Cluster wore a dried lavender bundle in his EVA suit. Upon encountering a small, slug-like creature, the creature appeared to exhibit signs of an allergic reaction. The creature ran away from the colonist, and thus was born the myth of exolife’s allergies to pollen! It took humanity a bit to understand that the exo-life could have allergies, and by the time we did, the superstition was already deeply rooted in Cluster culture. Botany students, who learn their craft by growing flowers from seeds, also dry out the flowers they grow, giving them as gifts to their friends and family.

No surprise for an agricultural colony, the Cluster also has superstitions regarding its fungus! It’s widely believed to be bad luck to eat the first fungus you pick during a harvest. Instead, the old wives’ tale asks farmers (or wayward children) to bury this fungus, a symbol of giving back, in order to ensure bountiful harvests and tasty crops. There’s no story here behind this one, folks. It’s just thought to be considerate! But even if there aren’t any reports of bad luck coming to those who don’t, who would want to take the risk?

But it’s not just the soil that the people of the Cluster have superstitions about. During the initial founding, when the ships Dr. Volkov and his peers came here in were being re-purposed to build the homesteads we now live in and the labs we now work in, accidents were common. After one scientist got trapped in a malfunctioning airlock, it became procedure to knock on airlock doors as you passed them. Luckily for our intrepid founding generation, the only things that knocked back were humans (who became trapped thanks to sporadic electricity–good thing our botanists figured that one out).

Just because nothing supernatural ever knocked back, didn’t stop the first generation’s kids from inventing wild stories about monsters! The second and third generations of kids used to tell scary stories, passed down from their parents. These stories were originally designed to keep the kids safe from areas of the colony that were still being built or had yet to be repaired, due to a lack of materials or hands. Some of these scary stories included believing that air vents were a monster’s breath or that the hollowed-out mines held monsters in them.

Another safety procedure that gave rise to children’s fears was the emergency lights on every homestead. These emergency lights shine at all times. They’re basically an “everything is okay” alarm. But kids tell of a wandering homestead, one whose orbit appears to be antithetical to Saturn’s gravity, and whose lights blink on and off throughout the night. Kids scare each other with this “haunted homestead”, warning of monsters and other creatures waiting to eat would-be rescuers. Which is for the best, since homesteads with malfunctioning emergency lights are, in fact, extremely dangerous due to their unstable gravity, uncontrollable growth, and other potential hazards, such as wayward electricity and broken systems.

Despite all this talk of monsters, none of the kids thought to be scared of the leviathan, whose body composed the ground they walked on! Which is probably for the best.

While most of these have fallen out of practice in just one generation’s time, it’s a neat time capsule into the mentality of those who helped build our illustrious agricultural colony! And lest you think Clusterites are the only folklore-prone group. It’s been said that Scarabs carry dirt vials from different places to travel to, so spirits can take a piece of their home with them when they pass.

Thanks for reading the second entry of The Cluster Archives, and we'll continue to unearth the history of the colony and its people. The road to Act Two continues.

✨ See you in the stars,

Exploring the death rituals was one of my first tasks when I started out as a Technical Designer at Soft Rains. The team didn't have a solid plan on how to approach them at the time, so I was given a long leash to play around with. I had a few strong references in A Mortician's Tale and L.A. Noire. At the time, we wanted to have many death rituals per level, with varying levels of realization, and we considered them side objectives in the game.

L.A. Noire

A higher fidelity reference that includes hand animation when inspecting the body.

A Mortician's Tale

Multiple-step body preparation that includes the use of multiple tools.

We started out with a more interactive approach, similar to our references, letting the player select tools to use and progress through the procedure steps. We iterated to make the experience feel intuitive, but struggled with the pacing shift between the main gameplay and the death ritual experience. Every time the game waited for the player's input, it felt clunky and broke the flow, taking people out of the emotional arc we were building.

Early Prototype - First Iteration

Player presses an interact prompt to enter a death ritual state with a unique overlay. The player follows the instructions in the overlay, using multiple tools to complete various tasks. The death ritual ends when the body is bioremediated.

We learned a lot from these early prototypes. We learned that we could create an intimate, tender moment while sticking to a first-person view by focusing on Dalia's hands and how she touched the remains. And ruled out some of our direct references, too; for example, the hovering hand in L.A. Noire didn't read well with the camera so close to the remains.

Early Prototype - Hovering Hand

Trying to emulate L.A. Noire more closely; having Dalia's hand hover over the body, and the camera follow the hand. The first-person view in this prototype made the whole experience uncomfortable. We quickly walked away from this.

Even breaking the interactions into a few chunks still felt clunky. So we moved towards a single cinematic to capture the moment.

Early Prototype - Breaking Into Chunks

Reducing the amount of actions the player needs to take. Instead, pausing and waiting for an player input to proceed at several stages. Even this approach is clunky and takes the player out of the experience too much. And testing voice over with temporary VO, while having Dalia encounter a character that is about to die.

Early Prototype - A Single Cinematic

Remove the requirement of any interaction from the player. Iteration on the writing. Give Dalia (and the player) a moment to confirm the death before proceeding with the ritual.

The exploration of the death rituals also included considering how these are placed in a level. We learned how valuable set dressing is. We considered gating the death ritual behind some fetch quests for personalized items required to include in the ritual and complete it.

But again, that all seemed to knock the air out of the ritual itself. Not letting the player complete the ritual upon finding the body felt bad. Some of the personalized ritual elements, like coins on the eyes, read silly in first person. We could have pushed through some of these challenges later on, possibly with higher fidelity; for example, if the coins were smaller, and it wasn't the unreal mannequin in the shot.

On the other hand, selecting moments that felt strong and hit as intended despite the placeholder assets felt like stronger choices that would set us up for success and reduce added work down the road.

Early Prototype - Placing coins on the eyes

Testing a different death rite; having Dalia place coins on the deceased's eyes. It looked very silly, so we decided to walk away from it and not gamble that it would work better with a higher-fidelity realization.

Once we started to receive strong, sombre emotional responses from early playtests with folks outside our studio, we knew we had landed on something special. In the process, the place of the death ritual in our game also changed. They became more centred, the focal point in the space they are in. This helped establish a stronger direction for the rituals, but also a higher-production, more bespoke one.

Notes I shared when we started working on the Parker & Walsh Farm level demonstrate this learning:

(Some general thoughts on DRs, some of this is obvious, but worth repeating - I feel.)

• a death ritual should be rooted in the scene around it - the scene should tell a story about that person, how they ended up there, how they died, and so on...

• the player should have some space to sit with the emotional impact of it, there should be some build-up to the reveal of the space where the remains are, and some ramp-off to sit with it.

• the death ritual shouldn't be tucked away - like, it's not hiding in a drawer haha - it should be very evident when you enter the space

• throughout the level, as the player approaches the DR space, there should be opportunities to learn about the deceased, their connection to the space, and the people around them. So by the time the player gets to the remains - they should have "met" the deceased.

All of this meant that we would have fewer death rituals in the game, and each would be expensive to produce.

Early Prototype - Validated Proof of Concept

The placement of the death ritual is integrated into the scene. Music starts building as soon as the player enters the space, and Dalia reacts to the body and the scene soon after. The scene conveys what may have happened to the deceased, allowing the player to explore and speculate before engaging the remains. Interacting with the body triggers an animation sequence that guides the entire procedure, culminating in the bioremediation of the remains.

Bioremediation is a particle effect that covers the body and conceals its disappearance; effectively "turning the body into a flower". After the player regains control, Dalia reacts to the experience -- letting the player sit with the emotional impact longer. And this experience "hits" with early playtesters, even with temp assets.

At this point, we were really confident that we could achieve the desired emotional outcome of the death rituals. At the same time, we were solidifying the core loop of Ambrosia Sky, defining its feature sets, scoping, and building out our production pipelines.

As part of this reevaluation, we decided to lean on the strength of our existing team. That's when Kait, our Narrative Director, had the idea to lean more on our 2D and comic art experts, and deliver the key frame moments with comic panels. It was a big shift and a big lift for those art pieces, but I felt confident we could hit the mark. We've already shown that we could hit the emotional response with temp assets, a few keyframe anims, and choice music. I was convinced that we could replace the key frames with still images, and we had much higher confidence in achieving high-quality images than in the animations.

Putting together a quick prototype with still images of those key frames allowed us to communicate the idea to the team and to onboard our concept artist, Vash, to start working on the comic panels. It also helped build confidence in this direction among the folks working on the feature.

Comic Style Prototype - First Iteration

Use the key frames of the full animation sequence to generate four comic panels that appear on top of the remains. The bioremediation particles are visualized on the comic panels and the body, connecting the player back to the scene at the end of the sequence. Music continues to play after the player regains control, allowing the player to sit with the experience.

At this time, the team decided to take on a challenge; instead of recreating a death ritual we already knew worked, we picked a new character to prove out this new approach. The team picked Gerald; if we could make people feel something for this stubborn, grumpy old man, then we could deliver on all our other death rituals with this approach.

In response to my hesitation to take on a risk, Kait pointed out that having already proven out an approach for a straightforward ritual, picking a character that broke the mould would help us make sure that we could both achieve the emotional experience with a crochetchy character, as well as make sure that our direction could support a range of emotional tones. So we began working on the first iteration of Gerald’s death ritual.

Comic Style Prototype - sketches for panels and text

Using a more complex comic-style layout that better utilizes negative space and layers panels within the physical space. The personal testimony is delivered via text that appears atop the panels after they have all been revealed. The sequence pauses before bioremediation, letting the player take it all in before it disappears.

Leaning on all our learning from the validated prototype, we started working on the level layout for Parker & Walsh Farm. We placed the death ritual prototype in its intended location in the level and began iterating on it in the context of the surrounding level.

Comic Style Prototype - Placed in Greybox Level

Placing Gerald's death ritual in an early version of the Parker & Walsh Farm level. Seeing the space we have to build up for the emotional impact, and the type of things the player could be doing before and after the ritual. Closer to final render on some panels and seeing how they render in-game.

Placing the death ritual in the level made it easy to demonstrate how important it was to give the music space to build. It wasn't enough to start playing the music when the ritual began; the tone had to build before the player approached the remains.

We couldn't just rely on distance to build up the music. We felt that most players would spend enough time approaching Gerald in the apartment, but wanted to account for those who traverse faster or use a shortcut. We implemented a dynamic buildup with various triggers throughout the apartment to respond to the player’s exploration patterns.

Comic Style Prototype - Dynamic Music Escalation

Testing dynamic music escalation; entering the room, leaving the room, leaving the room after exploring a bit. The music escalates using triggers set up in Gerald's apartment, spiralling up to the location of the remains. Another layer of escalation in the vocals when bioremediation begins. And ramping down for some time after the player regains control. Also showing some progress on panel rendering.

Continuing the iteration of the comic panel approach, we loosened the first-person camera rule, which allowed the panel reveal and framing to be more dynamic.

Comic Style Prototype - Art Pass

Progress on art assets, including a modular mesh for bodies in the game, posed for Gerald. "He's... older" line from Dalia doesn't work with the realized model. A more dynamic camera to frame the scene and the panels. The text appears with the panels to maintain the emotional connection between the text and the panels. Bringing back the temporary voice-over to test the impact of it. Tuning the lighting and rendering on the panels for better colour representation. Better input prompt to begin bioremediation. This version increases the confidence in this direction for the rest of the team.

Eventually, I was mostly hands-off with the death rituals, and the feature's realization was driven more by art, narrative, and music. We got more animation support and were able to bring back some of those intimate first-person perspectives of Dalia interacting with the deceased. Textures and set-dressing were strengthening the existing structure of the emotional experience.

Comic Style Prototype - Finalizing Assets

Finalized meshes. Texturing on all assets. Set design. Lighting pass. Dalia animations, leading up to the panels, and after bioremediation. Finalized bioremediation particles and post-bioremediation bloom. Sound design pass.

It was incredible watching the death ritual evolve; Kai's and Harmony's took on whole new identities with rich stories. I wrote Kai's personal testimony, and the team brought it to life.

Ultimately, the death rituals perfectly encapsulate the interdisciplinary strength of our team. They are the part of our game touched by most hands, and they were made better for it.

Final Version - Gerald's Death Ritual

Final assets; final set design and lighting pass. Voiceover performances for Gerald's personal testimony and Dalia’s reactions.

If you want to know more about the development of Ambrosia Sky, take a look at our prior dev logs that cover our main character Dalia, the role of a Scarab, the art & audio direction of the game, a look at the tech & design behind our cleaning mechanics, an in-depth look at level design, and an overview of what Ambrosia Sky is.

If you still haven't picked up Ambrosia Sky, now is a great time to do so! The game is currently on sale for 20% for a limited time, and the Act Two free update arrives soon.

Greetings Scarabs! ːscarabsignː

We have an important update to share about Ambrosia Sky’s next chapter. ːambrosiaprojectː

We’re excited to be able to bring the full story to everyone as soon as we can. Ambrosia Sky: Act Two will now serve as the conclusion to Dalia’s return home. When we first introduced Ambrosia Sky, we outlined Dalia’s story as a three-act journey. As development has continued, and as we've reflected on what the story truly needs, we've decided to bring the remaining chapters together into a single, cohesive finale. 

Focusing our full development efforts on Act Two allows us to deliver a polished, thoughtful, and cathartic ending to the crisis that began when Dalia first set foot onto The Cluster. Act Two will be the end of her journey as she races to uncover the reasons for the crisis and find her girl, Maeve. She will find answers to many of the questions that Act One raised, though Dalia may discover more than she bargained for…  

From a gameplay perspective, Act Two will echo Act One in terms of content and will include all new mission locations to explore, new exo-fungus to contend with and harvest, as well as an updated progression system with new upgrades. 

Ambrosia Sky: Act Two will be a free update to the base game. When Act Two is released, we will increase the base price to $24.99 USD to reflect the full experience. While we don’t have a specific release date to share just yet, our priority is to make sure the finale feels worthy of Dalia’s journey and of this community.

We’ve taken feedback from our community on Act One, and by concentrating our efforts on Act Two, we can make Ambrosia Sky a cohesive and cathartic experience.  

Thank you to everyone who has played Ambrosia Sky: Act One so far! We’re excited about what’s coming in Act Two and can’t wait to share Dalia’s completed story with you all. Keep an eye out on our socials and on Steam as we’ll be sharing more about the upcoming Act in the coming months. 

Thank you for your continued support!

The Soft Rains team

ːhonkytotː

Hale Volkova’s first address as leader of the Cluster

We dig together, we grow together.

It has been a generation since my father, the esteemed Dr. Veer Volkov, packed up his few belongings from Earth and made way to the asteroid belt around Saturn.

Earth was dying, but not dead yet. And while humanity prepared their spaceships for galactic travel, learned the known rules of the universe and picked which ones to defy, the success of humanity’s expansion into the cosmos was threatened by a simple need: humans must eat.

But there was a glimmer of hope. Asteroids dotting Saturn’s rings, which seemed to host a growth of exo-fungus. Fungus which did not wither under radiation nor break under solar winds. Fungus that grew from mineral-rich soil in the asteroids, made of composition we would soon discover the secret of … once it was too late to turn back. But before the discovery of the soil came the discovery of the fungus. All that was needed were those courageous enough to pack shovels, tea pots, and trowels and head for an irreversible life, establishing agriculture on those dead rocks.

My father, Dr. Volkov, was one of those brave few. He led the intrepid scientists and frontiersmen to new life. His spacesuit was the first to leave the airlock. His shovel broke the first ground. His hand cultivated the first exo-fungus, and his stomach digested it before anybody else. He survived on the alien fungus and then he set about building a world to cultivate it. Knowing there was no future left on Earth, they broke down their spaceships to build homes, they tilled what they could of the soil and mined what grew deep in the ground. Still, harvests were unreliable. The fungal growth was sporadic at best. Abundant at times, scarce at others. It did not follow a harvest/fallow period like on Earth. Because, of course, we were not on Earth.

And eventually, as my father and the others would learn, we weren’t even living on a rock. We lived on the dead and decomposing remains of a long forgotten cosmic leviathan, a beast unknown to human physiology and seeming to have drifted into our solar system as its final burial. We prophesied that the leviathan came from a void, or elsewhere, deceased eons before mankind ever walked. We reckoned that as its corpse drifted into Sol, it got caught in Saturn’s gravity, its soft, decomposing body ripped apart by the force of Saturn’s pull, orbiting the gas giant in its dismembered decay.

When we learned of this truth, we ran calculations. How long until the decay was too far gone to support human life? How long until the ground crumbles and we must evacuate? Centuries longer than my lifetime is the projection, based on the current rate of decomposition. Humanity’s best botanists and agriculturalists all agree. Centuries more. If not millennia. Our generation shall eat. The next generation, my newborn stepdaughter’s generation, will eat. And so shall her children’s generation, and the next, and the next. Our end is not nigh.

And just as soon as humanity spread far enough into the galaxy, fed by our supplies, they forgot about us. In turn, we, too, forgot that the leviathan was once a living thing. We disinfected its name, defanged it in our collective memory so we could continue tilling its bone and eating the fungus that grew from its decay without giving it further thought. Even as it fought back in turn, infecting us with Clusterlung from inhaling its spores, we sanitized it. This is the price to pay for not being hungry. This is the price to pay for being sated. This is the price of your lives among the stars. A price paid by the broken bones of the leviathan and the broken bones of those who built this world for us. This is the cost of survival. Remember that.

That is what we must never forget. We do what we do to survive. To eat. And I will do what I must to ensure that, no matter how much we have been shunned by the rest of humanity, that we will never go hungry. I will never forget about you, my community, my disciples, my family. I will fight for us to live here and thrive here and depend upon no one but ourselves.

We once fed humanity, and that made us great.

Now we need only feed ourselves, and that makes us strong.

Hale Volkova

Year 2210

Thanks for reading the first of our dive into the archives of The Cluster, as we unearth the history of the colony and its people. We'll be sharing more soon as we continue on our journey to Act Two.

✨ See you in the stars,

Hello Scarabs! ːscarabsignː

Community Manager Colin here with the latest report: we've got new Steam items, we're taking down our demo, and we've got some upcoming updates to hint at vaguely at the end of this post. Let's dive in...

ALERT: Incoming items!

Folks may already notice the brand new trading cards arriving in their inventories! We've added trading cards, profile badges, profile backgrounds and even a Steam Deck start-up video so you can fancy up your digital spaces with some cool new stuff.

Here's what we've added:

• Six new profile badges (incl. foil!)

• Five new trading cards to collect

• Six profile backgrounds

• A Steam Deck start-up video

• Plus, these emoticons: ːhonkytotːːscarabsignːːambrosiaprojectːːdaliahelmetːːskullriteːːzerogtetherː

The game badges also reflect the journey that the player (and other characters) find themselves on. Upon arrival at The Cluster, you find everything in Decay. Time (and a sentient alien fungus) has not been kind to the colony. As you explore, you start to uncover what has happened here and how the people lived here, a key Discovery. Dalia will find themselves on a path of Growth while facing her past.

It is after these first three steps that the colony can finally begin to see Restoration, as the alien fungi are removed. Each step brings the player and Dalia closer to the Truth and maybe even... a Rebirth.

Finally, our very own Joel Burgess tinkered away in Unreal and came up with a great new Steam Deck start-up video; it pairs well with our officially Steam Deck Verified™ game. :D Take a peek below for a preview:

Don't forget to collect the cards, grab the new items from the point store, and of course, craft the badge so you can display your very own Scarab badge on your profile.

Grab the new items here!

PSA: Our demo is going away very soon!

Ambrosia Sky has come a long way since our demo launched, and we feel it no longer reflects our main title. It's also a lot of development bandwidth to update it, and we are focused on Act Two! While this might just be a goodbye for now, we will be removing the demo from Steam by Friday, January 30th, at 12pm EST. (We're taking it down that morning, so it will be gone before this time!)

If you've already added it to your library and downloaded it, you can hold onto it forever as a wee Ambrosia Sky time capsule. If you've been on the fence and want to still try the game out, you've still got some time!

Some other quick community news...

We've got some bite-sized items for folks to check out in case they want to dive deeper into the world of Ambrosia Sky. In case you didn't see them on our social channels, here's what you missed on Glee:

• Our one-page TTRPG is now available on itch.io for free! Go check it out.

• Our Discord book club is still taking on new members! We're working out a new format for the club, but if you don't want to miss what we're planning, join the server!

• If you follow us over on Twitch, you'll get notified when the aforementioned Joel Burgess hops on stream and works on some new Act Two levels!

• Also, we got Bailey Wolfe (Dalia's VO) to read out some of your Steam reviews. Take a peek below to see if yours got included!

At the top of this post, I mentioned I would vaguely tease some upcoming things: well, hold on to your horses because this community update is just the tip of the update iceberg! We've got an accessibility game update, a new bit of worldbuilding, an upcoming sale, and more arriving sooner than you think...

Thanks again to everyone who has played Act One, told a friend about it, and left us a review on our Steam page. These all help us make sure the future of Ambrosia Sky & Soft Rains is a bright one! ☀

✨ See you in the stars,

Ambrosia Sky: Act One is now 20% off for a limited time! ✨

From 12/18-1/5, you can experience what Inverse called, “A promising start for a somber sci-fi tale.” for only $11.99 USD! (or $15.59 CAD 🍁) If you haven't picked it up yet, now is a great time. (it also makes a good gift for a pal, just in case you need something last minute...)

Holidays are the time to return home, and it turns out you can go home again, it just might be full of 🍄 when you get there.

How about an Ambrosia Sky-inspired one-page RPG? 🎲

In case you want to take your death cleaning with you into our real world, our community manager Colin has put together a small one-page TTRPG inspired by Ambrosia Sky! This one-page solo journalling RPG emulates some of the game's mechanics, encouraging you to clean/tidy spaces while also reflecting on the important items you come across as you do so.

It is called: YOU LEFT HOME AND BECAME A SCI-FI DEATH CLEANER AND NOW YOU MUST RETURN HOME (also your ex is there)

You can grab the PDF now for free on our Discord, or keep an eye out in January for its release on itch.io.

That's it for us this year! We're heading out on break soon for a well-earned rest, and then we'll be back at it again at the top of 2026 as we continue our work on Act Two. Lots of updates and news will be coming from us in the new year, so stay tuned.

Thank you to everyone who has played the game, left us feedback, left a review, submitted a bug report, and told their friends about us. You've all helped us have a great 2025, and we couldn't have done it without you. From all of us here at Soft Rains, we hope you have a safe and happy holiday! 💜 ✨ See you in the stars and in 2026,

Hello Scarabs!

Just a wee update for you folks today - our latest patch has landed! This patch contains a variety of fixes and adjustments for Act One, including many reported to us by our wonderful community. <3

If you have your own feedback or bugs you wish to report for future patches, visit our Feature Upvote board here. Here's what you can expect in the latest update:

🪐 = Community requested or reported

• A variety of UI updates across the game 🪐

• Progression tuning - prices for upgrades are now more expensive 🪐 (Dev note: This is a balance adjustment as we saw a common complaint that upgrade progression happened too quickly. If you've already acquired upgrades, you won't lose them, but new players will see a better staggered progression to upgrades.)

• More graphic resolution in windowed mode

• Audio polish

• Various audio and music bug fixes

• Fruit sample canister can only be collected once, none will respawn upon revisitation

• Simplified mission exit options 🪐

• Fixed Asteroid collision

Thank you to our players for helping us make the game better, and we hope everyone has a great end to 2025. We'll be back with one last community update later this week before we take off for some rest. ✨ See you in the stars,

Colin

\

Support Ambrosia Sky: Act One in the Steam Awards!

If you haven't already gotten your nominations in... (Dr Zoidberg voice) Why not Ambrosia Sky? We think we belong in three main categories:

Joel Burgess is the Studio Head and a co-founder of Soft Rains. He has previously contributed in studio and design leadership roles for Bethesda Game Studios, Capybara, and Ubisoft Toronto. He has led teams of all sizes, and is well-known for his contributions to open world and level design through articles, lectures, and mentorship.

Hi, I’m a Level Designer.

I’m Joel, and I wear a few hats at Soft Rains. But the one I’ve worn the longest over my whole career is my Level Design hat.

I remember when I first created a digital wall. I’d been a curious kid about games and computers, but it wasn’t until 1997 that I visited a friend whose mom had recently bought him a copy of “Level Design Secrets of Duke Nukem 3D” at the local mall. Armed with a CD-ROM and the BUILD engine, he showed me how to manifest a wall with a simple press of PgUp. I was hooked.

From there, I cut my teeth modding games throughout the late-90’s golden age of first-person shooters and immersive sims, eventually making my way into the professional game industry, where I’ve done level design on everything from third-person action brawlers to first-person dungeon crawlers, and even a color-matching puzzle… trawler?

Anyway.

Level design is my first love as a game creator, and it has been SUCH a joy to bring that skillset to what the Ambrosia Sky team has created. So I’m here to give a detailed breakdown of one of our levels from the project: The Bhat Communications Tower.

This level (which you can play in Ambrosia Sky: Act One) sees Dalia exploring a small communications array built into an asteroid near Saturn. She’s sent to collect organic samples that have taken root in unusual places. Along the way, she’ll have to contend with fungal hazards, disrupted systems, and the emotional complexity of walking in the footsteps of the person your old flame fell in love with after you left home. WOO! Sounds like a banger! Let’s peel back the process.

Where do Levels Come From?

We’ll begin at the beginning: where did the foundation of this level originate? Two main ideas drove it: one rooted in world-building, and another borne from a design experiment.

The world-building piece originated with “The Playhouse”, a location we’d planned and scrapped in an early phase of the project. This was an asteroid we had envisioned as a series of public spaces which the people of the Cluster had built around infrastructure tech, including a long-range broadcast beacon. We always think of the Cluster through the lens of its people and the community they’d form over multiple generations — this familiar, human element provides a strong narrative counter to strange and speculative elements of our sci-fi setting. So the idea of people building a community folk theatre in an asteroid bristling with space-age communication gear felt great to us.

While the larger concept of the Playhouse remains on the shelf, I still liked the idea of a communications array overlooking Saturn’s rings, and our plot had a use for this kind of location as well.

The design experiment, on the other hand, was comparatively abstract — I wanted to try making a level with a really small footprint. By the time work began on this level, the game was well into production. Our core mechanics, especially cleaning and tether movement, were taking shape, and we’d built some other levels already. I was curious to stress-test those learnings by situating them in a small physical space with a high density of exploration and movement. Put another way: I wanted to build a level that really made use of its nooks-n-crannies.

Massing Phase

I was able to kickstart my work on this level by borrowing an existing room sketch I’d previously made using the modular kit created for the game by Thomas Fraser. (My love of modular level-building is well documented, and the ability to “doodle” in a test level and have those doodles be useful for later ideas is one of the great side perks of working this way)

I chose this “Atrium” room to start with because I thought the high-ceilinged central space would give good opportunities for players to use the tether or low gravity, and I’d get good use from the way the columnades partition the space to create a puzzle flow using our electrical simulation. I also just liked the cathedral-like shapes. (Fun fact: in the project files, this level is called “Power Church”)

The next room — and I really wanted to limit myself to two rooms for this layout — would house the titular Communication Tower. I wanted the tower itself to be an obelisk-like, central feature for two reasons: first, its height would showcase the mobility options offered by tether and gravity. Second, the tower shape would require players to navigate around a central target to get ideal lines of sight whilst cleaning.

Sequencing the Player Experience

As I blocked out the dimensions, I was also thinking about how I wanted to sequence the level or create a sense of pacing & flow.

I wanted the pace of the level to be somewhat slow and deliberate. This is supported by the primary objective of the level, which focuses on finding a number of samples hidden throughout the space, and would play into my goal of emphasizing “nooks-n-crannies” exploration. This is how I imagined the flow playing out:

To celebrate our launch, we've created a brand new trailer above that should put you in the right headspace as you step into Dalia's shoes and return home.

Take a peek at it above, or find it on our store page! Don't miss out on our launch discount of 15% off! We also offer a bundle featuring our stellar soundtrack, which includes a 20% discount when you purchase both items together.

If you're joining us on this journey for the first time, here's a handy primer to our community spaces! 🐞 Submit bug reports & feedback using our Feature Upvote board!

This board is reviewed weekly, allowing us (and you!) to track our progress in addressing community concerns and submit these reports directly to our internal tracking systems. 🙋‍♀️ Join our community Discord server!

If you want to chat directly with the development team, get updates about the game, or just find fellow fans to chat with: this is your home for all things Ambrosia Sky!

📖 Read our past devlogs!

Since June, we've been sharing monthly devlogs that go in-depth on our tech, our world, and our characters. If you want to learn more about the game straight from the source, head over to our News section and you'll find them! 🔗 For all of our other links, including social media, personality quizzes, and our recent Extra Life streams, use our handy dandy Linktree!

RE: Acts Structure

Hey, folks! Joel here. I'm the Studio Head at Soft Rains.

I appreciate y'all taking the time to share your thoughts, and it's only fair to return that favor.

We’ve gotten some questions about our act release structure, so we wanted to take a moment to offer some clarity around future act releases and how they’ll work, when they’ll release, and what they’ll cost.  We didn't want to release information that might change - but given the questions raised by our community members, I'd like to be transparent.

When Will the Story be Complete?

The story of Ambrosia Sky is planned across three acts. With the foundation and systems built for Act One, we're able to focus on new content and iteration. Our goal is to release Acts Two and Three in 2026, completing the story arc for Dalia and the Cluster Crisis.

What Will Act 2 and Act 3 Cost?

We’ve seen a lot of questions about pricing, and that’s completely fair. Here’s the honest answer: we don’t know yet, and we don’t want to mislead anyone by guessing.

Our goal is to make future Acts accessible and fairly priced for everyone who’s supported us so far. If Ambrosia Sky reaches a wide audience, we’d love to release Acts 2 and 3 as free updates. If sales are more modest, we’ll likely need to release them as paid DLC at a reasonable price to support the team’s ongoing work and ensure the story is finished properly.

We know it’s unusual to leave that open, but we’d rather be transparent about what’s realistic than make promises we can’t keep.

Why Not Early Access?

Simply put, Early Access didn't align with the future we envision for Ambrosia Sky.  Ambrosia Sky is a single-player experience, a story told in three acts, featuring a gameplay sandbox that immerses you in the Cluster.

Act One itself presents a complete game loop and overall experience, concluding on a cliffhanger to establish forward momentum for Act Two. We felt an episodic release more accurately reflects the structure of the game and experience.

This release structure enables us to focus on delivering the best version of that story, immersive setting, and gameplay sandbox.

Why Wasn’t This Already Shared?

That’s a fair criticism, and we understand why it’s frustrating. The truth is that we decided during recent development that Early Access wasn’t the right fit for our story-driven, single-player game. At that point, our priority was finishing and polishing Act One, not locking ourselves into a pricing model that might not fit the game.

In hindsight, we should have finalized and communicated this structure more clearly before launch. We’re sorry for the confusion and will keep everyone informed as we learn more about our path going forward.

How Can You Help?

If you've already bought the game, thank you so much. Your support is deeply appreciated. If you're hesitant about the price, consider wishlisting the game. Steam will automatically notify you of future discounts so you can buy when the price is right for you.

Aside from that, it's all about reaching new players. Leaving a positive review helps Steam suggest the game to people who might like it. If you're comfortable recommending the game to other people in your life and online, that's the kind of grassroots support that made indie games viable in the first place, and it's our best chance of survival at a time when big games with massive marketing budgets are aggressively pushing for attention anywhere they can.

At the end of the day, we've taken a risk. By self-publishing Act One, we've put the power in your hands. Now it's up to players to set the course for Ambrosia Sky's future. Thanks for giving us a chance.

Welcome to the second community update of our very upcoming game, Ambrosia Sky: Act One! As we head into the final 24 hours before launch, we thought, why not raise money for our local children's hospital at the same time while also inviting some special guests to join us for fun video segments??? And with that tantalizing intro out of the way, let's dive in...

Come watch our 24 Extra Life & Launch Celebration Livestream!

On November 9 (tomorrow!), we will be hosting a 24-hour stream to raise money for SickKids Hospital here in Toronto and celebrate the launch of Ambrosia Sky! We have special guests, giveaways, and donation incentives that should make for a fun stream! To kickstart fundraising, our first $500 came from us, and we are matching the first $ 1,500 (CAD) in donations!

We've got a full docket of segements including:

👁 - Spot the (numerous) mods in Skyrim, w/ former Bethesda dev Joel Burgess!

🎧 - Playing through Life is Strange: Wavelengths DLC with Steph's VA, Katy Bentz!

👋 - Special indie dev guests from the teams behind SWAPMEAT, Fractured Blooms, Greenhearth Necromancer, and Season: a letter to the future!

🏆 - Making tier lists w/ fellow Soft Rains devs! It is time to decide which form of potato is the best.

👽 - A late night XCOM2 session with our community manager! (aka me)

Here's the event info:

📅 November 9-10 9:00am EST - 9:00am EST Watch at \

💸Fundraising Info Donate here: https://www.extra-life.org/participants/560537 All proceeds go to Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto, Canada Soft Rains is matching all donations made, up to the first $1500 CAD 🎁 Donation Incentives

Join our community Discord!

If you want to chat with pals & Soft Rains devs during our launch celebration stream, share your progress when the game launches, join a book club, send feedback about the game or just get all of our news & updates in one place... we have Discord server! Join here!

We are now... 56 hours, 44 minutes and... 45 seconds (as of this very moment) until the Ambrosia Sky: Act One launch! We'd love it if you stopped by our stream and wishlist our game in these final hours before we release it into the world!

Thank you again to everyone for your support as we head into launch; it means a great deal to us. <3 I'll be back very soon with a launch day post. Keep an eye out for that! 👁 ✨ See you in the stars,

Colin

\

Hello Scarabs! Thank you to everyone who has played the demo for Ambrosia Sky since its launch in June! We are grateful to everyone who played it, posted about it, told their friends to download it, and to all the folks who shared their thoughts, feedback, and bug reports.

If you've visited The Cluster before or if it is your first time, you'll find a smoother & expanded demo build that is now available to check out. Here's what you can expect in the latest update:

• A new location representing a new mission type

• Improved fungus variety

• Fully voice-acted main character and death ritual scenes

• Overhauled crafting & progression

• Location revisit systems (a cleaning meter tracking the total percentage of the location cleaned)

• Hidden collectibles

• General gameplay and core loop polish

• Bug fixes

Check out what's new in the demo, and head on over to our Discord to let us know what you think! (Or if you run into any bugs!)

Our demo works on the Steam Deck*!

Although our demo hasn't undergone rigorous official testing for compatibility, we've found it to work quite well on the Deck and wanted to share that information with you! Of course, there may be some weirdness/small text that can occur - but please let us know your experience with the demo on the Deck and other platforms! We are working hard to ensure the game runs well on the go.

*and other PC handheld platforms, probably

If you can't play the demo or want something on your second screen while you work, may I offer you a developer demo playthrough video during these trying times? Join narrative director Kait Tremblay and community manager Colin Cummings as they play through the latest build, talk worldbuilding, and chat about what the fungus might taste like.

Thank you for reading our latest update! If you haven't added the game to your wishlist or downloaded the demo, here's your sign to do both! ✨ See you in the stars,

Colin

\

Community Update #1 / October 2025

Welcome to the very first community update for our upcoming title, Ambrosia Sky. These updates will be semi-regular and will highlight streams, videos, press coverage, and other minor updates related to the game. Since this is our first one, we've got a few things to catch up on, so without further ado...

Don't miss IGN Nextfest!

✨ Ambrosia Sky is part of IGN Fanfest! ✨ Tune in on October 15th to learn more about your upcoming trip to The Cluster, and discover what awaits you when you arrive... Learn more here: https://www.ign.com/articles/ign-fan-fest-fall-2025-partner-lineup

Personality Quizzes, plural!

If you are dying to know which type of fungus you most closely align with, or if you're curious which of our main cast resonates with you, we've got two personality quizzes you can check out now!

We have created a quick and fun quiz to finally end your sleepless nights, wondering what type of fungus from our game you would be. It's like a Rorschach test, but the blobs are your results. Take the quiz here!

We've introduced you to our cast of characters (see Devlog 7), and now you can find out which character you are most like! Are you the protagonist, the enterprising ex, the ruthless stepmother, or our guy-in-the-chair? Find out with this quiz!

A wild Story Trailer appears!

In case you missed it, we recently shared a brand-new trailer that reveals more about why Dalia has come home to The Cluster and what she'll face upon arrival.

Did you know we have a Discord server?

Have you been playing the demo and want to share your thoughts or feedback? Do you want to ask our developers questions directly? Would you like to learn more about our world? If you have answered yes to any of those... we've got the Discord server for you! Come join us, the water is fine.

Join the Discord!

Join us for a LIVE Developer Q&A!

Next Tuesday at 3pm ET, join Joel, Colin, and Sofy as they answer your questions and play through our latest demo build. Catch the stream at: ✨

The stream will also be archived on our YouTube channel. If you can't make the stream or would like to submit your question ahead of time, please feel free to drop your questions in the comments below.

That's it for our very first community update! We're nearing some major milestones that we'll discuss in more detail soon. If you haven't played the demo or wishlisted the game yet, this is your sign to do either or both! ✨ See you in the stars, Colin \

Kaitlin Tremblay is the narrative director at Soft Rains. As a writer and narrative designer, they’ve worked on games such as Grindstone (CAPY Game), Watch Dogs Legion (Ubisoft), A Mortician’s Tale, and others. They are the author of two non-fiction books on video games: Ain’t No Place for a Hero: Borderlands (ECW Press, 2017) and Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games (CRC Press, 2023).

The story of Ambrosia Sky is a homecoming tale, of Dalia returning to the asteroid colony where she was born, 15 years after she left in a huff. And as such, the other characters who inhabit this world are essential players in the story of Ambrosia Sky.

So, for this developer log on Ambrosia Sky, I wanted to take some time and talk about the other main characters in the game. There’s Maaz, Dalia’s Scarab partner and best friend. There’s Maeve, the estranged love of her life. And Hale, the overbearing stepmother. All of these characters play an important role, both in Dalia’s story, but also in the story of the Cluster & the story of the world Dalia left behind, the one that kept ticking without her.

Maaz, our man-in-the-van

While Dalia is technically alone on this job, she’s not without support, in the form of a Scarab named Maaz. Maaz is Dalia’s man-in-the-van, acting as both her mission dispatch and her sample analyst. While Dalia is out in the field, she’s dictating her notes to Maaz, which she uploads every time she returns to her shuttle. Maaz receives these observation notes and is able to provide delayed emotional support to Dalia, while also using the notes as crucial contextual information as he analyzes the samples Dalia sends to him while performing her job.

Maaz isn’t just waiting for Dalia’s notes or samples, though. Despite their distance, Maaz has remote access to Dalia’s shuttle, so he’s able to monitor nearby comms, signals, and alerts while Dalia is deep in the field. And while this is primarily a safety precaution to protect Dalia from stray asteroids, it also allows Maaz to scan for any signs of life and movement on the Cluster that could indicate not everybody is dead. A role that will become incredibly important for Dalia’s motivations while she explores the Cluster.

Maaz joined up with the Scarabs shortly before Dalia. A lighthearted and charismatic man born to wealthy colonists in one of the furthest galaxies, Maaz sought to join up with the Scarabs out of boredom. He was tired of the same socialite people, and, like Dalia, he wanted out from the controlling regimes of his parents. Due to his upbringing, Maaz is a man who is comfortable in his own skin and naturally puts others at ease. Maaz has nothing to prove and effortlessly finds himself as the life of the party. As a Scarab, Maaz is ambivalent about the panacea–it could exist or it couldn’t. What Maaz is really after, though, is learning everything there is to know about the exo-life that exists in the galaxy.

It’s this background that makes Maaz an important and necessary foil to Dalia. When they meet, Maaz is fascinated by Dalia. He’s never met somebody from the Cluster before! And Dalia is at first put off by Maaz’s interest in her, but quickly accepts that he genuinely cares for her. Maaz’s affection for Dalia grows as he realizes she is the opposite of him in so many ways. They bond over their controlling parents, through both finding the Scarabs as a way to escape the life they don’t want, and Maaz’s insistent presence becomes a comfort to Dalia. He doesn’t want anything from her except for her friendship, and Dalia doesn’t want anything from Maaz except for his. Whereas Dalia is this emotionally tumultuous person, Maaz is her rock. As one of the few people she’s allowed herself to get close to since leaving her hometown, he’s able to ground her, help her. She’ll listen to him the way she won’t listen to pretty much anybody else.

But the emotional grounding isn’t the only reason we wanted to provide Maaz as a character. We knew we wanted Dalia’s experience and story to feel isolated, that her feeling of loneliness needed to be reinforced by her actual isolation on this journey. However, we still wanted a character to serve as a balance to her, both to provide moments of levity and to be a voice for the players. Since Dalia is from the Cluster, she isn’t always able to call out what’s strange. But it’s all new to Maaz, and so we wanted Maaz to be the voice that calls out the weird things Dalia might take for granted. Like sentient fungus. Like creatures that can change shape. Those sorts of things.

Developing Maaz was a lot of fun because of the way we envisioned him as a foil for Dalia. But we didn’t just want him to be a stoic, solid rock of a best friend. We wanted him to be weird and to have his own perspectives, as well. Maaz, despite joining the Scarabs, has a weak stomach and is easily grossed out. And he has a fervent belief in sentient, humanoid alien life. He’s the Mulder to Dalia’s Scully, without the sexual tension. He wants to believe, and that includes believing in hot aliens, as well as in Dalia.

Maeve, the one who didn’t wait

And then there’s Maeve, the reason for it all.

Maeve was Dalia’s best friend on the Cluster. Maeve was also the first person Dalia ever loved, despite Dalia never being able to tell Maeve this. Maeve and Dalia met as children in school, both studying agriculture from a young age. Dalia because Hale made her. Maeve, because she thought there was no other choice. However, Maeve was never good at their agricultural studies, despite Dalia excelling in them. Their differences bonded them together; Dalia helped Maeve with her studies, and Maeve became a confidante to Dalia. A lot of people kept their distance from Dalia on the Cluster, due to being the stepdaughter of the woman running the joint with an iron fist, but Maeve didn’t care about that. Thick as thieves, the only thing that could’ve broken Maeve and Dalia apart as teens was Dalia herself. So when Dalia left without warning at the age of 15 to become a Scarab, Maeve was hurt and furious. Both for Dalia abandoning her and for not even telling her she was going.

But Maeve refuses to wait for Dalia’s return and embraces her own reckless decisions. Since Dalia’s departure, Maeve has worked under Hale and become the beating heart of the Cluster, responsible for the community’s daily operations and welfare. While Maeve was never good with soil, she was always good with people and with numbers. She makes sure everybody is fed. She requisitions equipment for those who need it. She helps out at the clinic when it’s short-staffed. Maeve genuinely loves the Cluster, not for its history or mythos, but for the people who live there and make it what it is. Maeve is willing to work a thankless, stressful job if it means people on the Cluster can do what they need to do with less hassle.

Maeve’s role in the story of Ambrosia Sky is one of the most important ones: she’s the beacon of hope for Dalia. As Dalia begins to tailspin in her survivor’s guilt, Maeve being alive is the one thing that keeps her afloat. We wanted a reason for Dalia to stay at the Cluster when things got progressively worse throughout the game, and professionalism wasn’t enough of a reason. Dalia left once before when things got too emotionally complicated for her; being here because she’s on a job wouldn’t be enough to keep her from peacing out yet again. So we knew we wanted a character who could be that lifeline for Dalia, the reason she would keep deciding to stay here even as her own life was threatened.

But I also didn’t want Maeve to exist just for Dalia. I wanted her to be her own character, with her own goals, needs and ideas. Just because she’s the lifeline for Dalia doesn’t mean Maeve wants that role or fulfills it willingly. Throughout the game, Maeve is actively trying to find a cure for Clusterlung, the disease that has run rampant on the Cluster as a result of the fungal crisis. Maeve is her own character with her own goals, goals that often run counter to Dalia’s motivations. Maeve is helping the people of the Cluster evacuate. Maeve stayed while Dalia left, and so Maeve has devoted herself to caring for the people in her community, no matter what. Throughout Ambrosia Sky, players will learn about and track Maeve’s journey, discovering all of the ways in which Maeve was trying to make life better on the Cluster, and using her position as Hale’s right hand to do so.

And when Dalia arrives at the Cluster, Maeve doesn’t change anything to meet her estranged friend. Maeve doesn’t want Dalia’s help and resents her coming back now, only when things are at their worst. She stays focused on her goal: to cure Clusterlung. No matter the cost. And as Dalia will discover throughout Ambrosia Sky, that cost might be higher than she ever could’ve imagined.

Hale, the controlling stepmother

With the people Dalia unquestionably loves introduced, let’s talk about the person Dalia has the most complicated feelings about: her stepmother, Hale.

Hale Volkova is the de facto leader of the Cluster. A second-generation Clusterite, Hale came into power via her family name: Hale’s father, Doctor Volkov, was one of the founders of the Cluster. And as such, Hale has inherited power here. Hale loves the Cluster deeply. Not because she loves the people there like Maeve, but rather that she loves the power it affords her. She loves her status and her perception of herself above all else.

Ambrosia Sky needed a villain. With the main threats to Dalia’s physical safety being hostile fungus and creatures, we were feeling the lack of an emotional threat to Dalia. Since this story is about Dalia’s homecoming, what is the full range of that emotional landscape like? If Maeve is the reason for Dalia to stay, who is the reason for Dalia constantly wanting to leave? Her stepmother is perfect. Perfect because folklore was a huge inspiration for the worldbuilding of Ambrosia Sky, and the evil stepmother is a well-known trope from that type of storytelling, and playing with that trope sounded like so much fun to explore in a sci-fi setting. Perfect because it meant I got to write a trope I love.

Nobody else in the Cluster really likes Hale. To borrow a phrase, a lot of the agricultural residents on the Cluster believe she’s “all hat, no cattle”, meaning she avoids getting her hands dirty doing the real, hard labour of working the fields. She’s also ruthless and believes she’s larger than life because of her family name and position. She’s, frankly, insufferable, and I love that about her. Nobody believes in her importance the way Hale believes in her importance.

And it’s not that Hale’s is without complexity. There’s a reason she believes she’s right, and that’s because she’s trying to run the colony in the best way that she can. She loves the Cluster, in part because it bestows power on her, but also because she was raised believing in the mythos of the Cluster. Her father was heroic, being one of the first pioneers to leave Earth to start building an agricultural colony to feed humanity’s expansion into space. Hale was raised believing the Cluster matters–because it does. And protecting the Cluster, therefore, matters just as much. Despite the Cluster’s fall from grace as humanity settled farther and farther from Earth, Hale still believes in its mythos, and she will lie to protect it because she believes it’s necessary. In fact, she believes it’s her job to lie to protect people. Hale believes fundamentally that the Cluster should survive at all costs. But as the crisis worsens and threatens life on the Cluster, Hale realizes that Dalia may be the only one who can help her save the Cluster. Which complicates things for Hale, who is the person that Dalia learned how to handle her emotions from.

Hale’s a lot of fun to write. She’s emotionally ruthless while also being self-aggrandizing. If writing Dalia and Maeve is tapping into complex emotional landscapes of battling self-need with what we owe each other, Hale is the opposite: she’s a person who unquestionably believes she’s right. It’s a pure, indulgent villain voice to write, and that’s what the game needed to balance the heaviness of the other themes. She’s not cartoonish, but she does provide a space to vent some of the heaviness of grief and survivor’s guilt into just pure, indulgent anger.

If you want to know more about the development of Ambrosia Sky, take a look at our prior dev logs that cover our main character Dalia, the role of a Scarab, the art & audio direction of the game, a look at the tech & design behind our cleaning mechanics, and an overview of what Ambrosia Sky is.

You can also download the demo from Steam to step right into Dalia’s shoes and see the crisis firsthand. In our next devlog, we’ll begin to talk about the cast of characters that surround and support Dalia on this journey.

Kaitlin Tremblay is the narrative director at Soft Rains. As a writer and narrative designer, they’ve worked on games such as Grindstone (CAPY Game), Watch Dogs Legion (Ubisoft), A Mortician’s Tale, and others. They are the author of two non-fiction books on video games: Ain’t No Place for a Hero: Borderlands (ECW Press, 2017) and Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games (CRC Press, 2023).

For this month’s devlog, we wanted to take the opportunity to introduce everyone to Dalia, our playable character of Ambrosia Sky! The story of Ambrosia Sky follows Dalia as she returns to her home in the Cluster after a 15-year absence, only to discover that the crisis is far worse than she expected — and that everyone she ever knew may or may not still be alive.

The Cluster is an agricultural colony established in the rings of Saturn, and it was one of humanity’s first-ever outposts in outer space. It was chosen as such because of naturally occurring alien fungus found in the asteroids and rocks there, providing an answer to one of humanity’s most pressing questions: how could we feed people as they flee a dying Earth to try and find a new home amongst the stars?

But it’s the people that make the Cluster what it is. It’s a mixture of folks from all walks of life–the descendants of people who were able to leave Earth and establish the agricultural colony. These are people Dalia once knew, the people she grew up with. But Dalia soon discovers that she will have to fulfill the other part of her Scarab duty, and lay her former neighbours to rest.

The characters of the world of Ambrosia Sky are its heart, grounding the crisis and the worldbuilding in human connections, fear, love, and the lengths we will go to save ourselves and each other. We’ll go deep into the other main characters of Ambrosia Sky in a subsequent devlog, but for now, I want to talk about Dalia Volkova, the protagonist of Ambrosia Sky.

Meet Dalia

From the earliest stages of developing the plot and the backstory for Ambrosia Sky, we knew this being a homecoming story would be important for connecting the player’s journey in unravelling the crisis with the stories of people they must lay to rest. We wanted that insider perspective, a person who knows what is typical here and what is unusual, and can call that out to players.

Enter Dalia.

Dalia is a brilliant but emotionally unstable Scarab. While Dalia isn’t a true believer of the Scarab’s Ambrosia Project ethos (discussed in our developer log on the Scarabs), she has a strong stomach and is a capable scientist. She left her home to escape the closed, controlling life she had on the Cluster. Her stepmother, Hale, had grand plans for Dalia that Dalia didn’t want for herself. So Dalia left, and in doing so, she didn’t just abandon a controlling mother, but also her best friend and first-ever love, Maeve.

Born on the Cluster, Dalia was raised by her stepmother, Hale, the de facto leader of the Cluster colony. Dalia was a weird kid, growing up more interested in xenobiology than botany, but she enjoyed getting her hands dirty either way. Because the Cluster tended to recycle and reuse materials (thanks to a scarcity of new shipments and a lack of non-agricultural infrastructure), Dalia became skilled at tinkering, repairing, and reshaping the mechanical things around her.

Dalia felt at home among the systems of the Cluster, but began to feel alienated by her stepmother, Hale. Hale pushed Dalia to become something she wasn’t, and Dalia longed to escape her overbearing influence. So when a Scarab got called into the Cluster for a job, Dalia saw her opening. She could handle the more uncomfortable parts of the role, was smart, and asked the Scarab to train her. The Scarab agreed, on the condition that they leave immediately. Dalia left without saying goodbye. To anybody, even Maeve.

For the past 15 years, Dalia has been training as a Scarab, making a name for herself. She’s good at the job. Her clever mind, strong constitution, and impressive ability to compartmentalize her emotions make her an ideal Scarab (at least in her mind). Soon after, Dalia meets Maaz, a Scarab who becomes her best friend and work partner, and begins to develop a life for herself. She refuses to return to the Cluster, saying it’s because she’s afraid of Hale’s manipulation, but really, she’s scared of confronting the way she hurt Maeve by leaving without so much as a word.

Early concept art for the design of Dalia.

Then she gets the call that changes everything. A message from Hale, saying a crisis has engulfed the Cluster and a Scarab is needed—an unknown catastrophe, with an unknown death toll. Dalia returns, alone, and despite her experience and tools of the trade, she is unprepared for a homecoming like this. Dalia’s return is anything but heartwarming. Dalia must come to terms with her choices, as well as her survivor’s guilt, as she investigates the crisis that killed almost everybody she knew. Dalia will uncover a universe that is larger and weirder than she ever could’ve imagined.

Developing Dalia

Dalia’s perspective is integral to the story of Ambrosia Sky. She isn’t just here to do a job; she’s here to reconcile her own guilt, confront the mistakes she’s made, and learn how to forgive herself.

For me, Dalia was always our main character of Ambrosia Sky. I knew right from the start that the story of this world would shine if paired with an emotionally complex protagonist, providing an additional layer to the stories of grief and death that players will encounter. Dalia needed to be smart; she’s a scientist, but she’s also not easily grossed out, two strengths that play nicely in contrast to her somewhat emotional immaturity. When things get tough emotionally, Dalia tends to run away. Except this time she can’t. She has to see this through, at first because it’s a job she’s trained to do, but then because she’s invested in trying to save Maeve, and by extension, learning to look at her emotions directly.

But there’s more to Dalia than just her job. The early process of developing Dalia’s character included stacking the story and game objectives for her with references. The biologist from Annihilation was a huge early inspiration for Dalia, somebody who charges directly into unknown waters with a curiosity that can be dangerous to her. Despite her uneven emotions, Dalia doesn’t reveal them. She keeps her secrets close to her chest, and her feelings even closer.

The voice acting for Dalia really encompasses this range, this clinical detachment mired by extreme emotional tumultuousness. Writing Dalia was really about tapping into the ways in which we are dishonest with ourselves, and a lot of what I brought to Dalia from myself was my ability to overintellectualize my emotions instead of just feeling them. Dalia is a person who spends a lot of time in her head and, as such, struggles to accept the larger emotions that still manage to dominate her, despite her ability to rationalize them (if she even thinks about them at all).

One of the earliest sketches of Dalia.

Even from our earliest days, Dalia has always been Dalia. There’s parts of her that have shifted and morphed through development, particularly as the plot got solidified, as other characters came into focus, and as the story needs evolved as our game evolved. The core of her has always been there: this clever, emotionally detached woman trying to reconcile her own needs with those of her family and the people she loves.

As such, I hope players find comfort in Dalia. She’s made mistakes. She’s hurt people. But she’s trying to find a way through those emotions to help the people that she can, and to learn how to forgive herself. What I’ve brought to Dalia, and what I hope others can take from her, is navigating how to be gentle with ourselves while still doing the difficult, necessary work of accepting who we are, flaws and all, in order to show up for ourselves and others.

If you want to know more about the development of Ambrosia Sky, take a look at our prior dev logs that cover the role of a Scarab, the art & audio direction of the game, a look at the tech & design behind our cleaning mechanics, and an overview of what Ambrosia Sky is.

You can also download the demo from Steam to step right into Dalia's shoes and see the crisis firsthand. In our next devlog, we’ll begin to talk about the cast of characters that surround and support Dalia on this journey.

In this week’s devlog, we speak to Greg Harrison and Michelle Hwu, the composer and audio director for Ambrosia Sky, respectively. They share insights into using sound & music as worldbuilding, discuss the instruments and methods used in composing tracks for the game, and reveal the first full track for the game (demo players will recognize it!): Gerald’s Last Rites.

Can you describe how you approached the music for the Cluster’s different generations? 

Michelle: When I first learned where and when our game takes place, I got really curious about how music and art might have been created and preserved in our futuristic, sci-fi world. Kait outlined the three generations of humans that lived on the Cluster, which helped shape my understanding of how music might have evolved over roughly 200 years. People leaving Earth for Saturn would have brought only specific items and materials, which would impact what could be preserved over time. I wanted my early exploration of the music lore to serve as a foundation for our game’s soundtrack.

From there, I came up with some loose guidelines for each generation and how that would influence the game’s sound. For example, I imagined that when people first arrived on the Cluster, wood was scarce, large instruments were hard to come by, and they had to make do with whatever they could find, such as metal scraps from ships, mycelium, and beast bones. That got me thinking about how we could incorporate a sense of primitive technology and accessible instruments into the game’s music, using items like bones, jaw harps, ocarinas, and conches. I was introduced to Grej’s music, which felt like a perfect match for our world — he’s well-known for blending organic and electronic sounds in a really compelling way, and I knew he would be able to bring a great sound to our game.

What different types of instruments and sounds did you play with?

Grej: The Cluster was an invitation to think outside the box and explore what kinds of sounds might have existed and evolved over time in a completely different world. I considered what resources would be available, which instruments might have survived the journey from Earth (and which didn’t), and how those instruments might adapt to new contexts. What if bellows were used as percussive tools instead of for breathing air into a reed instrument? What if bowing a cymbal could transform it into something melodic? What if flutes were resonated by springs? These kinds of questions became the blueprint for the score. My intention was to make the Cluster feel alive — and to do that, I knew I had to build things from scratch.

I began by exploring “found sounds”: scrap metal, bones, springs, pipes and tubes, cymbals, and various synthetic skins. From there, the experimentation really blossomed as I searched for expressive ways to bring these textures to life. One of the main thematic drones you’ll hear is created by playing a jaw harp through a tube and processing it through layers of granular reverb, resulting in an organic, growling sound that feels unique to this world.

Can you describe your process for composing the music that plays during Gerald’s death ritual?

Grej: I really appreciated the team’s approach to death in the game. While much of the score leans into dark, ominous textures, Gerald’s death ritual felt like a space to shift into something gentler, something beautiful.

In contrast to all the bespoke, clustery instruments I built for the world of The Cluster, I wanted to introduce a sound that felt pure and transcendent. For me, the piano embodies that feeling. It’s an instrument that doesn’t exist on the Cluster — almost a mythical relic, a distant memory from Earth. Using it in Gerald’s and Kai’s rites became a way to musically connect them to their ancestors as they cross into the beyond.

The piece itself unfolds like an intimate dirge — not heavy or mournful, but quiet, reflective, and reverent. It’s also one of the only moments in the game where vocals appear, adding a human fragility to the farewell.

How does the music interact with the level design and gameplay experience? How do you account for player action?

Michelle: Grej and I wanted each track to evolve in its own way as the player moves through different levels in the game. We have several distinct mission types, and each one calls for a different musical vibe. Some needed to feel more exploratory, while others had to align closely with the narrative. Then there are moments where the level ramps up into full-on, fast-paced action. While working with Grej, we ensured that each section of music had sufficient variation based on the player’s choices — specifically, the path they take, the duration of their stay in an area, and their subsequent actions. We were constantly thinking about the mood of each level and what we wanted the player to feel at every stage.

Sometimes, the music needed to take center stage — like during the death rites — while other times, it’s more of a background groove for tasks like cleaning fungus off a level or just casually exploring for items. The fact that our main character often wanders through abandoned spaces filled with dead bodies significantly shaped the darker undertones that appear in our soundtrack.

What inspirations did you draw from for the music and sounds of the game?

Grej: Michelle gave me a lot of great influences to start with. One of the main themes we focused on was incorporating throat singing and jaw harps — sounds with deep, organic qualities. My goal was to take those traditional elements and push them into really unconventional, unexpected contexts to fit the world of the Cluster.

Since Michelle and I both have backgrounds in classical and contemporary percussion, we wanted to blend scrap percussion with driving electronic layers. Finding a balance between the raw, natural qualities and the more synthetic, rhythmic elements was key. We aimed to create music that felt fresh, immersive, and approachable, allowing players to emotionally connect with the soundscape while experiencing something new and unique.

Michelle: Some of my early inspirations came from experimental artists who lean heavily on percussion, like Yosi Horikawa and Steve Reich, along with cinematic soundtracks like Mica Levi’s Under the Skin, Colin Stetson’s Hereditary, and Clint Mansell’s Moon. A big focus for the game’s soundscape was capturing the feeling of being alone in space, while still hinting at the vibrant history that once existed there. The phrase “weird and wonderful” became a guiding idea throughout the process, particularly when illustrating how the fungus took over the Cluster and reshaped the landscape.

We wanted to create a fresh, unique take on how a sci-fi game can sound, especially since we’re not making a typical space marine-style title. I’ve always loved using “found sounds” — taking whatever materials are around and turning them into organic soundscapes, which is what led me to work with Grej. He explored new ways to play familiar instruments and gave them a fresh twist.

Do you have a favourite instrument you like to work with, and if it made its way into the game, how?

Grej: I used a lot of granular synths like the GR-1, Lemondrop, and Omnisphere to turn all these found sounds into playable instruments. One sound I was really excited about was called the “Beast Teeth” — a mix of actual teeth and jawbones (don’t ask) combined with a pitched-down vibraslap. Playing this on a keyboard instrument was incredibly fun!

Michelle: There are a number of standout sounds that Grej designed, but one of my personal favourites is when we hear the DynaCrasher, which appears in some of the later levels. It has a sharp, percussive quality (which we jokingly call the “tsk tsk”) that cuts through the mix with precision, helping to anchor the rhythm during high-intensity sequences. He also created a great sound which we lovingly referred to as the “FZEW FZEW”, which is a combination of analog synth layers with processed metal samples to produce a static-laced, almost electrical texture that gives the soundscape a sense of tension and movement.

From a team perspective, we were especially excited by the positive reactions to Grej’s use of throat singing sounds. We integrated them across several tracks, using layered harmonic overtones and low-frequency textures to evoke a sense of ritual, which added depth to the game’s darker, more atmospheric moments.

How do you score a piece of interactive media compared to something more traditional, like film?

Grej: This was my first video game I’ve worked on, and I was super intrigued by how an interactive medium can really influence the compositional process.

I began to notice parallels with contemporary music styles, particularly in the works of John Cage. Cage’s use of “chance” in many of his later compositions inspired me to approach the score as a living, evolving system rather than a fixed piece. This way, the music could feel alive and responsive, reacting dynamically to the player’s choices and progress throughout the game.

Michelle: One of the most interesting parts of collaborating with Grej was learning to communicate in different ways–sometimes through more traditional, linear scoring approaches, and then translating that into something that works for interactive media. His fresh approach to composition initially pushed the limits of my Wwise implementation skills, but once we figured it out, it was incredibly rewarding. We ultimately found some unconventional ways to manipulate Wwise to achieve the desired results, which is always a fun challenge. The outcome is a set of music transitions that feel much more organic and seamless as players move through the levels.

Gregory Harrison, also known as Grej is a dynamic and multi-faceted musician, composer and producer based in Toronto. Greg’s an East Coast Music Award winner and Dora-nominated composer, with over 50 composition and recording credits spanning concert music, film, and interactive media. His commissioned works include projects for Toronto Dance Theatre, ProArté Danza, Popular Demand Pictures, and Architek Percussion. He has toured internationally with artists such as Jeremy Dutcher, Cirque du Soleil, and The Cybertronic Spree, performing at venues including Massey Hall, NPR’s Tiny Desk, the JUNOs, and The Kennedy Center. Greg’s work explores the intersection of acoustic performance and live electronics through his innovative use of music technology.

Michelle Hwu is the Audio Director at Soft Rains, with over a decade of experience in both games and post-production for film and TV. Her work in games includes audio roles at Ubisoft Toronto, Beans, and Drag Her!. Originally trained in Percussion Performance at the University of Toronto, Michelle has performed with ensembles such as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, and the Esprit Orchestra. In post-production, her credits include projects featured at TIFF, Sundance, and the Tribeca Film Festival, along with work for CBC, NBC, and Shudder. Most recently, Michelle was recently nominated for a Canadian Screen Award in Sound Editing for the film In A Violent Nature.

To stay up to date on Ambrosia Sky and to support our team, please wishlist the game on Steam, join our community Discord, and follow us on social media. 📸 by Gabriel Packer

Adam Volker has worked in games and animation for 13 years. He worked briefly in AAA games at BioWare and Midway as a concept artist. Then, art directed the short film The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore, which won an Academy Award in 2012. He was nominated for an Emmy in 2018 for Manifest 99, a narrative VR experience. Now he works at Soft Rains creating narrative and mechanically peculiar games while trying to make them as pretty as possible.

Ambrosia Sky is set on colonies built on the back of asteroids nestled in the rings of Saturn. It’s about Dalia, a Scarab. Familiar with death, a scientist enlisted to cure humanity’s mortality on her return journey home. Our Narrative Director, Kait Tremblay, had built this incredible world in their head. I felt like my job was to distill the parts that needed to shine for the player and make them real.

When players pick up the controller to play what you’ve made, you have an opportunity to spark their imagination, to show them a world they haven’t thought of, and if you’re lucky, inspire them to make something and pay it forward. Good art is cumulative.

I strive to create a distinctive style for each project. There are centuries of brilliant 2D art to be found. So many styles to explore that artists before me have expressed in paint (digital or otherwise). What haven’t I tried to translate into 3D yet? Just as importantly, what’s cool looking? What sounds fun to try!? I pick one or two strong references for myself and the 2D team to dissect, understand, and internalize. Then we “method act” our paintings, using the tools taught to us by other painters and render objects from our unique world with those rules. The painting below is me trying to paint the large graphic shapes from our references with details inside, and design a building unique to our colony.

You can try, but you can’t erase your own way of painting; it’s a beautiful thing about creating anything. Everyone has a style, whether they paint or not. Even as our concept team tries to emulate the style of the specific references I’ve chosen, we trust the process to produce something wholly unique. It’s a fun exercise to start each project by combining simple, strong references and my own precious biases. (haha)

To get us started and to help direct the team towards what I’m aiming for, I made this spectrum and placed our goal on it. The two axes, one for the design of objects and the other for the final rendering style, helped us define what we wanted the word stylized to mean.

It’s a pet peeve of mine the way our industry uses the word “stylized” to describe non-realistic visuals. For our Ambrosia Sky, we wrote our own definition. There is so much media out there that is really good, and if you have the appetite, even more after that. It’s 2025 now. We drink from a visual firehose. It means the chance to surprise people when you actually get their attention is special. We only get so many at bat.

I was looking for painterly detail, rendered inside graphic forms. A stylized world where colour choices weren’t literal, and subverted expectations of what outer space might look like. I feel like every year, our photographs of space bring back new colours, new textures that were there and we didn’t see before. It’s still such a big mystery what’s out there. We had to try to represent visually more than we know now. For instance, we designed our airlock door to spin as a sphere instead of opening on a hinge. Why not?!

Our game features vast, desolate spaces filled with fungus. Part of our game involved giant, dead space creatures so that we could dip our toes into the realm of fantasy. But at the end of the day, to hold the gravity of our story that is about death and life’s finality, the game needed to be credible. The world needed to make sense and had to have a rich amount of detail. Even if it was stylized. Shared language is crucial when trying to establish a unique style for a game. Despite our sophistication in design, not everyone thinks of the same references in the same way.

The visual language of any project should be built alongside the story of the world, reinforce the gameplay and highlight the themes of the idea. Production design involves translating a theme into a visual language, being specific about details, and adhering to a concept throughout the entire production. It’s a question and answer. What designs support Dalia’s journey? How do we make a maximalist game about fungus legible?

Ysabel painted this; she is one of the most talented painters I’ve worked with. She put mood, design, organized colour, stylized brushstrokes AND story all into this image. This was a milestone painting for articulating the game. When she painted this, we hadn’t started building out our 3D kit for the game yet. This piece was a north star then, and still is one I return to, reminding me how the game should feel.

Concept art is for iterating, it’s for exploring. A good piece of art inspires the team’s imagination to create the game depicted in the picture, but concept art is a promise. After a few months of painting the building blocks, it was time to translate it into engine. We had some influences, a clear distinction of what we were after, and a huge stockpile of lore, character writing, and themes to draw from. Now we had to climb the mountain.

We filled in the corners of the world with paintings. Built a design language for the technology, and layered in history for different ages of architecture. Another huge challenge of the project was the life form Dalia encounters when she finally lands on the Cluster. The exo fungus.

Malicious space fungus that has overgrown the living spaces, airlocks, and facilities of her hometown. This was not only a set piece of our gross, dead, derelict world, but also the core of the gameplay. To uncover the truth about what happened to her friends and loved ones, Dalia must face a mutating, growing enemy by cleaning it away.

Each fungus has its own gameplay parameters, behaviour and interaction with the world. As Dalia learns what it does, we as players do too. It needed to be awful and beautiful. Gross and alluring.

We settled on high visual density, but not high detail. Graphic shapes everywhere, simple colours. Players needed to walk into a busy room, find what they were looking for immediately, assess the danger level in a room quickly and plan their route around it. With everything glowing, growing, and fighting for your attention, we chose to make each fungus’s shape design unique, individualize the colours between them, and keep the silhouettes strong so players wouldn’t be overwhelmed by what they saw.

The final challenge was turning the art we’d painted into an explorable 3D space. The design of the forms was straightforward. Build something big and flat to grow fungus on top of, easy. Making it feel painterly was harder. It took us several iterations and a lot of open-minded experimentation, but we got there. I think the game looks beautiful.

Please wishlist the game on Steam, join our community Discord, follow us on social media, and, of course, download the demo to get your first hands-on experience with Ambrosia Sky.

At Soft Rains, world-building is at the heart of our creative process. This isn’t just about how we write; it unifies everything we do, from art direction to audio to game design. And if worldbuilding is the centre of our process, the player character is at the centre of our worldbuilding. Dalia, the protagonist of Ambrosia Sky, is a scientist first and foremost, so we’ve designed the ways she interacts with the environment to represent this. Beyond that, Dalia knows this place: she was born here, long before the crisis that prompts the actions of the game.

The core of Ambrosia Sky’s gameplay revolves around cleaning up after the alien contamination that has decimated the Cluster (the agricultural colony in the rings of Saturn in which our game takes place), resulting in mass death and a lethally overgrown environment. The cleaning gameplay isn’t the only central game system in Ambrosia Sky. Still, it is one of our biggest, so we wanted to spend some time talking about the different ideas that comprise our main gameplay verb: cleaning with a chemical spray and the alien contamination that you are tasked with cleaning up.

We’ve already seen people describe Ambrosia Sky’s core gameplay as a combination of PowerWash Simulator’s cleaning and Metroid Prime’s atmospheric exploration. You’re here to find the victims of the crisis and clean up the deadly fungus that killed them. But the alien fungus of Ambrosia Sky doesn’t want to be cleaned. It can hurt the player by shocking or burning them. It can also move, chase, and impede you through the environment. To help our fungus blur that line between enemy and environment, we’ve invented a voxel-like system where cleaning can be tactile, allowing you to carve a path through masses of fungus, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

First, let’s meet the alien contamination that has overrun the Cluster.

Meet the Alien Contamination

The alien fungus is the naturally occurring flora of our setting, The Cluster. Humans discovered it here roughly 90 years before the events of Ambrosia Sky. In classic human fashion, we colonized the Cluster, exploiting the local ecosystem, and thought of ourselves as its masters.

But this ecosystem is unstable. Players will also experience this instability in-game (the first mission, as seen in our demo, is a great example!). As players collect organic samples for study, the act of extraction will cause a cascading response from the environment itself, triggering fungal growths that are, quite frankly, a bit furious at you for disturbing their ecosystem.

Our alien fungus is both environment and enemy, but it’s also a deeply embedded part of our resource system and upgrade paths, as well. Internally, we’ve used the phrase “farm-to-table fungus”, referring to a type of fungus that exhibits specific behavioural patterns in the environment and can also be harvested to create specialized sprays (among other upgrades) based on those environmental behaviours.

To support this, our fungus colonies are composed of two sections: the main roots/stalk of the fungi, which comprise the majority of a colony, and the “fruit”. For the amateur mycologists among you, we use the term fruit here in the same way scientists distinguish a mushroom fruit from hyphae (or roots) of a mycorrhizal network.

For example, with our electric fungus, energized roots sprawl across walls and deal damage to unwary players. Along these roots, players will occasionally see stalks ending in crystalline fruit, which emit a dangerous area-of-effect.

Using either the sprayer or the tether, players can disconnect the fruit from the roots, neutralizing the threat it presents. This allows the fruit to be harvested and then used to upgrade your chemical sprayer. The most exciting upgrade enables Dalia to create an electric spray that can be used to create electric conduits and surfaces to conduct electricity to unpowered doors and similar devices.

An exploder fungus, on the other hand, well, explodes.

Acting like an abominable cross between a puffball mushroom and a proximity mine, exploder fungi expand the closer you get, eventually bursting into flame to protect itself. Harvesting exploder fungus fruit is a bit more volatile (thanks to its explosive nature), but becomes easier in zero-g, when the fruit floats more delicately in the air, rather than tumbling down and exploding upon impact. Like with the electric, players harvest exploder fruit by severing the fruit from its base, but with exploder, this is done by carving through the thick roots. You can harvest exploder fungus’s fruit to craft flammable sprays, which can kill fungus or spread fire to nearby flammable objects. Or you can set off a chain reaction of explosive fruit, letting the resulting fire burn away the large fungus colony that remains.

Jules Glegg (Technology Director) explains that, 

… there are the simulation elements. We created a custom simulation system just for Ambrosia Sky, geared specifically to introduce the kind of hazards that matter in space — like fire — and to let Dalia use her creativity and know-how to manipulate those hazards in her favor. Ambrosia Sky’s simulation lets fungus interact very directly with the environment, for example by overloading an electric circuit that controls the exit door. It also gives clever players more ways to clean, like toppling a massive spire of electric fungus just by knocking its base out from under it.

This design approach gives us a lot of flexibility, allowing us to fill spaces with the alien fungus in interesting ways, creating traps and hazards that players have to contend with, and creating an interesting risk/reward of whether to carefully prune the fungus to harvest the fruit, or to clean the whole thing up to make progression easier. Below is a concept exploring the different layouts an exploder fungus could take to operate as an environmental threat.

Jules goes on to say, 

Fungus is so fun to work on. It’s all familiar game development problems, in a totally wild new combination that throws out a lot of the standard solutions. First, there’s the problem of how to let a level designer build a colony, shape it to their liking, and trigger when it should grow. For this we use Houdini (a workhorse application for visual effects artists) and a cool example of nature-inspired math called the Space Colonization Algorithm. The resulting tool lets a level designer drop fungus into a level, set up areas for it to avoid, mark spots where they’d like a fruit to spawn, and then grow the colony right towards your face as you round a dark corner.

Making Cleaning Satisfying

In addition to making the fungus feel alive, compelling, and threatening, we also wanted to make cleaning it up feel incredibly satisfying. To clean up the fungus, Dalia is equipped with a chemical sprayer. It’s her primary tool, and its base spray dissolves organic material on contact.

Designing Dalia’s sprayer, both the look and the feel of it, was a lot of fun. We went through a variety of designs, some of which felt more like a pistol, and others that, quite frankly, felt more like my Dyson vacuum cleaner. With these explorations, we ended up somewhere pleasantly in the middle: a tool that feels powerful and effective, but is obviously designed for cleaning and restoration rather than combat (although it is helpful in combat, especially when your enemies are furiously sentient alien fungus).

The interaction between the sprayer and the fungus is key to making cleaning feel so good. The electric fungus is super brittle and shatters pleasantly on impact. But we wanted our exploder fungus, a much chunkier fungus, to feel different when it is being cleaned. We wanted the ability to carve out chunks of it, to be able to burrow through it even. So cue: Quantized Impact Field, our unique destruction tech. To explain Quantized Impact Field, or “QIF”, here’s Jules: 

“Quantized Impact Field! QIF (pronounced “kiff”) is the tech that lets you clean fungus in precise chunks or even tunnel through large colonies. Lots of games have this kind of “volumetric” destruction, but we really wanted to find a way of doing it that avoids the usual tell-tale blockiness and supports Ambrosia Sky’s very hand-made, stylized art direction.”

Jules goes on: 

“To give a little more detail — as you clean, QIF records every sprayer hit into a grid of cubes called voxels. That data is then used to change the physical collision of the fungus, so you can walk through the cool tunnel you just made, and also sent over to your graphics card where we use it to change the appearance of the fungus — melting it, crumbling it away, whatever the artists want it to do.”

In our next Ambrosia Sky developer log, we’ll take a look at the art direction and the decisions that went into giving Ambrosia Sky its distinct visual identity.

Jules Glegg is Soft Rains’ Technology Director, where she spends most of her time guiding the development of gameplay systems and wrenching on simulation code. Previously, Jules worked on League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra and VALORANT as a Principal Engineer at Riot Games. She is a co-founder of Trans Game Dev.

Please wishlist the game on Steam, join our community Discord, follow us on social media, and, of course, download the demo to get your first hands-on experience with Ambrosia Sky.

Welcome to the second of our developer logs on Ambrosia Sky! In this initial series of dev logs, we’ll dive deeper into certain aspects of Ambrosia Sky, Soft Rains’ first-person clean ’em up game about exploring an agricultural colony in the rings of Saturn that has been devastated by an alien fungal crisis.

In Ambrosia Sky, you play as Dalia, a disaster clean-up specialist known as a Scarab. Scarabs are a loose outfit of self-trained scientists, whose specialties are a blend of biology, engineering, and religious mysticism. This blend of focus and specialties informs Dalia’s perspective and how she interacts with the world around her. Scarabs get sent to sample the DNA of people who have recently died in strange or biohazardous scenarios. Their job is to both lay the dead to rest and clean up the potentially contaminated environment in which they died.

Early concept art from art director Adam Volker exploring the moment of Dalia beginning a Death Rite.

As sci-fi analogues to real-world “bio cleaners”- people who are sent into places to clean up after people have died - Scarabs prioritize care in their job. They are not sent here to save anybody, nor are they soldiers; they are mortuary scientists whose job is to catalogue and to clean, to restore a space to working order and to respectfully say goodbye to the dead. Inspired in part by my previous writing work on A Mortician’s Tale, as well as other media like Annihilation (both the book and the movie, for different reasons), and real-world experiences, Scarabs represent a hidden job that focuses on care and community, but is extrapolated into a sci-fi setting.

But what exactly is a Scarab? Scarabs are mystical field scientists whose job revolves around the dead. Founded when humanity first ventured into the galaxy, Scarabs seek out death in the universe to understand the effects the cosmos has on human bodies. What kills us? Why? And can we harness this knowledge to stop cellular decay? The answer to these questions informs the basis of The Ambrosia Project.

The Ambrosia Project

Screenshot of Dalia coming upon Gerald Parker, an older man she remembers from her youth, who has consented to be part of the Ambrosia Project.

A common maxim unites Scarabs: understanding death in space is the key to protecting human life amongst the stars. This is known as the Ambrosia Project, a collective effort to research a panacea that can prevent cellular death and decay in humans. In effect: immortality. It is a Scarab’s most important creed.

Throughout the project, particularly in its early stages, we conducted extensive research to establish our world. Due to the Cluster’s agricultural setting, we conducted extensive research into NASA’s existing efforts to grow and cultivate crops in space. But I also jumped into the deep end of immortality research, or, more mundanely, anti-aging research. What was the existing thought on life extension, from a cellular level? We didn’t want the Scarabs to be pursuing the elixir of life or some magical substance that can be consumed; we wanted them to think concretely about cellular decay and how life in the galaxy affects and could interfere with our cellular growth and death. This led us to consider telomere extension, examining NASA’s Twin Study to investigate the impact of outer space on our DNA and bodies, as well as delving into gene editing. It was fun! It was weird. The research made me start lifting heavier weights and eating more cauliflower.

To progress the Ambrosia Project, Scarabs are sent to investigate deaths in the universe. Because Scarabs’ research requires taking large swaths of cellular samples from recently deceased individuals that occur in a variety of environments (to study protein interactions), Scarabs, by necessity, have to be nomadic. They go to lots of strange places, see how people died, and see what their deaths can teach us about our cells.

So when they are on a job, Scarabs’ priority is to take a sample of the deceased’s DNA to upload to the Ambrosia Project. After that is done, Scarabs perform a “bioremediation”, an organic act of cremating the remains via specialized spores. (A lot of Ambrosia Sky is also inspired by our team’s real-life experience foraging for fungus.) Importantly, Scarabs only perform death rituals on the deceased who have consented to having their DNA included in the Ambrosia Project, and who have passed within a 48-hour window.

In-game bioremediation VFX

When we first started thinking about the Scarabs, creative director Joel Burgess and I quickly realized that the Scarabs needed a motivation beyond their specific job, something that would compel individuals to leave their home colonies behind and to seek out dangerous places where people have died. We wanted to add a unique flavour to the Scarabs, making them feel haunted or feared by others. Adding a grandiose goal of seeking human immortality provided the additional element we were looking for. They became strange in addition to being scientific. In an early prototype, I wrote a line that described the Scarabs as “star witches,” a sort of cute in-world way to poke fun at the blend of science and spiritualism we wanted the Scarabs to embody. “Star witches” became an instant pillar, providing us with a coherent summary of what makes Scarabs who they are.

Medieval Medicine and Cosmic Folklore

Early explorations of what Scarab gear could look like, done by Carlos Ruiz.

I’ve always been somewhat obsessed with the concept of plague doctors and medieval medicine, and, importantly, how folklore influences medieval science. A big, compelling theme for us, as we think about sci-fi fantasy as a genre blend for Ambrosia Sky, revolves around the idea of what makes folklore so interesting, in the way that it’s people trying to make sense of something with the best information they have on hand. And we started thinking about what it would be like when we first truly start exploring and settling in the cosmos: what do we know, but more importantly, what don’t we yet know? And how would we experience those things that we don’t know, and what theories and stories would we devise about them to help us understand them?

This is where the plague doctor analogy came into play for me. Scarabs are scientific, but there’s a lot they wouldn’t know about how human bodies respond to prolonged life in the stars. So, they’re informed by real, proven scientific methods, but that gets blended with a folkloric approach to understanding the things they can’t yet grasp. It makes them a bit magical, a bit medieval in their thinking, grounded in what we know of science and death today.

Fortunately for us at Soft Rains, we have Fiona Jeeva, our associate technical artist, who is also a biochemist. Sure, I could read as many anti-aging books as I liked, but I was still finding the line between coherent and compelling, and Fiona was absolutely instrumental in not letting me get too far off the rails with this folklore-meets-scientific approach to the Scarabs.

Fiona then assigned me homework and articles to read, which I appreciated.

Concept of the flower that remains behind after the bioremediation is complete, an exploration of blending the scientific with the mystical of the Scarabs (credit: Adam Volker).

Working with Fiona on the Scarabs helped ground the grandiosity of the Scarabs into a scientific method. Particularly, we discussed extensively how the Scarabs sample the DNA of the corpses, what they are looking for, and how it would all work. Fiona’s why we discussed the role of environments in protein interactions. Fiona heard me say the word “telomeres” and asked me why I was interested in them. It was thanks to these conversations with Fiona that we developed the 48-hour rule for sampling human bodies: people who consent to the Ambrosia Project have to have their samples collected within 48 hours of their death, or the samples become non-viable.

Last Wills and Giving Voice to the Dead

Early sketch of Dalia’s emotional state after a Death Rite is completed by Adam Volker.

In Ambrosia Sky, the quest for immortality, known as the Ambrosia Project, manifests in the moments of laying the dead to rest, which we refer to as “Death Rites.” While scientific in approach (obtain the DNA sample needed to advance the Ambrosia Project), Death Rites are also highly intimate moments with the deceased. While performing a Death Rite, Dalia will listen to the deceased’s Last Will, a testimony that is recorded as proof of their consent to be included in the Ambrosia Project.

These Last Wills give voice to the dead, offering a range of perspectives on our own mortality as told through the eyes of somebody willing to donate their body to scientific research. Some are able to look at their own impending death straight on, others require humour and distance to accept their mortality, and others need to believe in something greater than themselves to be able to accept it. We really wanted these Last Wills to convey the different ways we all feel about and think about our own mortality. This is where a lot of the work I did writing for A Mortician’s Tale is really felt in Ambrosia Sky: both games strive to convey with compassion the different ways people respond to death, but with Ambrosia Sky, we wanted to have the opportunity to explore how we feel about our own death, rather than the death of our loved ones.

Each Death Rite is different, and each one affects Dalia in a different way, as some are people she’s known her whole life, and others are complete strangers.

Like the rest of Ambrosia Sky, even the identity of the Scarabs is a wonderful mixture of our team’s collective inspirations, experiences, and influences. And as Dalia’s job, Scarabs inform a lot about Ambrosia Sky, from the writing to the story to the gameplay. In a future dev log, we’ll dive deeper into the gameplay of Ambrosia Sky, exploring the details of how the Scarab job manifests in gameplay specifically.

Please wishlist the game on Steam, join our community Discord, follow us on social media, and, of course, download the demo to get your first hands-on experience with Ambrosia Sky.

Over here at Soft Rains, we’ve just announced our first game that we’ve been working hard on: Ambrosia Sky! If you missed our announce trailer in the PC Gaming Show, you can check it out here.

We’re kicking off a series of developer logs that’ll dig into different aspects of the game and some of the creative choices we made along the way. But before we sink our teeth into that, let’s take a moment to ask: what exactly IS Ambrosia Sky?

The Game: Clean ’em up as care

In Ambrosia Sky, you are Dalia, a deep-space disaster specialist dispatched to the rings of Saturn. As Dalia, you’ll lay victims to rest, clean up alien fungus, and research its strange origins. But this isn’t just another random job for Dalia: the place she is dispatched to, the Cluster, is her home. This is the story of Dalia’s homecoming, a woman who left this place behind when she was a teen and now has to return under tragic circumstances.

Ambrosia Sky’s core gameplay is a blend of meditative cleaning and FPS-style action, grounding these two proven foundations in an immersive world. To talk about it in classic this-with-that terms: it’s a bit like Metroid Prime meets PowerWash Simulator.

When we first started thinking about Ambrosia Sky, we were initially interested in how we could blend the “job sim” style of gameplay, similar to PowerWash Simulator, with narrative-heavy exploration. This led us to consider different forms of cleaning in the world, which in turn led us to death cleaners and individuals who clean up after a person passes away. We then connected those acts of care with the rigorous standards of jobs in biohazard cleaning.

It instantly clicked, and we explored those ideas through immediate prototyping of the cleaning mechanic. Even in its earliest, wild-idea, brainstorm moments, Ambrosia Sky was a reflection of our collective taste, experiences, and inspirations. As the game evolved through prototypes and playtests, and as the team grew, the raw material of the idea constantly germinated into something more interesting and unusual than any one of us would have crafted on our own. And once we got in-engine, the idea worked.

The core of Ambrosia Sky, of course, is the cleaning gameplay. As Dalia, you use a chemical sprayer to clean up the alien contamination that has caused the disastrous crisis, killing almost everybody that Dalia once knew. But the alien fungus isn’t a sedentary presence, just there to be cleaned. Each species of alien fungus blurs the line between environment and enemy with unique behaviours, causing fiery explosions, interfering with electricity, or actively seeking out Dalia.

Each fungus also has its own fruit, which can be harvested and researched. That research enables Dalia to create new spray types that, in turn, replicate the gameplay effects of the fungi from which they are derived.

But Dalia isn’t just here to clean up the contamination. She’s also here to find the recently deceased. As you explore, you’ll encounter victims of the crisis and lay them to rest. These scenes reveal the mystery of the crisis and connect the disaster to the lives of the people who fell victim to it. These Death Rites offer an opportunity to learn more about the people and this world, as well as catch a glimpse into the varied relationships we all have with death and mortality.

All of these actions make up the role of a Scarab, Dalia’s day job. In our next developer log, we’ll dive deeper into who Scarabs are, what they want, and how this perspective shapes Dalia’s story and her as a playable character.

The Setting: Saturn’s Cluster

Our setting, the Cluster, is an agricultural colony established in Saturn’s rings during humanity’s early exploration of the universe. A source of naturally growing alien fungus, the Cluster was hailed as a hallmark of humanity’s ingenuity: an agricultural station that could sustainably supply food for human life off-Earth.

But that frontier era was over 90 years ago. These days, generations have passed, and they have formed their own unique cultures and identities. Now, the Cluster has slipped into obscurity, a crucial yet bygone fixture in humanity’s extraterrestrial infrastructure. Gone are the glory days of the first generation, and Dalia’s generation must now contend with their home as a mostly forgotten waystation en route to all the galaxy has to offer, a relic clinging to its prestigious history.

Early on, when we first started thinking about creating Ambrosia Sky, we gave a lot of thought to the type of science fiction that truly resonated with us and inspired us. We discussed at length how to incorporate contemporary concerns and modern themes into a speculative setting. This line of thinking led us to discuss food scarcity and the role of agriculture in space-faring expeditions, which in turn inspired us to ground our sci-fi world in an agricultural colony. This connected elegantly with our interest in first-person shooting mechanics that weren’t about shooting, but instead about cleaning up and restoring a space.

This setting also inspired a great deal of fun in our 3D environment art, as well as our music design, considering how the different generations of the Cluster would build their homes and what sort of cultural connections these people, a group of frontier cosmic farmers, would have to Earth. We look forward to sharing more thoughts on how we attempted to manifest the world of the Cluster in our art and music in upcoming developer logs.

The Protagonist: Dalia

Dalia is a brilliant but emotionally unstable Scarab, a mystical mortuary scientist. Dalia has a strong stomach and is a capable scientist, and while she’s less inclined toward the spiritual side of being a Scarab, she is good at the job. She left her home to escape the closed, controlling life she had on the Cluster. Her stepmother, Hale, had grand plans for Dalia that Dalia didn’t want for herself. So Dalia left, and in doing so, she didn’t just abandon a controlling mother, but also her best friend and first-ever love, Maeve.

Now Dalia’s homecoming is anything but heartwarming. Hale threatens to pull Dalia back into their tumultuous relationship, and Maeve wants nothing to do with her estranged friend. Dalia must come to terms with her choices, as well as her survivor’s guilt, as she investigates the crisis that killed almost everybody she knew.

Everything about Ambrosia Sky is filtered through Dalia’s perspective: her understanding of her home, her use of tools to clean and restore this space, and the way she interacts with the deceased. Dalia will uncover a universe that is larger and weirder than she ever could’ve imagined, as she grapples with her own guilt, struggling toward understanding how she can forgive herself while saying goodbye to her home for good. We’re excited for everyone to meet Dalia and to see the Cluster through her eyes.

Thanks for reading! We’re excited to share more about Ambrosia Sky, so stay tuned for more developer logs as we dig into some behind-the-scenes of how we approached building the game.

Please wishlist the game on Steam, join our community Discord, follow us on social media, and, of course, download the demo to get your first hands-on experience with Ambrosia Sky.