Players could explore the game's vast open world of floating islands, where all in-game objects have their own weight and real-time physics. Worlds Adrift allowed the player to harvest resources and free-build an airship of any size and shape to traverse the world. Due to the game's focus on physics, features of the ship, such as the number and placement of various propulsion mechanisms, would have an effect on the ship's handling, fuel consumption and speed. Ships were constructed by creating a "ship frame" using an in-game program called "3DS Shipmax," then attaching various parts to the frame once it is built.
Plot
The game's plot is fragmented and incomplete, and is learned from scanning various in-game ruins. The game hints that the floating islands distributed throughout the game were once part of a planetary crust, but a cataclysm shattered the planet, forming the islands that float through the atmosphere. The islands float due to an "Atlas Crystal" that is embedded in the islands' impenetrable rock. Atlas crystals were minerals once mined by the ancient civilizations in Worlds Adrift, which can be used for its anti-gravity properties. A previous race that built the various in-game ruins is hinted at, but there is no contact between the players and their predecessors. The islands themselves are created by players in an external software engine. Bossa Studios has hinted at a planetary core miles beneath the orbiting clouds, but the player will die before falling far enough.
Development
Worlds Adrift was announced by Bossa Studios on December 19, 2014 by Bossa Studios' founder Henrique Olifiers. The concept for the game came from a game jam event. The game's complex persistent world is run by a cloud-based operating system called SpatialOS created by a UK-based company named Improbable. SpatialOS allows a simulated world, with a day and night cycle, to be inhabited by millions of complex entities in a real-time environment. The program's "worlds" can span massive regions of digital space, contain millions of individually simulated entities with complex behavior, and run across thousands of servers in the cloud.
Reception
Worlds Adrift was once referred to as "The Minecraft for a new generation" by Angus Morrison of Edge magazine. Brandin Tyrrel at IGN also cited the game as "Worlds Adrift is one of the most ambitious physics game I've ever seen." The game was nominated for the "Creativity" and "Heritage" awards at The Independent Game Developers' Association Awards 2018.
