Airframe Ultra October Devlog

Happy Halloween, racers. I'm Buddy, Head of Publishing for Akupara Games, and today, I'm back to provide our October update. Just as an aside: I’ll be taking over these devlogs through the end of the year, since I wanna keep everyone up to date on all the Airframe news that’s fit to print. If you like these devlogs and want us to continue them into 2027, go ahead and tell me so down below. There’s a bunch to get into: the game’s price, the roundtable discussion questions, and a little preview of the Eight Days to Infamy event.

The Price

Alright, I’m not going to belabor this. Airframe Ultra will release for $12.99.

I broke this out into its own section because there’s a bunch of nuance to price stuff, so let me clarify a few more things.

First, we’re working with a third party to ensure that we’re charging fair prices for folks overseas. We know game price automatically converting for every country isn’t always as fair as it looks on the tin. To that end, we’re charging something more accurate across the world for Airframe rather than use the default tools. There’s not always a good price to satisfy everyone internationally, but we do our best to make sure we’re charging something fair for the game.

Second, the game is going to launch with a discount. It’ll be 25% off for the first 14 days, so if you pick it up on launch, it’ll be $9.74. I guess there isn’t too much more to say about that…

The Roundtable

First up, I wanna say thanks so much for taking the time to put these questions together, with a special thank you to Mako and Your Local Slugcat for typing up the questions and recording the conversation, respectively. I spent a bunch of time going over each question with the team, and there’s a ton of really excellent stuff in here. We did find ourselves running into the same pattern, though, since a bunch of the questions are touching on topics we really can’t get into the weeds on. So, rather than answering with a bunch of “maybe” or “we’ll see” type answers, I’ve pared the list to a few that are about our development process as a whole, and I’m also including some of our high-level pillars that speak to common themes.

I also want to lay out some ground rules for how we see feedback coming from the community in general, so you can get a sense of what part feedback plays in the process:

• Feedback is not a vote: We want feedback, we read it, and it shapes the game, but Airframe isn’t designed by democracy. The game is the vision of James and Joar, and that means sometimes we’re going to stick with that vision over adding the most requested thing.
• Unless we have tangible plans, we won’t say we’re considering something: You guys have a ton of awesome ideas and we’d love to implement a bunch of them, but the practical reality of game development turns awesome ideas into cut content like you wouldn’t believe. To ensure we’re not getting anybody’s hopes up, unless we’ve greenlit a feature, we’re not going to announce what’s on that list of considerations.
• Design decisions won’t be negotiated by Q&A: There are some points where we’ll provide insight into design, but at the end of the day, we want the game to speak for itself. The design of the game is in the game. It's not going to be in these blogs. It’s not going to be in the Discord. It’s not going to be in a livestream.

Alright, questions. I’ve lightly reworded these from the doc:

How do you balance quality-of-life improvements, new content, and everything else on the plate?

I outlined some of this in the previous devlog, so if you wanna read the full details, it’s over there. But the short version is:

• Weekly Bug Fixes: Not every week will include a bug fix patch, but we’ll be looking at bugs every week. This won’t include quality-of-life changes or new content.
• Monthly Balance Patches: Every month, we’re going to take a look at the state of balance and make adjustments to what’s too strong or too weak. Some of those balance tweaks might qualify as quality-of-life changes, but no new content will come with these.
• Periodic Content Updates: Every few months, we’ll take a big swing. This is where new content comes out and it would include quality of life too.

We don’t want any of this work to crowd out anything else, which is why we separated it out like that. There may be times where we break that cadence, but this is the core of our update philosophy.

How does community feedback factor into development, and what do you weigh when evaluating a suggestion?

It matters a lot! There’s plenty of times when community feedback has sparked a super intense discussion among the team. Sometimes, that discussion leads to huge changes. Sometimes, it leads to little tweaks. And sometimes, it reveals how committed we are to certain paths of the game’s design. At the end of the day, those discussions are really important to us, even if they don’t lead to a titanic overhaul of something or other.

When evaluating a suggestion, we’ll always weigh its creativity against its scope. Lots of cool ideas come through that are out of scope for us, so we can’t tackle them. But lots of cool ideas lead us down paths to fun changes. The best suggestions are very open-ended like “I love learning more about the lore of the game” or “I want to see the preset racers from the betas come back.” That gives us a lot of room to figure out how we can address the suggestion in clever ways.

What are some important aspects of Airframe Ultra's design philosophy that players might not immediately recognize?

There’s a lot to discover about Airframe, but here are two examples that we really care about:

• Stars are bragging rights. Life in Megacity West is so much about street cred that we wanted to capture that in game. The more stars you get, the more your reputation becomes legendary for pulling off wild stunts and winning despite insane odds.
• The airbrake is advanced tech. A few weeks ago, we talked in the livestream about tutorializing the airbrake, but the team wants that to be a feature players discover and share among themselves. The analogy is to the boosts you can give yourself in Mario Kart , tech that’s important for high-end play that you uncover on your own.

And then, one more, just about the lore, because it’s cool:

• Megacity West isn’t entirely populated end to end with people. There was a population boom in its past that caused the insane buildout of this coast-spanning city, but the modern city doesn’t have one resident for every single arcology apartment. That’s why some maps (like Quarry and Estate) are entirely abandoned, where the city’s old infrastructure is almost like geology.

What was the team’s goal with updating the race interface and UI?

We have this pillar for Airframe that we call “Lo-fi Cyberpunk” and that really describes the kind of dilapidated future that Ultra Circuit racing takes place in. Finding cool ways to enhance that aesthetic (like with the race interface and UI) is pretty key to the way we want to develop Airframe. It’s certainly a multiplayer game first and foremost, but the lore and world will always be core to what we want from Airframe Ultra .

With launch approaching, what is the team's main focus in preparing Airframe Ultra for release?

The focus for us has been entirely on polish and bugfixes. We did a massive, super comprehensive round of bugfixing coming out of Beta 5 to prep things for launch. We also polished up a ton of systems and art from the beta itself, so the Gutter got a ton of work, we made changes to progression (which I talked about in the previous devlog), and we’re nailing down a big balance pass. Past that, we’ve spent some time working on the first post-launch update as well.

The Pillars

OK, in this last section, I’d like to take a minute to talk about some of the game’s pillars in more depth. These are our animating philosophies behind Airframe’s development, and pretty often we’ll quote them to remind ourselves what our core game design values are. These are:

• Couch Co-op Chaos: We’ll always prioritize the couch co-op experience over the competitive one. Who wins is secondary to crazy, chaotic plays.
• Build Your Cred: Megacity West is a brutal, harsh place, and choosing to climb the ranks of Ultra Circuit racers is grueling and tough. (I wrote about this a bit in the previous devlog as well.)
• Mastery Is Discovery: The game doesn’t always hand you the answers. Sometimes, you gotta dig for yourself to find crazy cool ways to win.
• Fight for Bragging Rights: Take risks to win glory. You become legendary when you win against insane odds and each star makes every win tougher and more prestigious.
• Fast and Deadly: A good racer should be able to win games. A good killer should be able to win games. You need to do both to be the best.

There are a bunch of questions from the previous section that are more or less answerable just on the pillars. There was a question about breaking up combat and racing, for instance, and that runs up against Fast and Deadly– Airframe Ultra is combat plus racing, it’s not either or.

The Event

Just as a teaser, I’m working on one additional piece for Airframe’s launch. We’ve been thinking non-stop about how to celebrate launch and so, we’re going to be holding an event, Eight Days to Infamy. Have you ever made Fan Art for AFU? Put together a cosplay? Recorded amazing clips? Well, we’re going to be rewarding the most infamous racers in Megacity West the entirety of launch week. More details to , but we’re going to be giving away one-of-a-kind prizes like a commission from Esteban (AFU’s key art artist), a custom PC case, and a helmet with signatures from everyone on the team. More details to come!

Thanks so much for reading, folks. This time next week, we’ll be on the circuit. I’m very excited for all of you to get plenty of kills on me.

• [AG] Buddy