Hello Hello! We at Yvora hope 2026 has started off well for all of you! While the world keeps turning below the clouds, things have been busy up here in our little corner of the sky. Over the past month, the team has been making some exciting progress, and we’re happy to share a bit of what we’ve been working on with you.
A lot of people in our discord and on our socials were in love with the Springriders (a leisure station you can build of the Eylanders).
We let our discord members vote on which animal should be the next one! So now introducing, as an addition to the WipKip...
The WhaleWip!
This month, one of our developers went deep under the hood to completely overhaul how our floating islands are built internally.
Thanks to this rework, players now have way more freedom when building on different islands. This is due to the fact that they now no longer all follow the same rigid grid and straight lines. Each floating island can now have its own orientation!
This helps give the game a more organic layout, more interesting traversal, and environments that feel less “copy-paste” and more cozy.
On top of that, this new system is faster, cleaner, and far less prone to bugs!
We also focussed on our 'Happiness mechanic' and it just got a whole lot more alive.
Instead of happiness being just a number in the corner of the screen, it now physically manifests in the world. When an Eylander is pleased, they emit little happiness sparks. You can literally run around, pick them up, and watch your happiness meter fill. It’s more visual, more playful, and way more satisfying.
We’ve also introduced one dedicated Tutorial Eylander. This means the tutorial is now much more stable and less buggy, since one NPC is clearly responsible for guiding you. The other Eylanders are free to just… be Eylanders. They’re no longer forced into tutorial duty, though they might still offer helpful hints if you stop by for a chat!
When your game literally lives in the clouds, you can’t really fake the clouds. Sooooo, we’ve been spending quite some time experimenting with different cloud techniques, and wow, this stuff is not a walk in the park.
Our challenge was to create clouds that feel volumetric and alive, while still being performant enough to use everywhere: as distant background clouds and as clouds floating right between our islands. After a lot of testing and iteration, we found a sweet spot by combining pre-baked data with a custom ray-marching approach. It gives us the soft, painterly look we’re after, without killing performance.
There’s more to share soon, but for now, here’s a little preview of where we’re at.
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Would you like to know more about our team or do you have any questions? Click here.
