- KYORA Dev Blog #6 - What goes up... - 15 July 2026
Hey everyone!It’s Pugstorm’s resident Associate Game Director, Felix here again 👋 Today I’m going to share a sneak peek at some of the ways we’ve been experimenting with fun and (mostly) efficient ways of traversing around the world KYORA. So what is our approach to 2d, verticality and gravity… 🛠 All footage shows experimental ALPHA gameplay - title in development. Visuals are work-in-progress!Staying GroundedGravity is a humble but core part of the gameplay in KYORA, and as such we must treat it (and in extension verticality) with great respect. This requires us to spend a lot of effort on movement systems and options, and come up with fun ways to utilize it in the best ways possible. In general, we think of movement as having two broad ‘modes’: controlled and uncontrolled. Controlled mode is when the player feels in sync with what their character is doing. They might be running arou…
- KYORA Dev Blog #5 - Survival of the Craftiest - 9 April 2026
Hey everyone! Max here, gameplay programmer at Pugstorm 👋 Today I’ll be sharing my insights on how KYORA approaches giving you the right tools and a sense of progression, and how we try to make that loop engaging. If you missed our previous posts, you can catch our deep dives on World Generation, Environment Design and Character Design here!PIXELS AND PICKAXESI’ve always liked sandbox games that drop you into a world with almost nothing and let you figure things out at your own pace. The goal is learning how the environment works, understanding what different materials can do, and gradually becoming more confident as you go. In KYORA, we follow that same spirit, but add the ability to pixel terraform right from the start. We’re big fans of how these games encourage exploration and experimentation, and we’re hoping that giving players this level of control adds an interesting twist to t…
- Thank You for 500,000+ wishlists! - 29 January 2026
Hello to all 500,000+ of you - wow! This was such a lovely way to start 2026. Huge thank you to everyone who has hit the wishlist button, each of you has helped ensure KYORA finds its community! It’s really encouraging to see so many of you excited about what we are building. Cheers! As a little thank you, we wanted to share a little teaser and insight into where we’re at! So, what have we been up to? With early access still a way down the road, we wanted to share a peek at where we’re at right now. Last year was all about nailing down our vision - lots of building systems, experimenting with prototypes, testing, tweaking, removing and replacing, and creating new dev tools to make this whole thing a lot easier going forward. It’s been difficult but incredibly rewarding. Here’s a taste of what we’ve tackled so far (in no particular order!): The core systems: improved player feel and move…
- KYORA Dev Blog #4 - A First Look at our New Character Design - 4 December 2025
Hey everyone! Linus here, Gameplay Lead at Pugstorm 👋 It’s been a little while since we first revealed KYORA and since then we’ve overhauled and refined almost everything in the game, including the topic of our blog today, character customization and gear! Before I jump into things, I want to take a moment to mention that everything we show today is a work in progress. Everything from the UI, to the customization options that players will have available to them will be changed and improved in some way, or even removed entirely. With that out the way, let’s take a look… The good, the beard, and the ugly One of the most common pieces of feedback we saw from the community when we first revealed KYORA was that players wanted more detailed character and customisation options, and so we’ve been hard at work to iterate on something that felt fun and fantastical, but remained grounded and true…
- KYORA Dev Blog #3 - Environment Design - 22 October 2025
Hey everyone! Anders here, Art Director on KYORA. In our last dev blog, Felix kindly walked us through the world generation that builds the foundation of KYORA. Today I want to dig a little deeper and talk to you about what goes on top of that foundation: environment design! Many of us on the team have had the pleasure of working on Core Keeper which means we’re pulling in all of our experience and learnings to KYORA’s design process. Our aim with KYORA is to create environments that aren’t just cool to look at, but are also an active part of the adventure; mechanically and narratively. Exploration: Inviting Players to ‘Dig’So, how do we fill an entirely destructible pixel world with mystery, adventure and life? KYORA’s destructible environment poses a really interesting challenge when it comes to building a coherent, fun play space. We want you to feel that ‘just a little deeper’ pull…
- KYORA Dev Blog #2 - World Generation - 23 June 2025
Hello and welcome back to our 2nd dev blog! My name is Felix (though I usually go by Fewes) and I’m the associate game director on KYORA. Last time, Fredrik (Prantare) talked about how the pixels in our game work, and today I thought I’d talk a little about a topic that very much ties into that: world generation.What in the world?To give some background: just like Core Keeper, KYORA is a procedurally generated game. This means that we utilize various methods to build a big world in a unique way for every player, and all of these methods fall under the umbrella of world generation. Think of things like the terrain, caves, greenery, resource/creature placement, points of interest and the like, and you have an idea of what we’re talking about.Many of the methods we use are great at making the world randomized, but we must take care to rein this in a bit and make sure the system does what w…
- KYORA Dev Blog #1 - The Wonderful World of KYORA - 25 March 2025
Hey everyone, Fredrik here (or Prantare, whichever you prefer!). Welcome to the first-ever KYORA dev blog. In these quarterly updates, we will pull back the curtain just a bit, sharing glimpses of what we are building behind the scenes. And whether you are joining us from Core Keeper, Starbound, another game ;), or just stumbled upon us by chance, we are really glad you are here. First off: wow. The response to our teaser trailer at The Game Awards completely floored us. Seriously — thank you. It gave us an enormous boost to kick off 2025. That energy? We are pouring it straight into KYORA — which is all about creativity, adventure, and freedom. And under the hood, we are building tech that runs deeper than you might expect. So, what’s special about our pixels? KYORA is built around pixels — tiny, interactive units of terrain you can directly shape and manipulate with pixel-level precis…
- Core Keeper developer announced KYORA that looks suspiciously like Terraria where "every pixel is yours to shape" - 13 December 2024
Terraria 2? Well, they can't call it that of course, but it sure looks like it. Coming from developer Pugstorm and published by Chucklefish, KYORA looks quite delightful. Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/12/core-keeper-developer-announced-kyora-that-looks-suspiciously-like-terraria-where-every-pixel-is-yours-to-shape
- Welcome To KYORA - 13 December 2024
Hello everyone! Here at Pugstorm and Chucklefish, we are incredibly excited to announce our brand-new game, KYORA, which will be coming first to Steam Early Access. Check out our teaser trailer, first revealed in The Game Awards showcase! KYORA is a 2D sandbox adventure for 1-8 players, where every pixel is yours to shape, mine, build or EXPLODE. Mine precious resources, craft physics-altering wands, take on powerful bosses, and build your base by terraforming the world around you. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3337850/KYORA/ Core Features: Explore KYORA Journey into the unexpected, in a procedurally-generated open world. Carve into the earth or sculpt toward the sky in search of magical materials. Craft matter-manipulating wands, upgrade your gear, and take on the powerful bosses in control of each biome: the Heralds. These bosses will test your reflexes, wit and careful preparati…
