Amberspire Steam news

• Latest observed playersNot available
• SteamPulse tracked peak31
• Units sold (VGI)No data available
• Revenue (VGI)No data available
• Review score90% positive
• Total reviews69
• Release dateMay 6, 2026
• DeveloperLunar Division
• PublisherBithell Games

Genres: Indie, Simulation, Strategy

Company pages: Developer: Lunar DivisionPublisher: Bithell Games

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Amberspire Steam news

Amberspire news collects recent Steam feed items, update posts, and announcements that SteamPulse can associate with this app.

Latest Steam announcements

• Hotfix 2 - 20 May 2026

  Fixed supply line displays for buildings affected by the Shipyard. Fixed a hang when opening the rulebook while holding a die. Allowed a left mouse click interaction on the dice tray to release a held die. Thanks for playing Amberspire!

• Hotfix 1 - 8 May 2026

  Corrected the swapped tooltips of influence and residents. Fixed the interaction between Shipyard and certain terrain buildings. Thanks for playing Amberspire!

• Amberspire review - a strategy game dedicated to the dicey ecopoetics of urban sprawl - 7 May 2026

  The key thing to know about Amberspire is that it isn't a city-builder in the SimCity sense, but a turn-based boardgame puzzler in which you don't so much 'build' a city as you do manage a tumult of unpredictable, city-flavoured agencies. Created by Lunar Division, developers of The Banished Vault , it takes place on the surface of a moon-sized mausoleum - a vast Venetian graveworld whose fractured isometric crust reveals level after level of archways and catacombs, sinking beyond sight. The all-pervading presence of the crypt reminds me of London's old church cemeteries, crushed like dandelions between mishappen skyscrapers, refusing to be written out of the tale. It also immediately undercuts your primary objective of building a city populous and advanced enough to win recognition from other planets. However high your towers rise, your city is just another layer of debris and pollutio…

• Micro and Macro History - 4 May 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicToday's design diary is written by the other writer on the game: historian, academic, and game developer Holly Nielsen. Holly was brought on to the game to bring a historian's eye to the writing and worldbuilding, but in a way to make sure things stay believably vague and contradictory, and in my biased opinion you're in for a treat.Hello! I’m Holly Nielsen, a historian, writer and narrative designer. I’m lucky enough to be working on Amberspire, and Nic has kindly offered this space to let me discuss our approach to narrative..Being a historian shapes the way I approac…

• Faction and Event Design - 30 April 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicFrom a design perspective, the factions and events form the third major element of the game, alongside the dice and the environment. The goal is to create a narrative quality to the game and city that is missing from the other two parts.The dice and environment provide a large and detailed systemic representation of the city. There's many little stories that come out of them, but they represent the city and environment as a series of processes with relatively fixed inputs and outputs.The factions and events represent the people, communities, and ideologies in the world,…

• The Factions of Amberspire - 27 April 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicFactions are the last major component of Amberspire I've yet to go in detail in, until now! They are a vital component to the game, and the backbone of the event system.In Amberspire you're fundamentally playing a dice game to build a city, but I wanted the overall experience to have narrative beats and events. These events are a light touch, and reflect things happening in your city and the solar system beyond.The factions are special groups of people with political and material power in the world and are greatly affected by the events. They have special Favor and Pena…

• Creating An Old City - 23 April 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicI wish city builders had more friction. I enjoy playing city builders tremendously, and as far as the extremely broad genre of management games go it is my favorite kind within that. But management games take on many forms, and unfortunately I think city builders are sometimes are not focused enough.There's many reasons, and that's also not to say they are badly designed! The kinds of friction in these homeostatic management games are fun, and there are many experimentations with the form.I want more friction from history in my city builders. I can understand why they d…

• Removing The Scaffolds - 21 April 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicThe past several design diaries have been a tour of all the big ideas in the game. Once those start to feel mostly right, the next step is to flesh all of it out. Frequently in this phase you invalidate some of those ideas or find better versions, so it's an important step in the process. Often the game will feel suddenly much closer to being complete, even with a lot more to do.The Rest of the OwlI started with resources and buildings, which is naturally a very circular pair of ideas. What were the actual resources the game concerns the player with? That depended on th…

• Isometric Slicing - 16 April 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicAlongside working on the art style of the game was figuring out how to render buildings so they would sort correctly and maintain performance with hundreds of buildings and layers on screen.ConstraintsThe first step is establishing some constraints. The first and biggest was a building always had a square footprint on the grid. This simplified many things, and left height open for art to establish unique silhouettes. Without any patterns or convexity to worry about, the game could have buildings of varying size and ease my headaches on rendering.Varying size is a key de…

• An Art Style for Science Fantasy City - 14 April 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicIt was initially difficult for me to define what I wanted Amberspire to look like. Science fantasy encompasses so much, it’s hard to clearly define what is right for your setting – Star Wars, Book of the New Sun, Viriconium – all are validly described as science fantasy. It's partially useful to describe what you don't want, but you need to define positive aspects to really go far.VeniceMy initial thinking started off with the world and city should feel like a science fantasy Venice. Not a literal Venice in space, but as a reference for various ideas: architecture, dens…

• Dice Design 2 - Cycles and Strategy - 7 April 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicThe path to solving these issues started with a new question I hadn’t previously considered and that the game wasn’t answering clearly: are dice and their resources representing constraints on the players actions, or progress to specific goals the player has?But What Are Dice?At first this sounds like a distinction without a difference, but it was illuminating to try to find an answer. Amberspire doesn’t have a concrete set of 'actions’ that you choose, but of course every game has a set of actions no matter how fluid or obfuscated they might be. Considering those actio…

• Dice Design 1 - Atomization - 31 March 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicUp until now in these design diaries I have only loosely described how the resources and dice work, but not in full detail. That's because, simply put, up until this moment (in the design process, not when you're reading this) it wasn't particularly good, and this only became clearer once the game had other things going on.I had initially designed the dice system to function with a simple tradeoff to provide friction for the player: you can roll as many dice as you want, but any resources you don't use add to a Fatigue value, which incurred some penalty and involved som…

• The Living Moon - 24 March 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicCity builders invoke friction for the player in various ways. Many have systemic values like happiness or pollution that, through the actions of the player and system, go up and down. The player needs to balance whatever goals they have with maintaining these values. Other common sources are geographic features and terrain, both elevation but also water features or natural resources.This kind of friction was at the front of my mind at the early stages of Amberspire's design, simply because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to represent in the game. Put differently, th…

• Population and People - 17 March 2026

  Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nicI've been playing and thinking about city builders for a long time, and along the way I realized I wanted to do my own spin on houses and population. This was partly born out of thinking about cellular automata, but also realizing that typically in city builders I am not engaged by placing houses or residential districts. Unless I am giving myself a very specific external motivation for doing so (a visual appeal or extra challenge) I'll just do the bare minimum the game requires and nothing more. In a sense, I'd like the population to be either something I think about a…

• Faction and Event Design - 11 March 2026

  From a design perspective, the factions and events form the third major element of the game, alongside the dice and the environment. The goal is to create a narrative quality to the game and city that is missing from the other two parts.The dice and environment provide a large and detailed systemic representation of the city. There's many little stories that come out of them, but they represent the city and environment as a series of processes with relatively fixed inputs and outputs.The factions and events represent the people, communities, and ideologies in the world, and they are weird! The events are meant to depict what the systems can't - strange occurrences, people being goofy or aggressive or helpful. The events also describe much of what happens beyond the city, in other settlements in the solar system and in systems beyond. This layer is something that narratively you are awar…

• 2D Cities, Detail and Theme - 11 March 2026

  The first production decision made for Amberspire was choosing to render the game in 2D or 3D. By training and experience I am a 3D artist and comfortable with 3D games, so this seemed like a natural starting point. Once I actually got started on the prototype however, we decided to do the exact opposite: go full 2D and isometric.BazaarThe DetailsCities are dense and detailed environments, and producing detailed 3D art is a lot of work. You need to conceptualize and model walls, roofs, windows props, domes, arches, tunnels, plants, – everything you want to see. Then unwrap and texture all those objects, before creating shaders for all the materials to render them. I have experience doing all of these things, but our goal was to keep the team size and production close to The Banished Vault - which had comparatively few small and simple models. Amberspire would need a few dozen unique bui…

• Amberspire will release on May 6th! - 4 March 2026

  We've been quietly working away on Amberspire for a little while, and it's finally ready to be shared with everyone soon.Amberspire will launch on Steam on May 6th 2026!We'll be posting a whole lot of sneak peeks and previews on our socials (@BithellGames on everything) between now and launch, so be sure to check those out in the meantime.We're so excited to get Amberspire into your hands. Wishlist, tell a friend, and we'll see you soon!Watch the teaser now!

• Cities and Cellular Automata - 6 March 2025

  Cellular automata have fascinated me from the moment I learned about them. How can simple rules and constraints can produce astounding complexity and unpredictability? Or even a simple recurring equation like the logistic map producing random noise, when tuned to the right value. It feels clipping through a wall in a game and seeing the underside of reality. A decade ago these ideas lodged in my brain and fused with the overwhelming desire to move from the suburbs and to a city, and I've been thinking about the two together ever since. Cities of Life So over the years I’d try experimenting with cellular automata to create a city builder, somewhere between a game, toy, and visualizer. I tried to hold on to a powerful idea that would eventually prove impossible, that the player could adjust the rules of the automata system to change how the city would grow. If a player wants more farms, t…

• Messing Around Until The End - 14 February 2025

  See the other design diaries, wishlist the game, or subscribe to our newsletter. So far the design diaries are still very much in the pre-production phase, where I am trying to sort out my thoughts on what kind of game I want to make, before actually figuring out all the various details. Today I put together my thinking about the incentives games put on players to make decisions and seek goals. A lot of game design is about applying pressure on the player to create an interesting end state for a game. In a competitive game, the end is important and the pressure is typically another player who is competing against you. For a single player game however, both pressure and end state become important factors that have to be manually shaped. Early on in thinking through Amberspire's design, the question was simple enough - what is pushing the player forward? My design tendency is to make anyt…

• Thematic Resources - 28 January 2025

  Cities are a natural setting in a science fantasy universe. Built over their own ruins, where the past and future mix into a heady kaleidoscope of people and technology. Cities are a microcosm of the world around them, but also with unique details and inertias. Without having to write (or read) tons of lore, just what kinds of buildings are in a city, what people do there, how it engages with the surrounding environment says a lot. The upside of a modern or medieval theme is it's very easy to communicate what function individual elements of the game serve. For example compare “stone” to something invented like “plastoid”. Everyone knows what stone is, how to get it, and its benefits and downsides. “Plastoid” needs an explanation, and requires more from the game on what it is, what it does, and how to get it. For a space fantasy setting like Amberspire's, the details are important, and t…

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