Cloudbuilt successor Sky Tracers takes rocket-powered parkour online
Leaping all buildings in a single bound
As much as I loved jet-powered platformer Super Cloudbuilt, it was a deliberately lonesome experience for the self-improving speedrunner. For their next - the recently announced Sky Tracers - developers Coilworks are adapting the formula to multiplayer. Swarms of jet-powered lunatics will be able to hop, boost and wall-run their way through towering sci-fi cityscapes, in environments looking less abstract than the dream-like floating ruins of Cloudbuilt. There's no release date yet, but Coilworks are looking for people eager to try out alpha test builds. Below, a debut trailer.
While I don't think Coilworks have explicitly used the word 'sequel' here, that's definitely a remixed version of Cloudbuilt's main theme being used in the trailer below. The jet-boosted parkour looks just the same as ever, although the environments are looking a little more Mirror's Edge. While the players appear to just be racing to the finish without directly impeding each other, there are some robotic enemies (again, as in Cloudbuilt) to be shot at, and which could possibly ruin a run if ignored.
It all reminds me a bit of Trackmania's multiplayer, with players just moving first as a huge disorganised swarm, then in groups starting to come together as racing lines are identified. There's mention of social areas to hang out with in-between matches and character customisation, as you'd expect from any modern multiplayer game. Right now all we've seen of the game is the basic multiplayer racing mode, but more ways to play are to be announced.
Personally, I'm hoping for at least some single-player story component to the game, if only because Cloudbuilt gave me some extremely nice Mega Man X vibes, and I've been wondering for years what a more traditional structure would do for its twitchy, agile parkour platforming. Social speedrunning does strike me as the next best thing, though, and the environments shown so far are big and open enough to invite experimentation.
There's no word on when Sky Tracers will be launching, but you can find a little more detail on Steam and its official site, where they're accepting alpha test sign-ups. In the meantime, I highly recommend Super Cloudbuilt.