Cycles of Play

In making Scourge of the Skies, we were determined to develop a good gameplay cycle as soon as we could.

It's not enough to just have stuff moving around in-engine.
There has to be a definitive start, middle, end, repeat, to make a gameplay flow and feed back into itself.

For example, in FPS games you break from cover, fire gun, return to cover, reload gun, break from cover etc...

So for Scourge, we came up with a navigational cycle that we could use as the core of the game.

Players take control of a flying airship:

The S.S Player 1.

They begin at their player base, which has a catch net and an iconic landmark (here a tavern).

A typical player base.

Once a match begins, players will race to the centre of the level. Here, they'll try to collect falling pirate passengers that are being thrown from a giant prison fortress.

The prison fortress is executing pirates. It's up to you to catch them!!

Once the player has enough passengers balanced precariously on their airship's deck, it's time to ferry them back to the player base.

Once there, the player will use the trapdoor built into the bottom of the airship to dump the passengers safely into the catchment net.

Safely returning passengers to your player base will add them to your score.

From here, the player finds themselves back at their base, and is free to start the perilous journey again. Rinse and repeat!

The first player to successfully rescue and return enough passengers to fill their player base to capacity wins and becomes the Ventus Rex - King of The Air!

So the gameplay cycle works... But this is only when everything is going well. When other players enter the mix - trying to ram each other's airships and dislodge and steal their passengers - well, that's when the real fun begins!

Stealing your opponent's passengers mid-drop is a challenging but rewarding experience!