A Plausible Sky-World?

Lately, we've been looking into ways to breathe life into our game environments. Elouise's skybox and building assets have certainly taken us a long way from the greybox level we originally had, and the Airship models, courtesy of Harry, have added a great deal to the atmosphere.

However, we're still honing in on what makes this place come to life. Is this place plausible? What laws and logic apply here? Basically, 'how does our world work'? 

A Pirate Airship docked at a floating village. 

Row Deakins, and myself have been experimenting with a variety of ways to merge the core components of gameplay with the environment. This can throw up challenges, as our relatively unique game location doesn't provide us with much reference material. 

For example, imagine you are playing a dungeon crawler RPG. Upon entering a room, a portcullis may slam down behind the your character, locking them in. This is both thematically appropriate, and functional for gameplay. However, we don't have the luxury of being able to reference 16th century castles. We have to be more abstract in our approach to world design. 

Row found that placing Repair Zones inside hollow islands provided the player with an exciting navigational challenge.

Naturally, we've taken inspiration from a variety of different sources that depict sky-worlds. Everything from Jame's Cameron's Avatar to Nintendo's Skyward Sword has provided us with ideas. But now we realise that the world and its rules are ours to construct. We determine what is 'logical' and what is 'possible' in Scourge of the Skies. Some hard decisions had to be made.

Maybe we should call this sky village 'Anchorhead'. 

In the world of Scourge, islands float irrespective of gravity, but Airships stay aloft with big helium balloons. 

Wind fills the sails of our ships, but each village use electric generators for power. 

And dropping enough passengers into giant nets will get you a promoted to Sky King. 

Sound crazy? Sure. But with some creativity and determination, we might just make it plausible.