Games Week Debrief

Hi guys,

We've been very busy over the past fortnight.

A few weeks ago, we pushed to enter a Scourge of the Skies Demo into the Game Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP) Student Showcase.

GCAP 2015

We're very proud to say the we were lucky enough to be chosen from the many entries.

Along with 5 other student teams from around Australia, we presented our game at the GCAP conference on Tuesday 27th and Wednesday 28th of October.

We cleaned up our Alpha Build, and added a few new features to really spice up the game.

The new Whirlwind feature in Action (top left)

People who tried Scourge seemed to like the game. We really appreciate the feedback they had for us, and it was a fantastic opportunity for us to meet industry leads and professionals.

We presented a streamlined Instruction Tutorial as part of the GCAP build.

Our Cinematic Presentation was something we tried to highlight.

It was also awesome to meet other students from around Australia and share some stories with them.

I also finished the week with a visit to PAX, where I got to meet some more indie devs, see some cool student projects, and of course, try some upcoming Triple A titles.

Even though we're doing all this exciting stuff, we haven't stopped working hard on Scourge of the Skies. We'll have our Beta build up and running soon, and we'll be sure to leave a link to it here.

For now, you'll just have to keep an eye on the skies.

 :) Catch'ya Soon!

Game Banner

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. 

Slipstreams

As we mentioned earlier this week, we've implemented slip-streams and air currents to Scourge.

Slipstreams in the Unity Editor

This is thanks to our programmer Andy who designed and created them and our level designer Row who's built us some custom maps at the last minute.

The slipstreams are currents of air that carries away anything that enters them. In our Skyworld, both the player airships and the falling passengers can get blown away by them.

The trajectory of the falling passengers is changed as they fall through the green slipstream 

Basically, the slipstreams are a game changer for us, as they can speed up the action and provide 'channels' of play. It's cool, because with this, we can begin to provide the player with more navigational options.

We'll be putting up a new pre-alpha build once we've got a number of new features in. Until then, we'll keep updating and announcing stuff here. Keep an eye on the skies!

Airship Ahoy!

Hopefully it's obvious that we're making Scourge of the Skies because we really like Steampunk Airships.

With many fictional and popular culture references to take inspiration from, we actually had initial trouble honing in on the exact model of an airship we wanted, as there's so many styles and variations to choose from.

But our lead artist Harry soon compiled a great collection of concept art, and quickly came up with a groovy design that combines the best of pirate ships and zeppelins.

Our airship uses balloons for balance, and a sail for movement, a propeller for speed and boosts, and a rudder system for tight turns and navigation.

Once we found what we were after, Harry quickly took the airship from concept to in-game model, and has since worked consistently to update and adapt the vehicle to match and enhance this core feature of the game.

Check out some of the iterations that it's gone through over the past few weeks:

Of course, great art like this is never truly 'finished' and there'll be more updates to the S.S Player 1 before we finish Scourge of the Skies.

To see more of Harry's work and the developments on Scourge, be sure to keep an eye on the skies and check back on our progress regularly!

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!