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. 

Meet the Factions!

Finally, we get to unveil our Airship clans! In engine! With gameplay! 

These ships have been in development for a while, we're very happy to unveil them properly now! 

The Navy - Proud fighters, the authority of the air. 

The Tinkerers - Resourceful technocrats, scavenging the skyworld.

The Vikings - Violent marauders, warriors wandering the winds. 

...and, of course, The Pirates - Flying buccaneers, the scourge of the skies. 

We're very excited to have these guys in the game. They really breathe life into the skyworld and allow us to flesh out the world of Scourge of the Skies!  

Hope you guys like the look of our clans. We're aiming to have a new playable build up and ready in the next few days. Remember to keep and eye on the skies!

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!

Synaptic Feedback And Friends

Hear that sweet buzzing sound?

That's our controller rumbling across our worktable! We're happy to announce that we've finally got vibration in!

Feel the difference!

This is one of the new features we're working on this week.

We're also adding a winner screen, new art models, a co-op team game mode and the very exciting 'Slip-Stream' speed boosts. 

We've got a lot to do, but we'll have the next build up and running as soon as possible. Remember to keep checking back here, and keep an eye on the skies!

Build v0.7.0! Post-pitch Prototype Iteration 3

Fire! The pink player's shots sail towards the yellow player.

In this release we continue to re-add in old game mechanics prior to the upcoming feature lock and to experiment with some new ones such as ship shunting. Our programmers have also began the process of refactoring and optimising the game post-prototype in order to get the game running as smoothly as possible.

Note that you will need an Xbox controller for each player who wishes to play.

Download (47.8 MB Zip Archive): https://github.com/patferguson/Storms-Project/releases/download/v0.7.0/ProjectStorms-v0_7_0.zip

Major changes:
-Re-enabled the ship cannon firing. Fixed several issues with this process.
-Gave the ship's cannons a shot cool-down.
-Added a shunting ability to the bumpers on the controller.
-Added a part repair zone.
-Tweaked and improved the prison fortress' colliders.
-Prison fortress warning light is now orange when idle then red when spawning.
-Lowered passenger terminal velocity to improve physics responsiveness.
-Made a all lerps/slerps/updates frame independent by using delta time that weren't already.
-Optimised several classes to use cached component references instead of game scene hierarchy lookups.
-Refactored code to improve clarity.

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!

R & D

This week marks the beginning of our month-long research and development phase.

One of the cool things with a game like Scourge is it's creative reach and flexibility. Since we've had our prototype approved, now is the time for us to start fleshing out the game.

Previously, we've focused exclusively on the core of the game - now we get to look at doing all the exciting juicy things we've been talking about for ages!

For instance, a much requested 'Team' game mode (2 v 2) seems like a natural extension of our existing 4 player Free-For-All, so we'll be looking into that soon.

Yellow team.

Similarly, we've just begun implementing airship destruction to the vehicles. This means that the balloons that stabilise the player's ship can be popped - and this will effect the player's movement.

Green player is tipping to the side because they've lost their port-side balloons.

Unfortunately, we don't have unlimited time to experiment with this cool stuff, so we have to plan out what we really, really want to achieve, and stick to it.

SO MANY FEATURES - SO LITTLE TIME!!!