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Tomorrow's Horizon is a game about conflict, exploration and discovery. You play as one of a number of captains, each with their own story path, travelling across a world stricken by war and racism. Each captain is driven forward by their own goals, and each captain will ultimately find themselves at the end of their road.

Tomorrow's Horizon is focused largely on storytelling and adventure. No character in the game is safe from harm. If a member of your crew is killed, they are dead forever. The same goes for your captain. If you die, the game is over.

Our goal with the game is to achieve a rich and immersive world in which every new game played feels completely different, not just in game play and strategy but also in story. The characters you meet, the places you find and the people you kill will play an impact on a personal tale formed by you and the game.






We're doing our best to make the development of Tomorrow's Horizon as transparent as possible. We want feedback at every phase of the project in order to make the best game that we possibly can. In order to do this, here are some of the things we're doing during development:

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Still Alive Saturdays

As often as is possible, we're doing weekly updates every Saturday, discussing some of what we've been working on, as well as expanding a bit on the features of the game. This will be an opportunity for you to learn more about Tomorrow's Horizon, and to tell us what you think of the going-ons.

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Video Updates

I've spent some time refurbishing the Magnesium Ninja Youtube channel. Our intention is to start posting more frequent video updates on Tomorrow's Horizon. Some of these will show off footage of the game, and others will talk more in-depth about development or specific features.

Our Youtube channel can be found at http://www.youtube.com/MagnesiumNinjaStudio/ (http://www.youtube.com/magnesiumninjastudio).

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Beta Testing

We would love to have members of the community work with us to make the best game possible. We'll be talking more about this in the future, but we're letting you know about this now!


I hope that some of this has piqued your interest. We're staying fairly quiet about the game's features right now, but stay tuned because we'll be revealing more as time goes on.

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Thanks for checking out our game!
Chris

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the first official Still Alive Saturday, henceforth referred to as SAS because I can't be bothered to type out the entire thing. We spent this week designing and implementing the majority of basic player combat, as  well as working on the first of a large number of enemies.



Basic Combat Moves

Combat in Project Sky has been designed to be fast and fluid. All humanoid characters will fight primarily with a melee weapon, although not all characters are limited to just that.

As a player, your attack options can be broken down into two main categories: ground and air. While grounded, you can attack low, medium and high. The same goes for in the air. This allows the player a large variety of attacks and methods by which they can defeat enemies with different strengths and weaknesses.

To give an example of what I mean: A standard enemy with only a sword isn't too hard to kill. Most likely, simply mashing the attack button at close range will be enough to stun and kill him. However, an enemy with a shield may require some more thoughtful tactics. Perhaps a better way of handling him would be to crouch, stab at his exposed legs, and then attack from behind while he's stunned.

Our goal with combat is to make situations like these frequent so that we can challenge the player in a way that enforces different skills and ultimately leads to them becoming a better player.




Technical Updates

A slightly frustrating side-note: As it stands right now, streaming development doesn't look like it's going to work out as well as I had planned. My upload speed isn't strong enough to support anything better than a slightly laggy 360p stream, which isn't all that exciting to watch. I'll look into workarounds, but as it stands things aren't looking too positive for streaming. Sorry about that.



That's all for this week! Depending on how much we get done next week, I may or may not talk a bit about the Project Sky world and aesthetic.

Let us know what you think of the update!

Chris

The game looks epic, though I would suggest changing the bland blue background with more zest.Perhaps birds, clouds, sun, moon, etc. Keep up the work!

P.S. Will you be able to man objects such as cannons or harpoons.

Thank you! Don't worry about the background, it's incredibly placeholder.

As for mannable objects, well, I'll keep stuff like that secret for a bit longer  :)

I like some visual ideas (to me there's something panzerdragoonesque in it) but I think you need better drawings to reach those ideas, in both characters and furniture. But I know you're still in the early stages, so I'll keep an eye on this :)

Absolutely! We have a ton of aesthetic work to do and what we have right now isn't a very good representation of what we want the game to look like!

Hey everyone!

We've reached week two of our SAS streak. This week is all about random island generation and our first official enemy. Here we go!



Island Generation

A big part of Project Sky will be the randomly generated events, both on land and out in the open air/sea. We've designed this game to allow for the largest variety of unique events to occur while still allowing us some control over the shape of each event.

What this means in terms of island generation is that each island is built up of a number of small 'chunks'. These chunks shape the overall layout of the island, after which we can further customize each island with its appearance, as well as the actual content on it.

By using predetermined chunks, the only restriction on the number of islands is the number of chunks we design. For every new chunk we add to the game, we increase the number of permutations.



The Lizog

The Lizog is a large and dangerous animal native to the world of Project Sky. Part lizard, part dog (I didn't choose the name don't look at me), this beast is a force to be reckoned with. Unfortunately, it wasn't bestowed with the largest of brains, and some quick maneouvering should prove effective against it.


As you can see from the above gif, the lizog relies primarily on rush-in attacks. If you can figure out a strategy that will keep the beast away from you, this early game enemy shouldn't cause you too much trouble.



Final Notes

A few small updates to accompany this week's SAS:

• We've added  the beginnings of the HUD. I'll discuss the HUD in a much later update, probably after crew is in game to some degree
• The island layout that you can see in the gif is obviously just a placeholder. The real layout will be much more natural

That's all for this week! Let us know what you think of the update, as well as any suggestions/comments you may have!


One last thing before I go:


Perhaps the lizog ai needs a *little* bit more work before we ship. Just a little.

Chris

I'm starting to see that a lot of the "metroidvanias" nowadays are finally picking up on better combat fluidity. I'm so glad to see this. It's more entertaining to have a very agile character.

I like your lizard AI bug gif, haha. It looks like this could be a real fun game, and I'm glad you've chosen a Pirates theme, as I've not seen much of that.

Looks good!, following

Thank you!

Small aside: I've been working tonight on some better effects. Here are the results so far:

http://gyazo.com/ddbc2a74e62fdddf1106dda5801b678d (Click MP4)

(Hey all! I was busy this morning and Justin wrote up the SAS for this week. Thank him for me! [Chris])



We've both been really busy with schoolwork and the like, but this week we managed to add a few details to the game. A lot of them aren't easy to demonstrate with GIFs, but here we go!

Hitsparks



Gone are the days of the shrinking red circle. We've implemented hitsparks for sharp attacks and blunt attacks, a block spark, a blood spray effect, and screen shake. In addition to this the player now has a proper hurt frame, so combat looks much nicer.



Lizog AI and Combat Fluidity

In addition, we've made some tweaks to combat with the lizog that should guide our combat design in the future. The lizog used to attack as soon as it got within range, but this made it much too difficult to take on several lizogs at once, especially because the player's range was shorter than the lizog's pounce.

To remedy this we've extended prep time to the lizog's attack.


In addition, the player's combat controls are much smoother; they can now switch directions instantly between attacks and blocks, and they have greater control over how far they lunge based on the directional key they press.

Our goal is to build a fairly extensible system where enemies have a certain pattern to them; like in Dark Souls, enemies will be challenging but fair and a great part of the game's combat will be the player's skill in dealing with the behaviors of different enemy types. To this end they must know when to strike, when to block and when to dodge, as well as their best opportunities to attack. We want combat to feel agile, and to reward players for their observation and quick thinking.



Final Notes

In addition to those things:

Chris has added full controller support. Right now he says it plays equally well on keyboard and controller.
Avash started writing bits of the story.
Lizogs no longer form a lemniscate when faced with a valley.


That's all for now, folks! Hope to see you again next week.

Justin

So smoooooth. Even without proper tiles around, those animations give off such a promising look already.

Hey everyone!

I'll preface this update by saying that there wasn't a whole lot of actual work done on the game this week. Why? Well, because between Sunday and Friday, the game was in a completely inoperable state. It's a bit of a long story, but worry not because everything is fixed and good now.

Instead of talking about what we accomplished this week, I'm going to give you some insight into the general story structure. Keep in mind that because we don't want to spoil any critical story/gameplay elements, I'm going to stay fairly vague with my explanations.



The Captains

At the beginning of each round of Project Sky, you will choose a captain to play as. Each captain will be defined by a specific back story and motives which will shape both your path through the game, as well as the options you will have at key moments during the story.

Our goal with these captains is to tell a series of interwoven and personal stories. As I said above, there are going to be key moments during each round where you will have to make decisions that will largely impact your progression. These will be unique to your chosen captain and will be impacted by your play so far that round.

If you're worried about these captains limiting the customization/random nature of the game, don't be. Our goal with the storytelling is to enhance the already unpredictable, dangerous and exciting nature of the game, not to force you through bottlenecks each round.

The last thing I'm going to say about this today is that all of the captains are related in some way.



That's all for this SAS! A little short, I know, but when issues appear they appear in full force!

See you all next week,

Chris

Hello there!

Some very big technical jumps happened this week. We started off by tackling proper island generation and art, working on varied landscapes and design. Afterwards, we started working on the Ledger, an important centre for a large portion of the information you'll need as captain to stay alive and well.


Island Generation

A large chunk of the gameplay in Project Sky takes place on islands, both in the air and on the sea. We've been working a lot on sky islands lately, trying to diversify both the verticality and the sizing of each chunk. The result is something that I am very, very happy with, but you'll have to wait a little longer to see the full extent of our work!

Justin has been hard at work creating art for each chunk. We've decided on a sort of Giant's Causeway aesthetic for at least our starting islands, which you can see in the screenshot below. It's a style I very much like, and coupled with further art assets/background work it's going to look really nice.



The Ledger

The Ledger is a focal point for information. From it, you can view all of your crew members, as well as assign equipment and tasks to them. The Ledger is going to be one of your best friends in managing your progress throughout the game.


Clearly, from the screenshot above you can tell that the Ledger is far from complete. However, this should give you an idea of how it's going to look. The left side of this screen will eventually hold an inventory screen that displays all of your held items. You will be able to easily equip an item onto a crew member by dragging the object onto their respective equipment slot.


Things are definitely starting to come along! This coming week is going to focus quite a bit on under-the-hood mechanics, but I'm hoping to work some more on island generation and events as well, so look forward to that.

See you next week,

Chris

Hey everyone!

This won't be a particularly long SAS; school got in the way of progress for me this week. Thankfully, Justin is a machine and made a bunch of island art despite also being busy, so I can show off more of that today!

I got some work done on the Ledger earlier this week, including the creation of a functional inventory system. The next step for me is going to be working on the world map, as well as extending the inventory system to work with an equipment system. There are some heavy pieces coming into play, and once they're in this game is going to start shaping up fast!

To compensate for a somewhat lack-luster SAS, here's a somewhat not-lack-luster GIF of the game in action (Read: Some dude running across the screen)




We've got an incredible amount of work to do still, but it's nice to see the game starting to look absolutely gorgeous.

That's all for this week, see you next Saturday with hopefully a lot more progress!

Chris

dat majora's mask motion blur kinda tracing effect

Hey everyone!

Another busy week for all of us what with midterms and projects, but I did actually manage to get something accomplished!



The Inventory

This week I buckled down and got to work on the game's inventory system.  The way that inventory/items work in Project Sky is slightly different from other roguelikes and games of this sort. In this game, items are not randomly dropped as you might expect. Instead, all items are either received as quest rewards, discovered in chests (read: rewards for random events) or purchased from stores. There are a handful of other ways you can get items, obviously, but these are the primary means.

Once obtained, these items go into your ship's inventory, which can be accessed from your Ledger in the captain's quarters. Within the ledger, you can equip your crew and yourself with improved armour, weapons and trinkets which improve their stats and keep them alive. Better equipment is key to surviving the later areas of the game.

Our goal with the inventory design was to create a very visually clear and easy to use interface, regardless of whether or not you're using a controller. Due to this, we've settled on the idea of a virtual cursor, rather than allowing the player to use a mouse to navigate the inventory. Having a game where you never use a mouse for anything except the inventory is bad design, and would make even less sense for controllers.

Each inventory slot is a 'card' which can be picked up and moved to other spots. This allows for easy item swapping and equipping. The system needs a little bit of tweaking to be perfect, but it's already incredibly functional and we're very happy with it.



That's all for this week! Stay tuned for more developments in the future.

Chris

Hey all!

We spent most of this week working on equipment and the underlying engine powering it. It's not 100% finished, but it's coming along very nicely!



Items

Items in Project Sky is divided into a number of subcategories. Today we'll focus on character equipment. This means things like armour, weapons and trinkets.

Think about player equipment as coming in tiers. Each new tier is, for the most part, better than the previous. There are a few instances where that isn't the case, but we'll forget that I just said that for the time being. The equipment you'll see in the gif below is from the leather armour tier. Equipping it adds one point to the character's defence. It's the lowest tier in the game, but it's still a hell of a lot better than nothing.

If you've ever played the new XCOM: Enemy Unknown game, you'll notice that this system is quite similar to theirs. They also have tiers that are objectively better. The only difference is that XCOM is based around a health system where armour adds health points. In Project Sky, we take the more conventional route of having armour reduce damage taken.

The necklace you see in the gif is a trinket that will alter the character's stats in some way. This could mean increasing their damage, increasing their speed, or some other attribute. It could also be some sort of a trade-off of unique effect. Trinkets are important to the survivability of your crew and are best used in a way that will enhance the strong traits of the individual.

Weapons in the game work fairly similarly to equipment, except that they modify your attack power. There's more to equipment than just this, but we'll get to that when it comes up.


As you can see, the Ledger isn't completely finished yet, but we're making great progress with it. Swapping equipment in and out is fast and easy, even with multiple crew members. Our hope is to keep the game as streamlined as possible in this area so that you don't have to spend too much time managing your items. A large part of the game focuses on your crew, but that doesn't mean you have to spend all of your time lurking around menus.



That's all for this week! We'll be tackling some difficult things this week, which means I'll either have a lot to show you on Saturday, or I'll be grumpy and have nothing to talk about. Let's hope for the prior!

See you then,

Chris

Hey everyone,

This week we tackled a couple of specific areas of the game. In terms of programming, I worked on enemy HUD components, as well as the beginnings of crew AI and implementation. Justin continued to work on island chunks and equipment art.


Enemy HUD

In order to improve clarity in combat, your current enemy (the one you attacked last) will have a HUD in the top right corner of the screen. This is pretty straight forward, but helps greatly in understanding the ins and outs of your opponent.



Crew AI

Crew members in the game will have two states. The first is inactive, when they are not part of your selected boarding party. This is the state that I worked on this week. It's fairly simple, but it's nice to see the crew members actually represented in game now.

The second state is active, where they follow you around, fight battles with you and so on. This will come later.


These crew members automatically update with changed names and equipment.


That's all for this week! See you guys soon.

Chris

Looks very fun! Following  :coffee:

Hey everyone!

We spent this week working on exclusively weather/backgrounds. It's been something we've wanted to tackle for a while now and I think the result is something that really enriches the feeling of the game.

As it stands right now, Project Sky can/will have the following weather/day types:

• Sun
• Rain
• Snow
• Sunset
• Night

We may add more as time goes on, but for now this is the plan.



(Note: These clouds are sped up for the purposes of awesome)

Already, the presence of background elements and parallax makes the game feel much more vibrant and exciting. No longer must we languish in the unspeakable nightmare of plain blue screen. We have entered a new era.


Of course, none of this particularly matters if there isn't a game to play. Our goal for the coming week is to implement the travel system. Once that's in place, we can begin fine-tuning the game structure, events and combat.

That's all for this week! See you all soon,

Chris

 

Hey everyone!

We spent this week working on a variety of things, a couple of which I'll cover in some detail. For the most part, this week was a lot of jellyfish, travelling and leaf men.

 

Jellyfish

Jellyfish are a fearsome species in the world of Project Sky. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes and float through the air with ease. The first jellyfish we're adding is a nasty-looking guy with 3 tentacles. He moves fast and spears you with his barbed tendrils.


The jellyfish is much different from the lizog in terms of combat strategies. When fighting this airborne creature, it's more important to dash out of the way, or attempt an air attack to counter its stab. As always, our goal with each enemy in the game is to challenge the player in a new, unique way.
 

Travelling

This week I tackled a difficult aspect of travelling between locations. What if you leave an island and come back? Everything should be the same as you left it. This means that we have to record the specifics of each and every location in a zone so that if you feel compelled to return, you can.

This was a difficult task to accomplish, but I got it done and I am glad the functionality is in there. Travel is still fairly simple, but there's plenty of time to make improvements there!



Njokun

Lastly, this week Justin has started work on the first non-Mo'ai race: The Njokun. The Njokun are plant plant people, but I'll hold off on talking about them or showing them for now. That'll come in a later update!

 

That's all for now, see you next week!

Chris

Hey everyone!



Not too much happened this week that I can show off, so I'll spend some time briefly talking about the Njokun, who I introduced last week as the second species in Project Sky.

The Njokun are a plant people, and possibly the most ancient of the three found in-game. They are native to the islands that float high above the sea, and have been slaves for much of their history.


Slaves to whom, you ask? That answer will come later. For now, understand that most of the Njokun alive during Project Sky's time period are slaves, forced to employ their natural talents for the purposes of sustaining a civilization that could not otherwise survive.

In contrast to the Mo'ai, a highly physical workhorse race of people, the Njokun are a more, for lack of a better word, magical people. They are highly in-tune with nature and are often capable of feats that no other could even dream of performing. It is for this reason that the Njokun are highly prized as slaves.



That's all for this week. Short, I know, but we're trying some different work practices that should help improve the level of work we accomplish. See you all next Saturday!

Chris

Hey everyone!


This week we worked on a number of tasks in different areas of the game. We're currently in the process of redesigning the existing Merchant ship (the one you've gotten used to seeing), and while that's been under way I've put some time into working on the Jellyfish enemy and the ability system.



The Merchant Ship

Our goal with the redesigned Merchant ship is to create an environment with more variety in the vertical and horizontal landscapes. The existing design doesn't allow for as much combat dynamic as we want. To fix this, we've slightly condensed the space in which you can fight, and added more platforms and ladders on which to monkey your way around the ship.

Our hope is that in doing this, we're creating an arena that works to the game's strengths, instead of fighting against them.



The Ability System

Abilities in Project Sky are a secondary skill that the player can purchase, find or steal throughout the game. These abilities can be combat-focused, but can also affect other areas of the game. Our goal with the ability system is to allow for a wide variety of play-styles. The same ability in subsequent rounds may prove more or less useful, or may aid you in a completely different way. We're aiming to have these abilities affect the game on more than just a surface level.

That being said, not every ability in the game is going to be deep and complex. Sometimes it's nice to start off simple. This week, we worked in implementing a fireball (name pending) ability. It may end up being more than just a damage dealer, but you'll have to wait and see!



That's all for this week! See you all soon,

Chris

Hey everyone!


It's gonna be a bit of a short update this week! We worked on primarily the new Merchant ship, which I will happily show off in just a moment. We also took strides toward finishing the designs of all the game's captains.


The Merchant Ship

I talked about the design of the new Merchant ship last week, so this week I'll be happy to show off some teasers of the ship in-game!



We're very, very happy with how the redesign turned out, and are looking forward to designing with it as the game progresses!


Captains

Each captain in the game has their own unique backstory and progression through the plot. Although the general structure of each round is random each time you play, there are milestones for each character that you will hit each time you play. These milestones offer you different pathways through the game, and are affected by how you play.

Our goal with these captains is to express the diversity and richness of the game world, as well as to tell very personal and interesting stories. We're designing the characters in this game to be more than just avatars on the screen. We want the emergent storytelling to be enriched by a strong personality base in your main character.


That's all for this week! See you all soon.

Chris

This looks quite nice. I think the combat is my favorite part; the animations look awesome!

Hey everyone!


This week we worked on a variety of different areas within the game. The major focal points for us were implementing the first enemy raider ship, developing the raiding system, developing map interrupts and designing some additional weather/time of day types.



Raider Ship #1

The first raider ship in the game is of Quetzan design. We haven't really introduced the Quetzan as a species yet, but you can see by the contrasting technological level/design of their ship that they're sort of the big fish in the pond.

Raids will typically take place when you are travelling between two locations. Project Sky has an interrupt system that will occasionally stop your travel in order to present an event to you. Some of these events are positive, but more often than not it's going to be an issue that you have to take care of. One of such issues is a pirate raid.

In a pirate raid, you and your selected squad of fighters will fight an attacking crew. The attacking pirates will come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and their type will greatly affect how you fight them. These battles keep you on your toes and remind you that the skies are never as safe as you think.




Inside the Cabin

I forgot to show this off in previous weeks, so I'll do it now. All player ships have an exterior and an interior. The interior (the crew quarters) is where you'll be able to view your inactive crew members, as well as some potential future features that I won't talk about for now.




Each ship has its own size-class. This size affects how many crew members you can have, as well as a number of other aspects of gameplay. The interior you're seeing here is for the Merchant Ship, which has a medium size-class.



Time of Day

Our goal with weather and time is not to make a dynamic day system, but to provide a large amount of visual diversity that we can pick and choose from to create some really stunning moments. I won't show off the new time-periods just yet, because I'd rather get to that next week when it's implemented and fully-functional, but rest assured that there's going to be some really wonderful eye candy coming up.



That's all for this week! See you soon.

Chris

I like how fluid or natural the grass platforms are!

Hey everyone!


This week and the week to come are going to be relatively light on progress, but we were able to get a little done! I focused primarily on the lighting engine for the game, which will be used in dark places and in non-sunny weathers.


Presently, lighting in this game follows the same concept as Ascension; we have a combination of colds and hots to give the game more than just flat illumination. It's a subtle effect but one that I absolutely adore.

This lighting will also be used in places like caves, and is going to go a long way toward enhancing the atmosphere of the game. Expect to see things like torches, fireflies, bio-luminescence and magic lighting up the darkness.

Justin spent some time this week working on a new armour set, so I'll hopefully be able to show that off next week!



That's all for now, see you soon!

Chris

Hey everyone!


Very short update this week, we didn't get a whole lot done. The biggest thing that happened was the completion of the iron armour, the addition of Dawn and some changes to the energy/ability system.


Iron armour is one tier up from leather armour and provides improved defence. Most crew members will start off with leather armour, but some higher tier recruits will come in better armour sets. Keep in mind that heavier armour does have its detriments!


The changes that we made to the energy system allow it to carry more weight with each ability used. Dashes now require a certain amount of energy, which means that as a player you must be strategic with every move you make, instead of spamming the dash button to get away from combat. In addition, you can now dip into negative energy, which will slow down your recharge rate. This is useful if you have only a little bit of energy left but absolutely need to use an ability. It will cost you more in the long run, but it might just save your life.

 

That's all for this week! See you all soon,

Chris

This looks cool. Love the airship.

Thank you! The redesign feels a lot better visually and in-game :)

Hey everyone!

This week we focused on the beginnings of crew ai, ocean locations and some improvements to the Ledger/Map HUD.



Crew Ai

The crew ai in Projecy Sky needs to be fairly intelligent and complex in order to not only navigate the dynamic and diverse locations, but also to provide actual protection/challenge during combat. To do this, we've designed a system combining behavioural states (such as Attack, Follow, Flee, Support) that will apply the use of the A* pathfinding algorithm. The design of this has been completed, but the actual pathfinding code is still early in development.



HUD Improvements

Our goal with the Map component of the HUD is to provide a clear and simple representation of the zone that you are currently in so that you can formulate strategies rapidly and without confusion. At the moment, our icons are limited, but when the game features more varied environments and different special locations such as towns, temples, and the like, all of this will be visible on the map screen.

We've also settled on a tentative HUD font for the game, which is called Monkey (and can be found on http://www.dafont.com/).




The Ocean

Not all islands in Project Sky are floating. Some can be found at water-level. These islands are typically home to the Mo'ai, and will make up roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of the locations in the game.


Obviously, the ocean is far from complete, but the framework for ocean islands/locations in general is in place and working perfectly. I'm excited to be able to show you all the locations as they progress in development and design!



That's all for this week, see you all soon.

Chris

Lookin good.  :gentleman:

Hey everyone!


This week we focused primarily on path-finding development and ocean locations, as well as some mild progress into improving combat feel and some other minor features.


Path-finding

The path-finding used in this game is the A* algorithm. I've spent the past two weeks learning the logic behind the algorithm and then implementing the basic structure into the game. The result, while simple, is the basis for future work involving jump calculations, ropes.



Next week my goal for this is to code support for edge detection and climbing so that the week after, I can get to work making these little guys moving around and acting alive.


Ocean Islands and Decorations

Justin spent some time this week starting the ocean island tileset. Our goal with this tileset was to create a visual aesthetic that is unique from the existing sky island. Ocean islands make up about 1/3 of the game's locations, and our goal is to give both types of locations equal love in a way that makes the game feel varied and expansive.



I also spent some time this week coding island decoration support. While incredibly basic at the moment, this engine allows for us to decorate the islands with foliage and other structures. Right now, all we have is a handful of small tufts and bushes, but once we get the full decoration set in, each island is going to thrive with life, colour and variety.



That's the majority of what we worked on this week. There are a couple other small features that I added, but they aren't super exciting and can wait for future updates, or to be discovered in eventual update videos.

With a little luck, path-finding progress will go smoothly and I'll have some cool stuff to show you next week.


See you all later,

Chris

Hey everyone!


This week was supposed to be a mix of a couple things: The sound engine, the debug console and continued AI pathfinding. Un/fortunately, the debug console proved to be a much more monumental task than I had anticipated and I instead spent the entire week working on it. The results are something I'm incredibly proud of, but the pathfinding will have to wait until next week.

Note that Justin was away for the duration of this week, so no progress was made in the art department! How dare he.


The Debug Console

The debug console is a tool that I've been meaning to add to Sky for some time now. It allows us as developers to test, watch and modify aspects of the game with ease.

Testing combat? Spawn some Jellyfish in with a couple clicks.

Trying to figure out what location the player is at? We can monitor that.

Want to change the probability of a random encounter happening? No problem.



The console gives us much more freedom with testing and will speed up a lot of processes. It also means we can customize and set up scenarios easily so that all components of the game are highly polished.



Other Progress

Despite the overwhelming focus on the debug console, I did manage to get some other small tasks done this week. For one, the sound engine is functional and there are some basic attack/damage sounds in-game for testing purposes. It's nice to see that even with really basic temp sounds, the combat really comes alive. I'm excited to get some serious sound and music work done in the future!

Additionally, I spent some time on Friday optimizing the existing pathfinding structure. It'll need some work yet before it's fully optimized and ready to be run on slower computers, but it's a start and it feels good to be able to have a dozen or more algorithms running at the same time with only slight frame loss.


That's all for this week! I'll see you all next Saturday for what will probably be a more interesting update than this!

Chris

Posting to express interest. This looks awesome.

Hey everyone!

This week was a bit of a monumental week for the game's development. I say this because we have achieved two important things that we have been working toward for most of development. The first of these is the beginning of a functional, moving ai crew member. The second of these is an official name for the game.

 

Naming the Game

We've spent hours over the past couple weeks brainstorming what exactly we want to name this massive game. There are so many elements that make up what we want to achieve with this project, and it was hard to nail exactly what about this game is so unique and valuable.

What we eventually came to realize is that this game isn't special by virtue of it's gameplay, story or art style alone. Instead, the game is made up of a unique and powerful combination of all of those elements. We are not only aspiring to deliver an exciting and dynamic game to play, but also an emotionally moving and deep story each time you play.

In this game, you play as one of a number of captains. Each captain has their own unique story paths to take, but the similarity between all of them is their struggle, journey and discovery. The world that this game occupies is one that mirrors our own in many ways. There is racism, cultural issues and war. This is a game about exploring those problems, as well as individual conflicts. It's a game about the human condition and how the world affects us. It's a game about looking to the future and striving to achieve the impossible.

With all of this in mind, the name that we've settled on for the game:

 


 

Let us know what you think of the name. We hope you like it as much as we do!

 

Moving AI

A very large aspect of the game has always been the dynamic nature of the crew. Your crew is meant to be smart enough to assist you in combat. This means that they have to not only be able to pathfind intelligently through any kind of map, but also that they have to be able to fight for you in a way that is actually helpful, not detrimental. Your crew should not need to be rescued all the time.

Developing ai this intelligent has proven to be quite difficult, but this week I made some serious strides toward achieving that goal.


 

As you can see, the ai movement is nowhere near completion, but it is a very important first step towards achieving realistic and intelligent movement throughout the game world. One of my goals over the next few weeks is to take this movement even further and achieve a highly versatile artificial intelligence that will enhance the game's atmosphere and feeling.

 

That's all for this week! We'll be spending some time next week improving both the studio and the game's representation online, so look for that. See you all soon.

Chris

This is looking really brilliant!

Thank you! :)

Spent today developing the beginnings of the cave generation system. I'm pretty excited to show this one off once it's further along, because the variation potential is incredibly high.

It's also a really nice change of pace from the island locations. Although the islands will ultimately be less Left -> Right than they are now,  the caves are more of a network in which you can easily get lost.

I love the swashbuckling look and feel of this. Very interested to see how you are handling the story elements.

Hey everyone!

Continuing with my usual tradition of making a horrible pun to celebrate the week's update, this week is primarily about cave generation. Before I get fully into that, however, I should mention the other progress we've made this week.

Justin spent the week finishing up the ocean island chunk set. That means that all islands, regardless of what type, have at least one complete image set to work with. There will be more to come in the future, but this is a really nice thing to have complete and it looks great in-game.

We also put some time this week into starting the design for the game's logo. We've come up with some pretty great ideas and I can't wait to be able to show the finished image to you!


Cave Generation

Caves in Tomorrow's Horizon are generated as part of an island event. Cave islands will be ones that are very thick (that you can't see the bottom of) or ocean islands, mostly because it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense if a thin snaky island hid a multi-level cave complex inside of it. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far!

Caves can be seen as a sort of alternate (or in some cases, supplementary) challenge for a location. A lot of island locations will have their combat/events/exploration entirely above ground on the island's surface, but cave islands will typically be more heavily emphasized on the underground aspect. This means that there will be fewer or no enemies above ground. However, some late-game locations might end up being a two-part challenge that requires you to fight your way TO the cave, and then conquer it for your reward.



The generation process for caves is a grid-based recursion method. We start off with a root node which can have 1 or 2 children. These children are randomly placed in one of the four directions outside of the root node. Once this has been done, the children recursively generate their own children over and over (so long as the maximum branch length has not been reached). This leads to a very snaky layout that feels like a maze.

Obviously, you can see by the above screenshot that the generation is still very early in development, but this process allows us a great deal of customizability and control over the nature of each cave. In coming weeks you can expect to see more work done on the caves, so look forward to that!

I may write a more detailed technical break-down of the road, probably once the generation is a little bit more fleshed out.


That's all for this week! See you soon.

Chris

Hey everyone!

It's going to be a bit of a short update this week, not because we didn't get much done but because there isn't a whole lot to show just yet.

Both Justin and Avash are away on vacation presently, leaving little ol' me all by myself to work. I made some good progress on cave generation, mostly in terms of item placement, chunk sizing and enemy locating.

More exciting than that, in my opinion, is the revised item/enemy hierarchy I implemented this week. We discovered this particular design from a game design blog that I'll link at the end of this post. It's very interesting, and I'll explain it briefly so that you understand how I plan to use it.


The hierarchical system for both enemies and items works in a very similar manner, but I'll use items to explain for the time being. The item hierarchy allows us to specify, with as little or as much specificity as desired, what item to give to the player in a certain situation. For example, when opening a chest in a certain type of cave, we may decide that players should only get a weapon, but we don't want to specify precisely what weapon we want to give them because we want it to be a surprise, even to us. Alternatively, perhaps we're generating items for a shop and want to pick from all available character equips. This system allows for both of these scenarios and more.

The way the hierarchy works, in brief, is this:

1. We begin with a root node. The children to this root node are the widest possible categories for items that we want. In this situation, my categories are "Equips", "Ship Equips", "Consumables" and "Miscellaneous". I can add more later if  I want, but those are my categories at the moment.

2. We add sub-categories under each category based on how we want to structure our hierarchy. For this example, under Equips I have "Head", "Body", "Trinket" and "Weapon".

3. Under each of these sub-categories, I add a list of items that exist under that category. These are keyed by item name, so for example: "IronHelmet".


When I want to retrieve an item from the hierarchy, I can specify any node that I like. I could specify "IronHelmet" and it would only ever retrieve that specific item. Alternatively, I could specify "Equips" and it would give me anything that exists under that node, at random.

There are a couple additional aspects of this design that help add to the variety and usefulness. The first of these is the ability to backtrack up the hierarchy, if desired. For example, if I want my cave chest to give weapons 90% of the time, but give an equip at random 10% of the time, I can specify that the hierarchy should be able to backtrack. The hierarchy may then step up one node to "Equips" and then choose randomly from there.

The second special thing is to be able to assign a rarity value to each item node. When calling for an item to be generated, we can specify a rarity, and only items below that rarity level will be generated. This allows us to be sure that we aren't giving the player something too powerful too early in the game.

If you're interested, here's the link to the blog that we stole the design from http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/07/05/dropping-loot/
 

That's all I've got to share this week! Hopefully the slightly more technical/design-heavy update was interesting for you all. See you next Saturday.

Chris

Fuckin' floating islands, airship captains n crew, dynamic/fast combat, and random events you can get messed up in while traveling? Jeez man it's like you're making a game I would be if I wasn't spending my time with Ferryman. I will def be following this.  :-*

Thank you! I'm very much looking forward to the point in this game's development where we can honestly do justice to the design ideas we have floating around :)

Hey everyone!

There won't be a SAS update this week on account of a couple things:


1. Justin returned from his vacation halfway through the week.

2. Chris is a lazy piece of garbage.

3. The Full Indie Summit in Vancouver is happening this weekend.


We've decided to officially take this week off. Progress will resume in full force next week. In addition, if anyone is going the Full Indie Summit, be sure to look out for us! I'm the scrawny white kid with glasses and Justin is the muscular Chinese guy with glasses. We'd love to say hi!


See you all next week,

Chris

Hey everyone!


This week was a bit of a miscellaneous task week. We spent the first two days completely and utterly engrossed by the Full Indie Summit here in Vancouver. It was a great experience and gave us quite a deal of insight into some aspects of game design and development that we hadn’t thought of before.

Beyond that, we took some time to finish up/implement a couple features that had been waiting at the sidelines for a while. Justin completed the ocean island icons for the map interface and began work on the first variant of the Quetzan. This is an important milestone for us because it will mark the inclusion of all 3 playable races into the game, at last.

I spent the week looking into re-designing the pathfinding system, primarily. Pathfinding is a complicated beast, especially in the non tile-based platformer environment that we’re working in. It’s been a struggle for me to learn, comprehend and expand on the limited resources out there for an environment like this, and so the first run of the system that I created has some flaws.

The major flaw is that I designed the algorithm to work in a grid. This works in a top-down pathfinding environment where every tile is either walkable or not walkable, but in an environment with gravity and open air, the pathfinding algorithm needs to be run on more of a general graph.

What I mean by this is that the walkable ground should be linked not based on adjacency in the grid, but based on connections created by edge detection, fall lines and jump lines. This means that the algorithm can pathfind across gaps that are as wide as I specify, allowing the ai to know when it has to jump to reach its destination.

I’m going to be spending this week largely attempting to implement it. It’s going to take some time, but hopefully I’ll be able to make a sizeable dent in it.
 

That’s all for this week! Check back next Saturday for some word on sound design, as well as (with a little luck) a new enemy!

Chris

Hey everyone!

This will be a simple update, as the Ludum Dare begins this evening and I will most definitely be taking part. If you’re interested in what I’ll be working on this weekend, be sure to follow along on Twitter. I’ll be tweeting my progress semi-regularly as the weekend progresses.


As for what we got done this week:

1. We finally sat down and had our sound design discussion. We settled on a direction, as well as musical inspirations, and made a couple sounds to start things off. We now have a functional footstep sound engine (TM) and some sand/cave sounds to match. Now that we’re getting into sound, expect some actual video footage coming in the near-ish future.

2. We finished the first Quetzan variant. Following typical bird fashion, male Quetzan are colourful and vibrant, and female Quetzan are more desaturated and basic in colour scheming.



3. I wrote a batch file to allow for easier adding of new character skins into the game. This will hopefully reduce a half-hour task to around 5-10 minutes. This makes for a happy Chris, believe me.

4. I made progress in developing the new pathfinding engine. AI can now navigate over gaps, which makes them about 100% more useful than before. They’re still squirrelly and buggy, but progress is being made and I am glad.


That’s all for this week! Expect more progress on pathfinding next week, as well as some new sounds and (I’ll say this again) potentially a new enemy. See you soon!

Chris

Hey everyone!

This week we focused on making improvements to the crew ai (getting tired of hearing that yet?), world building and starting work on a new enemy.


Crew AI

The work done on the crew ai this week was mostly working towards making the crew members more stable when travelling around the world. There's a ton of work to do before I'm comfortable moving on from it, and work is slow (and tiring), but it's definitely seeing progress. They're becoming less and less likely to fail a path. I don't expect this to be done by next week, but it's coming along.


World Building

Our goal with Tomorrow's Horizon is to create an incredibly rich, detailed and immersive world. To do this, we need to spend a lot of time fleshing out the history, geography, etc. We spent some time this week figuring some of those details out, and what we've come up with is pretty exciting. I'm happy to be able to say that the work we're doing here will directly impact gameplay as well, instead of just being flavour text.


The Hardhead

The Hardhead (name pending as always) is the next big enemy that we'll be focusing on. It's face is covered in thick plating that prevents you from hurting it from the front. The player will have to employ creative dodging and jumping in order to manoeuvre behind the beast and slice at its backside.


Although seen outside here, the Hardhead is native to dark, wet caves where its presence in the claustrophobic tunnels is a threat to be seriously reckoned with.


That's all for this week! Check back next Saturday for pathfinding progress, more work on the Hardhead, and a cacophony of other additions and improvements! See you then.

Chris

this is looking great!

I hope the game feels as open as your screenshots make it look !

Thank you! Honestly, once we get more content and gameplay structure under way, it'll probably feel even more open than it does right now.  :)

Hey everyone!

This week, and probably future weeks for the foreseeable future, is going to be fairly small in terms of progress. We're all crazy busy with our respective schools/works, so any work on the game that we can actually get done is a blessing. Anyway, on to what we actually accomplished.

This week, our goal was to do a whole smattering of things, most of which weren't even looked at. However, I was able to put some serious work into altering the player movement speeds. We'd been feeling for a while now that the player's movement was too fast and too jerky. I took the time to slow things down and give things a bit more weight. It makes combat feel better and makes movement more strategic instead of hectic.

We also did some work on the Hardhead, implementing its attack. The Hardhead isn't even close to done, but it is coming along and I'm looking forward to showing it off.

That's all for this week! Next week, time permitting, will probably have a bit of an emphasis on design/re-factoring. Probably a little less exciting to hear about, but it needs to be done! See you soon,

Chris

Hey everyone!


We've been absent for the better part of the past few months, and that kind of sucks. School and work absorbed basically all of our time, which also sucks. In the time that we've been gone, we've made some decisions, as well as progress. Allow me to enlighten you:

We've decided to make some design changes. We've been having issues with our initial design and have been struggling to realize it in a fun way for a while. These changes will be explained more in depth in the future, but for now, let me explain with the following.

Our goal for the future of Tomorrow's Horizon is to transform it into more of a strategic game in which you make specific choices about the path you take through the world, and then fight to obtain rewards that will help you achieve victory.

Vague! Wait for more details. They're coming, I swear.


The second big change we've decided to make is the conversion of the game from GameMaker to C++. It's a change we've been wanting to make for a very long time, and we're going to go through with it. It will result in a large development set back, but we're already refactoring a lot of the game due to design changes, so I feel like this is a beneficial move.

What does this mean for the game? It means better optimization, faster development time (once we're up and running), better potential for DLC and cross-platform release, and easier third party integration.

What I'd like to do for the time being is start up a semi-frequent development diary on the process of converting this game into C++. This is our first time developing a game in C++, and I'm sure we'll make plenty of mistakes and discoveries. We'd love to have you along for the ride.

The first of these posts will come along soon. Hopefully you enjoy them, and maybe you'll learn something with us as we fight our way through this new frontier.


See you all soon,

Chris