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[Zarkonnen]

In Airships: Conquer the Skies you'll need to use all of your creativity and skill to design and build fearsome airships and land vehicles to give you the edge in massive aerial battles.

Steam

Build



Construct your vehicles by piecing together a vast array of modules, choosing weapons, armour types, structures, equipment and resources in near endless configurations to allow you to prevail against even the toughest foes.

The vehicles are highly detailed, teeming with sailors moving around performing their individual tasks to stay in the fight. Your choices of vehicle layouts are crucial, exploring the design space of different crafts and their matching tactics to make sure your fleet emerges victorious.

Battle



Once your vehicles are ready for the fight, you’ll give high-level commands to your small fleet, swooping, soaring, ramming and boarding others to gain the upper hand in battle. Ships and terrain are fully destructible: they can catch fire, explode, break apart, and fall, so you’ll need to choose your tactics wisely.

Hunt



Face off against giant aerial kraken, fleshcracker mechs, huge venomous spiders, clockwork wasps, and more. Defeat them and reap the rewards.

Conquer



Play across three distinctly different modes: taking on (or creating your own) bespoke Missions; building a mighty empire in Conquest, or destroying your friends in Multiplayer matches online or via LAN.

[Stitch Games]

Really like the sound of this. The heraldry idea is sweet!

[hogge]

Seems cool, I just HAVE TO know more.

How does the combat work?
Do you see your own ship close up, and then see the ship you're fighting somewhere in the background? Is it turn based or real-time?

[Zarkonnen]

Seems cool, I just HAVE TO know more.

How does the combat work?
Do you see your own ship close up, and then see the ship you're fighting somewhere in the background? Is it turn based or real-time?

The combat's real-time and involves small fleets of ships. You have fairly simple controls for the ships: you can tell them where to move and on what enemy to focus their fire. Here's an example screenshot of one ship attacking two buildings:

[Layl]

This looks really fun, excited to see where this is going. Am I right in seeing that that building has no defenses?

[Zarkonnen]

This looks really fun, excited to see where this is going. Am I right in seeing that that building has no defenses?

It does, actually. There are some cannon sticking out to the left, but they are a bit hard to see against the backdrop.

[Zarkonnen]

If you've been following my Twitter, you may have seen a series of increasingly exasperated tweets about my computer. Basically, for work reasons, I had to upgrade my Mac to Mavericks, the newest OS X version. Unfortunately, Mavericks causes my machine to freeze irretrievably after a few days, and only a complete reinstall temporarily fixes the problem.

So now I'm, grumbling, back on Snow Leopard (IMHO the best version of Mac OS X), having lost a lot of time in the process. So yeah, that whole idea about releasing the early access version around now isn't happening, but I hope to get it out there before the end of the month.

I have not been entirely non-busy, though. A week ago, I was afforded the opportunity to do some playtesting. As I wrote before when I did this with Patent Blaster, there is just not substitute for putting down someone in front of your game and wordlessly watching them trying to figure it out.

The day after the playtesting I filed something like sixty new issues on Airships' tracker, ranging from trivial graphical adjustments to "feature X does not work". I selected the ones that I felt were important enough to get fixed before the first early access version, and have been plowing my way through them. (At least when I wasn't trying to fix my computer.)



One big change, visually, is that I adjusted the color of the sky to be less saturated, on the basis of this great article on game visuals and user feedback that the ships didn't visually "pop out" enough.



While doing graphical adjustments, I also took the opportunity to put in an early version of the main menu background, a digital painting of airships that I'm working on. It's by no means done, but I just, er, blurred it enough that you can't really tell. As time goes on, the picture will come into focus more.

[blip]

Actually, I think the menu might be better if the background stays blurred... Kind of same reason as the sky - with a clearly detailed background, the menu elements will stand out a lot less that they do now.

[Zarkonnen]

Actually, I think the menu might be better if the background stays blurred... Kind of same reason as the sky - with a clearly detailed background, the menu elements will stand out a lot less that they do now.

That is an excellent point. I do want to finish the painting, of course, but it can also be splash screen/box art. 

[Zarkonnen]

I did a blog post on AI programming you might find interesting. Also, the early release version of the game will probably be out this week! (Details also in the post.) 

[Zarkonnen]

The early access release is up!





Some more details about the game:

At its core, the game is about designing airships and fighting with them. Ships are put together out of modules, and the layout of modules matters a great deal: everything on board is done by individual airsailors who need to run around, ferrying coal, ammunition, water and repair tools - and sometimes their fallen comrades.

You can command fleets of airships both against the computer and against other players across the Internet. (A match-making and ladder service is planned, but right now, you just enter your opponent's IP address.)

In addition, there is a single-player strategic mode, where you use your fleet to conquer city after city, unlocking new modules and bonuses with each of them.

The game has an authentic-ish system of heraldry where you can create your own coat of arms, and register it with the game forums as unique to you.

Interested? You can get it on itch.io for $5.

This is an "early access" release, which means the game is by no means done or perfectly polished. There's lots of features which I'm planning to add in the near future, such as boarding combat, more modules, varied terrain, etc...

[Zarkonnen]

Today marks the release of the second early access version of Airships. I've been working flat out to improve the game over the last week, and there's some cool new stuff:

Smaller modules

There are now small versions of various ship modules, opening up more ship design space. Previously, the smallest viable ship was about 300 gold. Now it's 90.



Internet multiplayer

There is now a game server where you can create multiplayer games and join others'. Come and measure yourself against other players!



Active enemies in strategic mode

The AI empires now go conquering, which means it's very important to keep your cities defended.



Shouty crew!



The next release is likely to take longer, as I plan to add major new features such as boarding. I also have about a zillion blog posts I want to write about the game, such as some lore things on suspendium and a ship design guide.

As before, the game's available on itch.io, and existing players can (of course) download this upgrade for free.

[Zarkonnen]

There's a shiny new version out, mostly focusing on stability and UI things, but also adding some huge new modules like a targeting computer and a repair bay. The next version's going to focus on adding some new mechanics like boarding. :D

[Connor]

dude, cant wait for a demo of this. when you get one out, email me alright? ill pm you my email.

[Zarkonnen]

Doing some live blogging of me adding floating rocks at the moment.

[ANtY]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa 

pixel scaling at its worst



but other than that looks pretty promising, keep it up

[Zarkonnen]

So I'm reorganising the way the user interface works in Airships to be on the basis of UI layers/components. It's going really well so far, so here's a blog post about it: The Coming of the UniScreen, or, How I componentised the Airships UI to reduce technical debt.

[Zarkonnen]

[Layl]

Tried the game out a bit, very fun! I love games where you get to build your own stuff like this. At first glace I've got a few things I noticed:

- Large games quickly become unmanageable. I started a large map and directly after attacking someone I got EVERY single other faction sending their ships after me and me alone at once. Lost quickly after since I simply couldn't survive that many attacks in a row.

- The amount defenses and ships cost over time seems to be so high that you start going into the negative before you've got every location decently defended. This also means that I can't afford the upkeep of any big impressive ships. (My 1:1 copy of Castle Wulfenbach will have to wait )

Certainly looking forward to updates!

[Layl]

Just when I got someone to play against, the servers are down