Soon though, I hope. I'm still trying to figure out what direction this is going to go in. There's just a million ideas running through my head and on paper. One thing is certain though, the editor needs improvement, so that is where the focus is for now at least.

Is it possible this is one of those games that will have an indefinite rolling release? Were you going to add a level editor? If so that makes four big features if you count sandbox, challenges and plane editor. You might want to think about adding spit and polish to those and slapping a price on this thing.

I'm not entirely sure where the line is between keeping it free and putting a price on it. This seems like an ideal game for early access or some other alpha funding method, but I just want to make sure there is a little more focus before I think about putting a price on it.

Anyway, here are a couple of the newest and craziest designs, both made by Cosmic Grenade.


Those are separate, detachable missiles on the 2nd one. And they both fly, even the train

Not much to update. Been a pretty unproductive week as far as Lift development goes, unfortunately. Cue excuse #1, #2, and #3.

Enough of that, let's talk about community productivity!

(click for big)


By my calculations, that is a total of 5235 attempts and 421 successful completions for a success rate of just over 8%. That number seems to be pretty steady. Unfortunately I think there is a bug with the "mount the sky whale" challenge and it is granting successful completion when it shouldn't be.

And again I have confirmed that most of the failure is due to plane selection. Certain planes just are not capable of completing some of these challenges. I've caught myself trying several times just to get a plane off the ground in the ring leader challenge when it is clearly impossible, and each one of those attempts counts as a fail.

I am a little bit surprised though that more people don't stick with it and try to beat these after failing. I think I will definitely need to add some better plane sorting and user plane rating for specific challenges if I continue down this path with the challenges.

I would love to showcase some more community built planes but there have been 111 new planes published for this latest version. There is just no way I could capture those in a screenshot or hand pick a collection to show. The complexity is reaching new heights, and I'm starting to feel bad for not having a larger selection of parts to choose from.

Soon though, I hope. I'm still trying to figure out what direction this is going to go in. There's just a million ideas running through my head and on paper. One thing is certain though, the editor needs improvement, so that is where the focus is for now at least.

I had another play. I love the reflection in the water and the challenge mode etc. This is all coming along together very quickly, well done.

That is just the standard issue Unity water. It gets the job done for now, but I feel like it could be improved. I'm not exactly sure what I would change though. Oh I guess for starters I should add some actual water physics so you don't just fly through it like its not even there. Hmm, water landings anyone?

That would make a good alternate menu screen.

Yeah that is definitely going to get integrated into the menu somehow, assuming that plane is still functional in upcoming versions.

After seeing those little dudes on the plane, I now need them to be moving or something. Maybe add some parachutes and drop a hundred of em on the battlefield. There would have to be something for them to do though, like fight some kind of evil force... I should stop there, this could get out of control in a hurry

There Will Be Farm

with a 15 second teaser trailer with the music starting at the 5:45 mark:

In Kerbal Space Program, they have a button to turn snap on or off. That is always an option. :D

If we start thinking like that, pretty soon I'll be implementing space travel with these planes

But yeah, snapping will have its place. Y'all just gotta trust me, have I ever let you down?


And now I present "Lift Mk2". It started with the letters on the wings and I requested a banner trailing behind and acrobats. Thanks to Cosmic Grenade for this. Not sure if they frequent the forums or found the game some other way.



Not the most pleasant thing to fly, but it is good enough

The idea is to subtly turn the designer's intention into a more precise and aligned model.

So poetic. You sound like you've done this before

You mean fully functional Death Ray Chicken.

Precisely what I mean. I just need to hurry up and finish dissecting this bird to study its wing mechanics so I can implement them properly. All these feathers...

Provide mirroring across the global axes only I reckon, as this will be the 99% use case. Local mirroring will just have to be done by hand. I think you should have "snap" points at the middle of faces, edges, and at vertices - to help align things. The editor gif looks good, and the challenge modes look like they are taking shape!

I'm not sure about the snap points yet. I really like the fluid nature of just pointing and clicking, and then once it is placed you can fine tune with traditional translate/rotate handles. If there are snap points I feel that just suggests those are appropriate places to put components, when really it is totally dependent on the makeup of the plane. I think I will still expose the position and rotation values so you can adjust those manually, or maybe have buttons to snap to an axis, for placing a rudder down the middle of a fuselage or something.


And I got slightly distracted today when someone linked me this video:



So naturally I had to drop everything and try making a bird.


This was basically just a proof of concept, taking the flappy sky whale one step further. It was a pretty big hack job, and each time I messed up I had to start over so this is as good as it will get for now. It doesn't work quite right, but after setting this up, I'm 100% confident that at some point down the road there will be a fully functional bird plane.

YESSS! Love your project. It's not exactly enjoyable right now. I'm not a huge fan of the controls and the building part isn't functional yet. But this will be great 

As others said, KSP is pretty much the only game at the moment where you can build your planes and fly but, being a game about space travel, flying planes is not the main feature but kind of a bonus.

thanks for your feedback. Can you elaborate on the controls issue? I'm not suggesting the current setup is ideal or anything, just curious to hear what you think. I'm sure down the road I'll have to integrate all sorts of joystick support and what not. Looking forward to that!

Mirroring is smart. Will make creating symmetrical planes so much easier

Mirroring is getting a little complicated already. I was hoping to have some level of intelligence built into the system so it knew what you were trying to mirror and where, but that isn't going to work. The user will have to be explicit about what object they want to mirror across, and more specifically what axis.

For example in the gif, those are all being mirrored across the middle of the plane. But what if you wanted to mirror locally across a specific wing or other part. Not every plane will need to be perfectly symmetrical, in fact I'm surprised there hasn't been any traditional looking asymmetrical planes built yet.

Did a quick mockup today of a possible new editor style:



Oops, got a little carried away there.

It is definitely more fun to use, and faster. I think with this type of interface combined with an advanced mode where you have full control like you do now, it should satisfy most people.

I'm also going to try integrating some prettier components and prefab components to select from to drag and drop like this.

Actually, you can get shot in the wings quite a lot with bullets before they're useless.  Bullets are far more dangerous to fuel lines and the power train (and cockpit).

Yeah, I think the most fun I've had playing is when in less-than-ideal circumstances, so I think having a damage model might be kind of interesting. Hadn't thought about fuel lines and what not, but that could add some nice depth too.

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In other news, the challenges have been attempted just over 2000 times, with a success rate of about 8%. I think this is a result of learning curve plus not all planes fly the same or are even appropriate for all the challenges.



It appears I misjudged the difficulties a bit also

[I'm loving the current state of the editor]

I finally got around to constructing my first plane. Introducing.... The Custard Biplane!

Haha, awesome post. That biplane is great fun.

Now I want to have some kind of in game currency and a way to put your planes up for sale for others to buy

The Custard Biplane is amazing.  I'm loving the current state of the editor.  I couldn't figure out how to rotate the plane in the preview window.

Wait, did you mean to say that? Not a whole lot of positive feedback around the editor, but it must grow on people since some stick with it and make all this cool stuff.

I've had a lot of thought on how to do a more user friendly yet flexible editor and I'm excited to get started on it shortly. I'll be sure to have a help screen explaining how to rotate the camera (I think it's hold right mouse button and drag right now?)

That sniper hazard is awesome, makes for some great slow mo moments
It's cool that you're exploring all kinds of crazy ideas for hazards and challenges.

"exploring" them yes, but figuring out what to actually do with them? not really. Like that sniper hazard, its fun to play around with but is there really any way to do anything meaningful with it? Once you start losing your wings your plane becomes useless pretty quickly.

I think this has been brought up before but one thing I still want to explore is having different materials to build the plane components out of. Take these snipers for example, maybe they just do a certain amount of damage. A wood wing will be ruined in one shot but an aluminum wing might lose 50% effectiveness after one shot. Having a 50% effective wing is going to be much more useful than no wing at all.

Maybe you can wrap your wing in kevlar for extra strength, but it would be much heavier so you would have to build around that.

I feel like I've said all that before.. hopefully I'm not just reposting old ideas that I haven't got around to trying yet

Really cool stuff, you've come a LONG way since I first tried this game. The menu seems to break for me when I try to open the controls though.

Also, might be a good idea to have a few default planes that are fairly stable at the top of the list?

Edit: Hmm, the menu seems to have magically started working for me now.

Edit: Muahahaha I have conquered the sky whale.

That's a good idea with the planes, I'll see if I can do that from the server side...

And no the menus were broken in a couple maps. I've fixed and uploaded new builds.

Nice work on the sky whale I was pretty surprised, I managed to go 4 for 4 when testing the challenges before doing the final builds. For the sky whale, the 5 second timer was up about 3 feet from smashing into the ground, it was awesome

0.2.0 is available now.

Browser
Win32
Linux
OSX

This wasn't supposed to be ready just yet, but I decided not to sleep in order to make this happen. IndieDB put Lift on their front page featured banner rotation thing just as I was going to go to bed. I didn't want another batch of new people playing the old build, so I made it work. We'll see if I regret this decision tomorrow when everything breaks

Anyway, some cool stuff for 0.2.0. Lots of small bug fixes and user interface improvements. A proper escape menu, better controls menu, etc.

The big changes are 4 challenges added (click for big):


and a new sandbox map:



The challenges are where I wanted them to be. They range from easy to hard, although this is with only myself testing so they're probably all hard for someone new I set up the challenges to track success and failure, not only for each challenge but each plane as well. Hopefully this will help people get them done. I should have probably sorted the planes list by success rate so the best ones are always at the top, but... I didn't.

The sandbox map is not exactly how I wanted it, but it is miles ahead of the last build. Some stuff scattered about to play with, or just cruise around the map which is fun too. It's fun to buzz the water, even though it doesn't actually act like water yet.

Another thing I added was the ability to comment on each plane. This was mostly due to me wanting to respond to either the bug reports or people asking for help in their notes when they publish their planes.

And going back to the drag physics updates, I managed to integrate the first level of improvements but not the more advanced changes. That will come later.

Some editor related changes:
- drag coefficient is exposed for non wing components. This allows for more control over certain builds, like the enterprise which has such a unique design.
- center of gravity is now restricted to the bounds of the object. This is mostly for preparation of the next physics update. Plus it should just be this way anyway to prevent really weird looking physics behavior.
- you can now use the arrow keys and throttle to simulate the planes controls in the editor
- added plane name input field to the publish menu... too many "New Plane"'s floating about

And a couple other significant changes:
- another toggle to the plane selection menu for "this version" or "compatible versions". I put this in because the old version still works, however due to the drag changes they don't necessarily fly like they originally did. Hopefully the old planes being in a different list will be enough to indicate new version and new changes?
- planes should now sit nicely on the ground regardless of how they are built in the editor.

There's more, but mostly minor stuff.

This will probably be the last big update for a while. The editor overhaul is coming next, and I'm still not entirely sure how that is going to go.

One of the new toys to play with in the sandbox:



They pick a random wing and make it go away. In this case the first one to go was the elevator and it ends up getting caught on the rudder which looks pretty awesome. Without that though I was dead in the air, and then they pick me apart piece by piece.

Have you thought about trying to package up these different mechanics in standalone web player builds for people to play with?

Your water mechanic is awesome. Give people a few gravity fields and a dozen boxes in a very simple world, like the inside of a cube, and you'd be surprised what they could do. It would probably help to get feedback on what people do with it and maybe how to introduce it in the full game, or even give you some ideas for level design.

Obviously you don't want to release some bug ridden mess, but if you have a solid mechanic I don't think there is any harm in releasing some early stuff for people to play with.

Come on, you know we need a GIF of that menu. I really like that idea, having the letters made of plane parts. It serves a dual purpose: shows the title in the style similar to the game, and demonstrates what the editor can do

Ask and ye shall receive.

(click for full size)


I think it's the shadow that really sells it.

That's actually pretty appropriate.

The lift logo thing? I was thinking of having some kind of contest to see who could come up with the best design for that. I have a bunch of ideas for integrating different planes and craziness to the menu system, but figured I would keep it simple for now.

Cool man, glad u had a bunch more people look at it!

Thanks! I need to find a way to set up that archive so any new people that play the game can see all the old stuff that was built from the earlier versions that no longer work

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And speaking of old versions, this new version is not quite done yet... I keep finding more and more stuff to put in it. I just want to make sure that this next version can be good for a while because I'm planning on diving into the editor next, and I have no idea how long that could take. There are still a lot of people playing the game, so I want to be sure there is enough to play with until the next next version. So, I'm adding a bigger sandbox arena to play in and several challenges. One of the challenges is called "Mount the Sky Whale". I'm sure you can figure out what that is referring to (hint: go back a page or two).

And finally, I was pointed to this "lets play" video on youtube today:

/subbing

Welcome

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Still working on the next update. Getting close, about another half dozen items to finish. Mostly small stuff after tonight, but some of the small stuff can require some refactoring so it's a bit time consuming.

I had a good conversation with a close friend of mine tonight about the game and how to move forward. Most of it revolved around how much he hated the current editor and how it needed to be accessible to anyone and everyone. Nothing really new, but it just reinforced the plan moving forward. He also sucked at flying so he requested some easier controls and better feedback for that. So what, they let anyone through flight school these days?

Anyway, here is a shot of what will likely be the new main menu for the next version:



There is a scrolling message of the day on top. The logo is pretty funny. It took about an hour to get the center of gravity right along with the amount of throttle I needed to give it in order to fly upwards. At the moment it looks like it goes up but if you look off camera it flies way off to the right and crashes after 30 seconds

I must say this was quite a surprise! And very inspiring.

I hope you continue to find the time and resources to keep this going.

PS. I've been looking for the right words to describe Lift, and you nailed it