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[WhyNot]

Those speedlines and vortices really give the game's movement that extra visual oomph

Thanks! We are trying really hard to make visual effects look as good as possible, but at the same time we are also trying to keep the balance, so nothing would distract players.

[SolarLune]

Yo! The game looks really awesome - waiting for release!

[Mnniska]

This looks so, so tasty. Can't wait to play it, keep up the great work!

[Pixelologist]

Have you ever played or heard of Luftrausers? It's a little similar to your game.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/233150/LUFTRAUSERS/

Did it inspire you in any way?
I hope you have fun making your game :D

[thefoolishbrave]

Those speedlines and vortices really give the game's movement that extra visual oomph

Thanks! We are trying really hard to make visual effects look as good as possible, but at the same time we are also trying to keep the balance, so nothing would distract players.

Even though it looks like you haven't posted in about a year this just got bumped up and your gifs look amazing! I would 10/10 play/buy this. I hope these recent comments fuel your fire!

[filbs111]

This looks lovely.

[biotic]

When will the testing come... i really wanna sink my teeth into this:D

[bombjack]

It looks really nice and frantic! I'd love to play it 

[oyog]

I think it's safe to assume the dev is no longer working on this. Quit bumping a dead thread.

[RizeoftheSummonds]

Looks Badass!! Keep up the great work guys.

[blekdar]

I think it's safe to assume the dev is no longer working on this. Quit bumping a dead thread.

Project isn't dead, just looks like they're not posting here anymore. Dev posted some twitter stuff last week: https://twitter.com/WhyNotArtDump/status/898820959779540992

So yeah, do what you will with that info.

[oyog]

So yeah, do what you will with that info.

 

Oh man the game's looking so fucking fantastic!

[WhyNot]

Hello TIG! It's me, WhyNot, and it's been a really long time since I've posted anything meaningful here, haha.

As you can imagine, alot of stuff happened since our team's last activity, and sadly, NicolaiGD been quite busy with other things lately, so I've decided to take over a programming part of the development, at least for now. And since now I've assumed a direct control over every aspect of the development, I think it's a good chance to finally start writing some well-thought devlogs.

And to start the series, I think I should pick a topic to highlight all the gameplay basics, sum everything up and explain what this game is suppose to be. So...

GENERAL VISION
At the very core of this game, lies a concept of fair difficulty. Player's jet is fragile, there is no health regen in any form and agility is your key to survival on the battlefield. Player always have enough tools at his disposal to overcome any challenge the game throws at him: aileron roll provides you with a few frames of invincibility to avoid any incoming damage, short bursts of afterburner gives you an ability to rapidly change your direction and position yourself, etc. I'm trying to ensure the whole game can be beaten with zero damage taken by both general game design and some hidden mechanics that will prevent any "cheap" damage.
The second major concept of this game is flow of combat. Judging from gifs, action might seem too sporadic, but in reality the whole game has a really balanced flow. Your movement is snappy but smooth, the enemies and projectiles positioning dictates your moves one step ahead. The game is just too fast to comprehend by your "mathematical" part of the brain, it puts you in a trance, your fingers flick gamepad's stick and push buttons before you can even process the information on the screen. Constant split-second decision making blurs into a mesmerizing experience. Imagine playing "through the fire and flames" in Guitar Hero on hard after you've mastered it. Basically, that's what it feels like.
The game is story-based, filled with different mission types and bossfights. Pacing of each mission is controlled by a global AI system that provides you with both hardcore action and some moments of silence.

Replayability and playtime value
To be honest, I'm not a big fan of modern trends of extending a game's playtime by adding tons of unlockable shenanigans. I believe that playtime value must come from a high skill ceiling and emotional reward from getting better at the game. And this game will deliver you exactly that.
Sure, there will be enough weapons, unlockable modules, additional game modes, etc to play around with, but depth in each of game mechanics, bossfights and enemy types is what really makes the game shine in my opinion. You can think of Vanquish as an example of what I'm trying to achieve. Each movement mechanic has multiple purposes and there will be a huge skill gap between a novice player and someone who spent some time with this game. And learning all those new ways to utilize game mechanics at your disposal is what makes you feel like a really badass ace pilot. This game will dare you not just to beat it, but to master it.

New game+
Sadly, as a one man team (at least at this moment), I dont have enough resources to make the main campaign long enough to support a full learning curve of this game. So, finishing campaign for the first time would be more like finishing a tutorial and that's when the real game begins. I don't want to make ng+ difficult by just buffing enemies health and damage. Basic enemy stats will stay the same and additional difficulty will come from more aggressive AI, additional attack patterns, etc. This way, playing the game again will feel fresh enough and it will allow you to apply new tricks you've learned to the same scenarios. On top of that, I'm planning to include a true ending and actually connect the original campaign and ng+ together with some storytelling.

The biggest game design struggle
Making this game sometimes feels like exploring the uncharted territory of game design. High speed, absence of physical boundaries and total freedom of movement is the game's blessing and a curse. I mean, there's not much games like this one around. For each game meachanic I'm trying to implement I have to keep speed in mind all the time. Static/slow moving objects blink in and out of visible screen space in seconds. Enemy AI must adapt to player's 360 degree movement and react accordingly, because making a "homing missiles" with minigun strapped on it is not good enough for an enemy jet AI. I know many people accused me of ripping off Luftrausers, but man, I WISH i could rip some game mechanics straight from some other games withought reimagining and adapting them to my gameplay.
For now, I'm overcoming this challange quite succesfully, but I must say it's much harder than making a game in a well-established genre.



So, I think that's all for now. I'm really looking forward for any kind of feedback. I hope we can have a good discussion here.
And, ugh, sorry for my grammar.

[ionside]

Niiiice! Flashes of Robotech come back to me.

[nihilocrat]

The biggest game design struggle
Making this game sometimes feels like exploring the uncharted territory of game design. High speed, absence of physical boundaries and total freedom of movement is the game's blessing and a curse. I mean, there's not much games like this one around. For each game meachanic I'm trying to implement I have to keep speed in mind all the time. Static/slow moving objects blink in and out of visible screen space in seconds. Enemy AI must adapt to player's 360 degree movement and react accordingly, because making a "homing missiles" with minigun strapped on it is not good enough for an enemy jet AI. I know many people accused me of ripping off Luftrausers, but man, I WISH i could rip some game mechanics straight from some other games withought reimagining and adapting them to my gameplay.
For now, I'm overcoming this challange quite succesfully, but I must say it's much harder than making a game in a well-established genre.

Sharing some lessons from Sky Rogue since it's in the same ballpark as Skychasers:

The limited visible space strikes me as the opposite problem I had: that being fired at from behind in a 3D perspective is not only a common thing in a flight sim but makes it hard for players to intuitively recognize and dodge incoming fire. All you can hope to do is have an abstraction (arrows at the edge of the screen) to try and point out this information but it's never as good as seeing a literal missile flying towards you. You also can't go overboard with this information; a billion arrows at the edge of the screen make it harder to process any one of the arrows. You already have a bit of look-ahead in your camera, you may want to intensify that in certain states such as firing, or make the camera aware of nearby enemies / explosions like I believe Luftrausers does so that it tries to get the player and enemies in the camera frame. For things like missiles you can also do things I didn't get around to doing: play with the scale / shape of the arrow so it provides info about how close it is to you, which in motion kind of gives intuitively "felt" info about how fast it's moving and when to get ready to dodge.

If you can afford to reduce the number of enemies active in your vicinity, you may be able to play a lot with this offscreen information since there's less to process. The unfortunate side effect is the more you add GUI the less the game feels "real" since you're processing abstract info instead of concrete info.

You can also slow down the actual motion in the game a little bit while adding a bunch of effects to create the illusion of motion. "Fwooshies" are the most obvious one: straight-line particles that whiz by in the opposite direction of your velocity. This exploits the fact that any perceived velocity is relative, so you're moving the frame of reference to add perceived velocity. In 3D I also increase the field of view when the player speeds up, this intuitively makes you feel like you're going faster probably because your frame of reference is increasing. You might want to try increasing or decreasing at differing velocities the size of the camera frame (orthographic size) to give a similar sensation; of course that's a little risky with pixel art where you must decide to scale or not to scale to avoid subpixel jaggies. Giving myself leeway to slow down Sky Rogue without making it seem slower let me do a lot of gameplay-improving things: you can visually identify enemies when they come in range, have dogfights with things bigger than specks, and do head-on attacks (more intuitive than reality, where it would get you killed) without whizzing by your enemy in a split-second.

With the constant motion you don't have much "breathing room" in the gameplay, no time for the player to collect items, equip them, etc without disrupting the experience. Your game is more explicitly arcadey than Sky Rogue so I think you can get away with having floating powerups / resources you collect from destroyed enemies. On the other hand you could make a design pillar, as Sky Rogue did, that there are no floating powerups to make the game feel more "simmy" and by extension make the player feel more like a pilot than a player. However, in Sky Rogue, which aimed to be "a rogue-lite flight simulator", you couldn't collect and equip items during play, a core part of a traditional roguelike. I'm not going to derail to talk about my game, but it's just an example of a tough problem introduced by gameplay rooted in constant motion in a vehicle.

I also learned a cool trick for missile guidance in Sky Rogue, I'm not sure if it's applicable to your game, but here's the missile guidance pseudocode:

1. Every X milliseconds, get the position and velocity of my target: P and V. This is the "guidance update"
2. Every frame, use P and V * time until I reach my target to calculate where I think the target will be. Do NOT use the current position and velocity.
3. If the target continues on its current path (i.e. the player does not react) I will reliably hit them
4. If the player changes their velocity or position abruptly within the X millisecond window, I will fly past them. If they do it outside the window, there is some leeway in whether I will be able to correct and hit them depending on my turning speed, velocity, guidance cone, etc
5. If the player exits my guidance cone, I give up entirely, the player can consider me "dodged". There is a small bit of leeway in terms of timing so that I won't abruptly lose tracking when I'm so close to my target that small changes in position cause them to exit my cone.

Hope this helps! We follow each other so hit me up in DMs if you need help!

[KPas]

An interesting project!

As you said, speed is the key feature, and the biggest problem ist the restricted view. I definitely agree with that and my suggestion would be as follows:
The faster the player moves, the further he falls back to the edge of the screen. For example: if the player moves to the left, then you would place him almost at the right edge. While turning at high speed, the player would move elliptical along the edge of the screen. But this will only work if attacks from behind can be neglected at high speed.

[WhyNot]

@nihilocrat
First of all, thanks alot for sharing your personal experience! I really appreciate that!

Basically I've already done excacly what you've suggested. Off-screen markers for enemy jets has a visual distance indicator, and homing missiles alarm system has both markers, a blinking warning sign and bleeping noice, which telegraph the distance and give you an indication of safe evasion window. Camera always trying to keep your jet and any incoming threats in sight.
And ugh, to be honest, I think both you and KPas got me a bit wrong on that last section of my post.

Yes, the game has to partially rely on off-screen markers and abstract info to telegraph additional info to the player, but that's a justified sacrifice to be made. But visibility (at least directly) is not a real issue here. I think I've managed to overcome it almost completely, and I still have some tricks up my sleeve in case beta tests will prove that isn't enough. It's more like conventional mechanics don't work so well in a wast open space of fast-paced aerial combat. For a most common and obvious example, let's talk about bossfights, how they play out in other similiar genres and why it does not work for me.
Let's talk about classic shmup bossfights for example. If you'll take scrolling background out of equation, you are left with almost static boss and player character, always persistant on the screen. You just evade projectiles and learn boss patterns to win. There's minimal movement involved.

Now let's apply the same boss mechanics to this game. And just for the sake of argument, let's imagine there's no visibility issues at all, camera still manages to keep track of all action and boss attacks are telegraphed clearly. The issue starts right away with gravity. You can't just stay in one spot/hover like in shmup games when there's nothing to do, you have to move at all times. Then, comes the next issue. The combat area is huge, it's not like a small self-contained and well-thought boss arenas from conventional games. And you can gain distance between you and boss really fast. Huge slow moving boss won't be able to keep up with you, and just makign enemy chasing player around without any interesting movement patterns is not that cool.
The best player strategy here is to gain some distance, do a gun run, disengage and repeat, while evading enemy fire, learning patterns, etc. It definitely works and might be fun, but it does not really emphasize a fast paced action this game can achieve.
And, don't get me wrong here, there's still place for at least a few such boss types in this game, but making this kind of bossfights a bulk of the game will get old pretty quickly.

Same goes for regular enemy jets. Basic AI can keep up with player and chace him pretty well. But this kind of behaviour can't really counter player's ability to move around freerly and just making all enemy types home-in on the player's jet and shoot is, again, not that fun. So, different enemy tiers don't just have better guns and more hp. The main difference here is their behaviour and moveset. High-tier enemy types are designed to inheret my own playstile and can pull off a number of different maneuvers to counter player's movement. They don't outpower the player, they will try to outsmart him.
And obviusly the "speed" factor applies to any other gameplay mechanic, I'm just talking about AI as a best example here.

Hope now I've described my problem a bit better. And as I said before, I'm overcoming this challange with enough success, even though it's hard to come up with mechanics that fits the game and emphasize the pasing, instead of breaking it.

Again, I'm open for any kind of feedback, questions and your ideas.

[Ayramen_Studio]

Impressive graphics! Also that kind of fast paced gameplay looks really cool

[io3 creations]

@WhyNot Regarding the boss fights: there are games that somehow limit the area of movement (e.g. "laser wall").  That way, the player would be forced to be close to the boss and would have to face the attack much more than being able to fly away to a relatively safe distance.

[flex$]

love how you've captured a real sense of momentum in the combat here. the aesthetic is killer