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[Goran]

The why

It all began with a passage from a sci-fi story written by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson called Dogfight. If you've read it then you'll know what I mean if not - here's the passage where Deke enters the bar and sees the game being played over a pool table.

"Through the haze came a trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D Vhs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked majestically under the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb. The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely. The kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the felt, without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green
flatlands but to no avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply and stalled, too low to pull out in time. A stack of silver dimes was scooped up. The Fokkers were outnumbered now. One had two Spads on its tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker slip-turned right, banked into an Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the biplane fell, tumbling.

"Way to go, Tiny!" The kickers closed in around the table.

Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again."

What I want to do is to recreate what Deke felt and what I felt reading this story for the first time.

The what

The basic premise of the game is aerial combat of WWI aircraft. But as you may have noticed in the story - the players control up to three aircraft at once in a 3vs3 duel. This is the main design challenge which led to the following decisions.

• The game is played in a top-down perspective. This way you'll have a nice overview of the dogfight and still get to see downed aircraft crashing and burning.
• The aircraft all fly at the same level (height) and the game play consist of turning the aircraft left and right, shooting at the enemy and performing a few aerial maneuvers (such as immelman and barrel roll) to escape from enemies at your tail.
• The game is played on a single screen to enable player to see and control his team of three aircraft simultaneously.
• The controls for the aircraft must be simplified to the bare minimum as the number of keys the player needs to control is tripled.

The prototype

Before I embarked on building this game I've (listened to good advice) and created a small prototype to see if this could be fun.

Two images of gameplay.

The aircraft and terrain are 3d which is needed for (vertical) maneuvers. And I think would be a nice feature for players to be able to view replays in 3d.

Playing with the prototype gave me some good insight into what is fun an what is not, what needs to go and what needs to be done. But that's another post altogether

I'll appreciate the feedback!

[Montoli]

Color me intrigued!

I'm interested to see how you manage the control of 3 aircraft without making the controls turn crazy and unwieldy!  The only two knee-jerk ideas I came up with were turning them into mindless drones that follow you around in a set formation, or cutting them loose to an AI that -mostly- follows you, but allows them some autonomy.

But from your post, it sounds like you have something more clever in mind than these, and I can't wait to see what it is!

[Core Xii]

Looks like Triplane Turmoil on crack.

[Pishtaco]

Very interested to see where this goes.

One way to make a more tactical game where you control several planes at once is to go turn-based. There were a few games by the people who went on to do Combat Mission that do this -- Flight Commander (maybe 2?) is the one I played; it was about jets in Korea and upwards, and had maybe 15-second long turns.

I've recently been playing Darkwind, which is a physicsy car racing and combat game, which essentially runs in real-time but pauses every second for you to give orders to your team, which can consist of a few cars at once. It struck me that this might be an interesting way to do a flight sim.

[Goran]

Thanks for the feedback!

As you've correctly observed, controlling multiple aircraft is tricky. I've thought about different schemes like the ones that were proposed:

• Sequential scheme - where you fly sinlge aircraft while the rest circle around until you get killed at which point you take control of another plane
• AI scheme - where the rest don't just circle but are controlled by AI (until yours is shot down)
• Formation scheme where the rest follow you in formation (but you get to chose the formation)

And then I remembered a game (sources anyone?) where you basically control 4 characters at the same time. You get to control which two characters jump (up = upper two, left = upper left and lower left one etc.) It's quite tricky as each of them is faced with a different world (holes and walls). So you can't just jump all the time as hitting the wall or jumping into a hole kills you. I can't remember the name of the game but it was a blast.

So I've decided to let you control all three aircraft at the same time. I'm not saying it's easy but you can get better at it - which is the whole point of the game.

Lessons learned from the prototype

First off, it's quite hard to keep your aircraft in the battle area (the screen) and it's impossible to do that and fight effectively. I experimented with rolled up versions (flying off to the left you reappear on the right) but it looked silly. So I thought about making you share the control with the AI. And this is where it gets quite interesting.

In the game you are sharing the control over the aircraft with the AI pilot. This means that your input is more a suggestion to the pilot on what to do (perhaps a technical post is in order here). If the aircraft is too close to the edge of the battlefield the AI simply overrides your input and steers the plane back. This enabled you to focus on a particular fight if needed without the worry of loosing a plane.

Also I've limited your input to turning left and right. The basic idea is that pilots themselves control the machine gun. If you've got an enemy plane in your sights for a period of time the pilot will open fire (it will also stop firing if a friendly plane crosses path). This means that steering and getting behind the enemy aircraft is the best way to shoot it down. Head on or side attacks are penalized as your pilot doesn't fire immediately and you can't really lead your shots.

The AI pilots can sense aircraft a long way in a narrow field in front of them and and a very short way all around them. So I've included some simple avoidance algorithms where the pilot would override your input and steer away from a collision with another aircraft. The cool thing about it is that it is not perfect (sometimes steering away from a collision will provoke another collision) but it is good enough to keep the aircraft alive for a much longer time even without your input.

Also this is where all sorts of game mechanics open up! Your pilot's abilities gain importance. Pilots can get quicker on the trigger or improve their field-of-view etc... So pilot progression could be a nice addition to the game.

So basically you need to control 6 keys to fly your planes. It's hard but quite learnable. The biggest problem is connecting which two keys control which aircraft. Once they zig-zag in the fray of battle you loose it. I'm planning to address that problem using insignia on the aircraft wings.

The other most important thing is the scale. If the screen is to small then the game loses the fun factor as it gets too random. If the screen is too big then your aircraft are too small and you don't enjoy flying them anymore. So the scale and the speed (Good thing you're fighting with WWI planes that fly more slowly ) of the aircraft is very important and will be resolved by further play tests.

I'm quite interested in what you guys thing about the control scheme.

Off to do boring stuff that pays the bills but don't forget to write.

Goran

[george]

The biggest problem is connecting which two keys control which aircraft. Once they zig-zag in the fray of battle you loose it. I'm planning to address that problem using insignia on the aircraft wings.

First of all great idea, and I loved the short story as well.

I think the issue quoted above is going to be big. I wonder if you couldn't have a 'focus' that also switches from aircraft to aircraft depending on which one you're controlling. The other aircraft not currently controlled would become less 'in focus' overall but their control signature would become more prominent.

[BadgerManufactureInc]

Looking like a fun game :D