Epic Airship to Airship Combat
Today we’re going to get a look at another region of the world: snowy Firnfeld, long known to residents of Burren as simply “The Frozen North.”
The world has changed since the years of war, and as the skies darkened and the climate grew colder, the polar ice cap expanded and descended to cover over what once was a temperate region in the old world with permafrost and snow, burying its cities and their secrets and driving out all but the most hardened survivors.
This is a fairly general post. I just got back into doing something that I get pretty excited about: working with numbers, formulas, all inside of a tidy little spreadsheet. There’s been a lot of talk and questions on our Facebook page regarding larger design decisions of Guns. While things like “will weather effect gameplay?” or “can you found your own town?” are all important parts of gameplay, what game design comes down to are not vague feature lists. It’s diving deep into how these things work on a systemic level. By examining what ‘play’ and ‘fun’ is, we can determine what is necessary in order to create games that people want to play. In fact, ‘game’ is already a vague term. The word we want to look at is ‘rules’. A game is a thing that contains rules that we have to follow in order to play said game. By following rules, we are given a challenge. Accomplishing challenging tasks is fun.
There’s a map floating around that some enterprising ludic cartographer made showing the comparative sizes of a few particularly expansive game worlds. You may have seen it — it ranges all the way from Grand Theft Auto III at about three square miles to Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall at 62,394 square miles. That’s a lotta land.
I’ll hold off on revealing precise figures just now, but let’s just say that on that list, the map of Guns of Icarus Online should fall somewhere in between Fuel and Guild Wars: Nightfall, which is a pretty sizable chunk of real estate.