Ship Feel and Control
I always felt that there was much to be desired from controlling vehicles in some of the top shooters. I remember playing some of the first shooters where I could control a fighter plane. I think they got a lot of things right in that the controls weren’t incredibly responsive like usually how driving a car would be. Turning was slow and difficult, risky even. Sure, it’s close to reality but that doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable. Maybe there wasn’t enough intermediate feedback. Either way, it’s concerning because vehicle driving is a core gameplay element in GoI: Online.
Choose Your Own Wasteland
The world of Guns of Icarus is in an interesting place, historically speaking — a grand civilization devastated by relentless war and sunk into a post-apocalyptic ruin, so much progress and knowledge and technology lost, the people who remained scrabbling and struggling and surviving, barely.
But that’s not where we enter this world. We enter it later, as the tides are changing and something new is shifting beneath the surface of the restless sands. As more and more airships are built in makeshift dockyards in villages scattered across the Burren, as young men and women leave their homes and take to the skies to crew them, traders and adventurers and daredevils and visionaries, a new class is arising, with the potential to change the world. Airship captains and their crew are the new knights errant, the new merchant class, explorers and ambassadors and warriors. As trade routes open and formerly isolated communities come into contact with the wider world for the first time, a seismic shift is underway, and nothing can stay the same. Not that it will be easy. Not that it will be peaceful. Not that anyone knows what it will be like.
Because in the multiplayer campaign mode, those new adventurers changing the world are you, and we don’t know what you’ll do.
When Dimensions Are Added
This is something that I’ve been not only thinking about but experiencing myself. The opportunities and problems afforded and created by the addition of different dimensions (mostly in the traditional sense like 2D to 3D but the definition is loose) becomes both amazing and daunting. I’ll keep this confined to map and level design.
Starting with making 2D Flash games, level constraints are quite straight forward. You only have two degrees of freedom (x, y axes). Take for example the ubiquitous platformer: movement is defined by floors. 2D platformers are easy to grasp whether due to its simplicity or its commonplace nature in games. I remember drawing Sonic the Hedgehog levels before I could spell Sonic without looking at the box. Walking on terrain is a simple game that we all know because we’ve played these games as children–skipping over cracks in the pavement, hopscotch, and etc… Creating levels for 2D games are fairly straightforward and are easily produced on paper by drawing simply lines to represent the ground. There is easily a standard for designing with these constraints. The information that is required to effectively convey the workings of a level can easily be read and drawn on a piece of paper for an everyday platformer.
Air Pirates at Dawn
The art team is hard at work putting a trailer together for Guns Online – here is a sneak peak of things to come.
Month of the Gun
When the art team was laying out our schedule for the summer we noticed a interesting chunk of time occurring in the month of June–gun production! And because this is GUNS of Icarus, we’ve been busy designing and building the most epic guns ever imagined! We have micro flamethrowers, harpoon launchers, magnified solar beams, revolver rocket launchers, air mine launchers, and everything else that would make a ballistic-phile pass out in ecstasy. Here is a behind the scenes look at the “Month of the Gun.” Happy hunting 🙂
Tesla Cannon Design – Jon Lin, Model – Eugene Chu
