Epic Airship to Airship Combat
Hi everyone,
We have a few important clarifications to make—a somewhat serious business post. We’ve used some loose language regarding the game like PvP and Campaign, which has led to some minor confusion at times. So here are the official titles and explanations for the two game modes in Guns of Icarus Online.
Let’s take a look at what those are…
Hey everyone, time for another update! We’ve got some big news, actually from within the past 24 hours really. Guess what? We finally have a Steam App ID! Wait, what does this even mean? This means we can now fully begin Steam integration of our closed beta testing. You heard us. With all the proper information from Valve, we now go full steam ahead with getting things ready for our dedicated players (pun very much intended).
Hey everyone! Long time to no post. We duly apologize for our lack of attention to the website. We’ve been busily making changes to the game for our upcoming closed-beta testing as well as managing the lucky beta-testers who supported us on Kickstarter! Holy crap, $35000!! You all are great. Everyone in the team deeply appreciates the gesture. Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten our promise to our backers in opening up beta testing. Trust me when I say we’re really close! Continue reading “We’ve Been Busy”
Congratulations to all the artists who entered our Guns of Icarus Online character design contest on DeviantArt. Here are the final selections, and our thoughts on them.
First Place: ~VinzentVoight’s “Red Coat Girl”
Guns of Icarus Online is now available for preorder on Kickstarter! Pledge an amount of your choosing in support of the project and you can get great rewards, including preorder copies of the game, the original soundtrack, exclusive closed beta access, limited edition costumes, t-shirts, posters, art books, the chance to design your own custom characters and items in the game, and more!
Head over to our Kickstarter page to get in on the action!
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.
By now, everyone has seen the trailer. We’re very happy with it but we also want to let everyone know that there is more to come. We know you’ve all been waiting a while to see something new, and while our teaser was a looker we knew we’d get people clamoring for gameplay footage. This is a more technical post to give everyone a thorough update on all our core mechanics and what state they’re currently in. Some things are were in the gameplay trailer, some things are so new that they didn’t make it in.
The one thing that just came out of the oven is new ship controls. More specifically, we’ve erred on the side of realism and created an honest to god ship thrust model. We have friction, drag, and all the goodies that comes with real-world physics. Of course, we’ve simplified a few things so gameplay doesn’t get too out of hand. The main one is that all ship motion assumes it has a left and right engine. We decided not to try to model a rudder system so having two engines on either side of the ship becomes essential in turning. You can put your ship into discrete levels of forward or backward thrust, so far 7 to be exact (from -3 to 3). This basically means both the left and right side engine(s) are at the same power. Turning the ship lessens the thrust of one side and increases the other. With this, you can expect realistic ship movement. For example, it’ll take some time to come to a full stop but we’ve toned down some of the realism to ensure maneuverability and a fun control experience. But since everything is still based on a realistic system, everything just operates as you would expect it to a phenomenal degree.
I guess some people on our beta list are affiliated with some big gaming websites because our trailer ended up on one this morning 😛 What we wanted to do was give our fans a heads up before we start posting to media sites. But you can go watch it now already since our leaking skillz are 1337.
The trailer contains our first testable gameplay footage. That’s the main reason we’ve been in the dark for the past few weeks–we’ve been busting out bugs and ensuring that our systems and graphics are as accurate as possible. We still have a lot to do but we wanted to give everyone an update on where we’re at. Rest assured, you’ll be seeing lots more weapons, repair activity, and enemies in the skies.
Yes, weaponized clouds is a thing.
We’re really excited to announce a character costume design contest for Guns online. Finalists get some Guns Online swag, and the winner’s concept art will be used in the final game! So get out your sketchbooks and start designing!
Full contest rules below.
So one of my favorite games has to be Diablo II. Yes, it’s basically click all the things. Yes, there are too many ways to fail in the skill tree. Yes, I always defend this game because I played the hell out of it. How many characters did I roll? How many mules did I have that were full of Stone of Jordans? My Hammerdin was awesome. My Bowazon destroyed everything. If I put points into the wrong skill, I just transferred my items with the help of friends and power-leveled my new character and kept trading for crazy items. Don’t even get me started with items… that was what put the frosting on the cake.