I am the 3D Artist behind the blog you are currently reading as well as the artist behind Skyward Online.
What is Skyward?
Skyward Online is an first person combined arms "Hybrid MMO" that I have been planning for a while now. It is fundamentally a game about Mechs, exploration, user created content, and most importantly fun.
What makes Skyward Online Unique to other Games?
Combat - Combat in Skyward is twitch based and similar to a first person shooter. But has allot of elements that you would find in a game like Mechwarrior for Pilots and Infantry combat similar to Project Reality. I personally want the game to be really deep in terms of movement and combat.
Exploration - Typically in other Games you go down a pre chosen or made path and you kill things. In skyward you will need to explore and hold various strategic positions to gain the upper hand. The world will be procedurally generated from pre made content.
Player Hosted Servers - I want players to host their own servers for Skyward Online. With each server the game world will be different. Admins will be able to alter the game world in various ways.
Modification tools - I want players to modify the game to their hearts content. With the best being brought into the core game, expansion packs, etc.
Player Driven Development - Allot of games have done this by gathering feedback and analytics I want to get player content and Inject it directly into the game. Things such as foliage,new biomes, new mechs, weapons systems, etc. If you make something awesome please show it off. I will go into how we plan on doing this later.
What engine are you using for Skyward?
Unity3D version 4.3.4 (Current) Unity 5 when it is released.
Why are you using Unity? I thought you were going to use Unreal?
I am going to be honest here.
Unity is great on performance (Better than Unreal at this point in terms of rendering) it allows allot to be done with it in terms of plugins and the like. It uses Enlighten which is an industry standard rendering solution. It has a very mature plugin marketplace and very extensive documentation.
Unreal Engine 4 - The Documentation for the API and the Toolset is minimal however it is improving fast with the help of the community. On the note of performance - It is very shader / Post Process heavy while the engine looks prettier it will bog down performance. The Tools for Unreal Engine 4 are awesome I will admit.
What is the planned Monetization Model for Skyward?
I am thinking about doing a one time purchase since we are not going to be hosting any "official servers" the servers will be community ran. I will be using expansion packs as supplements to the games development and hardware costs.
Why are you making this?
I am tired with the stagnation in the mech games market I want to see better games with the players interest in mind. Not ones for "corporate executives", the next "sure thing" or a dumbed down version of Mechwarrior. I would like to also try a few different things that are pretty much foreign to the mech market.
Events
I will be hosting a few events to get player feedback more on this in the next few days while I nail down a the specifics. I would like to be as transparent as possible with these events. If something cannot be done I will say so. I really hope to gain your trust. There will be one tomorrow at the following teamspeak address -warringworlds.dyndns.org
This will be an all day event for gathering feedback and feature requests.
Last but not least -
I am looking for a C# Programmer that is willing to help with the game and is familiar with Unity3D and Networking.
If you are interested please send me your CV or Portfolio to Ben_Stan@Squeakinteractive.com
With the a Subject line - CV / Portfolio
Please note: The Position is unpaid until we can get a Prototype going.
