In 2020, I decided to make video games my job, and in the process, to rediscover some games from my childhood. I then came across SkyWar, a 2008 flash game developed by Motion Twin that I had played a long time ago. This game combines strategy, aviation, floating islands, everything I love! I then thought for a while about how to improve and modernize this old flash game, and the first concept of UpperSky popped into my head!
UpperSky is an online battle royale RTS game which is taking place high over the coulds in a steam punk univers. The main focus of the game is to play around environmental events that randomly accures during your game. The game map is randomly generated. Designning the game and writting the Game Design Document took me around 3 weeks.
<= Feel free to check the Game Design Document !
UpperSky is an ambitious solo project on which I've been working on for a while. Aside from the design, I also programmed the game alone (check the technical page for more infos about the tech behind the game). For the game's art, it was partly made by friends, for the rest I used online free assets or home made ones. Later in the project I also randomly generated some element with my own procedural mesh generation system.
UpperSky allowed me to learn very valuables skills in game design, aside from design and writting documentation. One of them is balancing. I had the please to balance a bunch of differents units, buildings and technology while analysing the results of the playtests I had organise. I also improved a lot from a technical point of view as I programmed a lot of features, including :
Building System
Worl Procedural Generation
Units Formation Queue
Units Combat
Units Skills
Networking
I then stopped working on UpperSky as I had to work on others projects. Nethertheless I still want to work on this project and I know I will do so at one time or another. For now I'm focused on Oko Tactics!