Spiludvikling.dk

Hello. I gave a talk at Unite Europe in Amsterdam a few weeks ago about the input and camera control systems in Static Sky, a game that we're developing at framebunker. The videos are online, and I thought it might be nice to share a link here in case anybody finds it interesting. Oh... and I should probably thank the guys at Zaxis and Cape Copenhagen for sitting through an early beta version and giving great feedback.


Or, if that embed doesn't work for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPpJT5R4bBU

Charles

Excellent detailed development talk Charles
Worth a watch for sure

Thanks, Jonas!

So how are things progressing with StaticSky anyway.
Inching closer to release in the foreseeable future?

And how many hours of gameplay are you aiming for?
I would suspect your 3 man team does indeed impose some strict limitations on how much scope you can give it in that regard.

It looks super nice. Really excellent work. I'm sure Apple will be all 'feature happy' with it.

Thanks, it is moving forward — our "unofficial" intention is to ship end-of-year.

When we get asked about hours of gameplay, I'm not really sure how to answer it. Partially because I just don't know, but also because we're really trying to embrace the idea of this being a mobile game where 10 minutes here and 15 minutes there is actually a fun experience. Combine that with semi-procedural missions, and I'm not even entirely sure that the length of a single start-to-finish run is the most relevant measure of scope...

But I'll try to answer — Søren or Nich might dispute every word of what I'm about to say, and it is by no means our official goal for game length... I'm sort of thinking this through while typing: There are a dozen story missions and if we get the difficulty curve right, I would expect a competent and focused player to take about an equal number of the procedural missions just to have characters appropriately leveled. For reference, last time I played a mission straight through, I think it took me about 15 minutes... that is knowing exactly where to go and what to do and with a character that was overpowered fighting AI that wasn't quite working.... Any real-world average will be much longer. I guess that would mean a flawless play through that only did exactly what is necessary would fall in the 6 hour range? In the real world, I would be taking more missions, needing to explore at least a bit, leveling up multiple classes for more diverse situations, etc. I'd also be dying... a lot. And since it is a mobile game I'd lose some percentage of my play to being interrupted... So, with all of that... I guess I'd pretty confidently say "more than six hours" knowing that I'm probably under-selling it by a whole lot.

I guess I can give a real answer when we are to the point where we are getting analytics in from beta players. To be honest though, within reason, I'm pretty ok with "too short". I'd much rather have that than "lost interest and didn't finish".