In the details.

Lately we've been working on making the city feel like a city.  Lights, telephone poles, sewers, alleyways, they all make the feel of the game come to life. That's where the quality comes from and being that we only have one person, ME, doing the modeling for the game, it's hard to get all the quality I want into the world without worrying about or fixing something else that needs my immediate attention.

I say all of that to say, I recently re-worked a final version of a shop I had done back in 2013 called "Garden of Weeden."  It's one of the many shops in the game and will probably be one of the more comical pieces.  Here's a side by side comparison of of the version of the shop, not much longer than 2 years ago, and the one today:

I hope at the end of the project, when all is said and done, that it really feels like a game made by a big studio.  The style, quality and details, even though they won't be AAA in scope, will at least give off the feeling that this could've been made by one.

I'm doing my best to make sure everyone gets to play this game as soon as possible.

Sludge, sweets and sewers

Hello and welcome back.  We've been in the background continuing to work on the game and it's finally starting to come together.  More bigger news later this month.  For now, lets start with the alleys:

Lately I've been hard at work making every single prop in order to make this town feel like a town.  Cardboard boxes, crates, pipes, stairs, trash cans, etc.  You name it, I modeled it.....and lit it....and added animation to it........you get the idea.


We here at Skyride like the "Hands off" approach when it comes to gameplay.  We will set up areas with specific treasures to find, but we don't want to have to blatantly point out where you need to go next.  Characters and props will help lead the way.  One of the cool concepts we are going to do incorporate are posters in the city like this:

Even those these posters won't be moving, they will be plastered around town and will "magically" change their image depending on where you need to go next.  So incase you ever get lost or can't seen to figure out what to do next, all you'll have to do is track down a poster and you'll get a good hint.  This hint is what you'll get when you first arrive in the city and need to get a place to live while you are here.

RainChecks are the in-game currency you use to buy things.  You will not need to buy fake money with your credit card, because this game is a non pay-to-win game and we feel like if you bought the game, we don't need anymore cash from you. (You're welcome.)


Another big idea we've been bouncing around are the idea of sewers.  Since it's a city of Rain, there sewer system should be large and vast.  We didn't want to make this game about living in the sewer and hiding with the mole people because we want to force the player to interact with the people in the city.  So to meet in the middle, we hid a secret underground room somewhere in the level (no, we aren't telling you where and good luck finding it) and as a bonus we put someone special living inside that room.  Take a look:

We might add some special weapons or a loot of money or something cool in this room later, but for now, it's just a sewer room.


So that basically wraps up the latest on our end.  Hopefully you start to get an idea of the feeling of the game as well as how some of the gameplay might be.  Keep an eye out this month for big news about our characters and we will see you next time screen slavers.

Quick update

As the title states, this is just a quick update on the progress of the city I've been modeling for the game.  Take a peek:

I've completed 4 streets of buildings and have about 2 more streets to complete.  The main street branches off into many alleyways with twists and turns and slowly bottlenecks as you get further to the outskirts leaving only certain openings for passage.  Since most of the exploring will probably take place around the main street, I fully plan on allowing the player to go anywhere in the city they want.  Only certain buildings will have explore-able interiors but there will be plenty to explore on the outside of the buildings as well.

I'm very excited to continue on and once I get a playable Alpha version of the game up and running, I'll have sign ups on the skyride studios website so people can enter to play and test out the alpha for me, giving feedback and so on.

Well, that's all for now.

Dark city alleyway

So I've been playing around with some props lately, trying to put detail into the city and get it ready for characters.  The first area I decided to play around with was one of the alleyways between two buildings.  After some fun production design and lighting, here's a first pass on what it looks like:

Obviously there is still a lot of work to do but I am pretty happy with the result.  Next I will decorate a shop in one of the buildings and see how that turns out.

Later crazies.