![]() Finding a large stash of one particular resource could be a peak of interest, but to lock our players into a flow, they’d have to move on fairly quickly. To magnify that feeling, no single area could provide all resources for the player indefinitely. This created a constant problem of low-level asset optimization, which added a mini-loop to our game, and felt like a comforting tempo to our players. When the kingdom moved away, players would search for closer pockets and re-assign their gatherers for greater efficiency. Players would target a far off location to fly towards, and as their city moved, they would rotate the camera in search of nearby resources and assign workers to them. But the real flow-state emerged in a rhythmic repetition of small tasks. Our original instinct was to create large pockets of resources separated by vast swaths of uninhabited lands. Though the movement system required a lot more work on the world itself. The natural connection between verbs was surprising from the get-go, even for us. And the larger the city became, the more force it needed to move, adding another element of infrastructure, Propulsion, for players to stay on top of. If players wanted to find new technologies to construct, they’d have to search for interest points on the ground - an in-world research tree. With resource collection, instead of sending workers further and further away, the city itself moved closer to them. This mechanic integrated elegantly with the rest of our game. With no anchoring to the ground, a player could simply click on a spot in the world, and their entire city would fly above that location. We tried a number of mechanics to find our own slant, but it wasn’t until we added right-click-to-move (first described by our programmer Fred Gareau as “movement like an RPG”) that we could fully see the potential of what we’d created. Yet our first prototype of this concept felt underwhelming - a village suspended above a ground plane had little to set it apart from genre staples. The systemic nature of the genre was intriguing, and the creative potential of a kingdom-among-clouds was equally tantalizing. We had all worked on hit franchises ( Dragon Age, Star Wars, Battlefield, etc) and had almost half a century of combined industry experience - but our debut game, Airborne Kingdom, would be the first time any of us felt complete creative control over something big, with enough skill and resources to pull it off.įrom the beginning, we loved the idea of creating a city-builder in the sky. Then in 2017, Visceral closed - so a few old colleagues and I founded the studio The Wandering Band. After years at various AAA houses, I left Visceral Games in 2015 to “go indie” (solo-developing a narrative adventure, A Case of Distrust).
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