Airship Commander
Airship Commander 0.3 Overview!
https://youtu.be/w-gyzzHsDv0
One thing that crept up in the last week was the teams general dissatisfaction with the scenarios in the Narcopope campaign. Specifically they take a lot of time to create and test, but aren't much more fun than the four random scenarios included in the build. The Capital Ship scenario in 0.3 approaches things a little differently.
First it's a "mirror match", with the two combatants using the player faction from the campaign. They've been modified to have red textures and new national flags, but otherwise are the same Raptors and Vultures you're used to.
Second is each capital ship will spawn squadrons continuously, instead of 100% of the vessels in the fight being present at the start. This sort of endless combat generator really ups the spectacle, and brings Airship Commander an additional step closer to the ultimate vision we've got for the game.
Between capship fights, missiles, man-portable weapons and this new scenario configuration, 0.3 feel packed to the gills with stuff. We're locked down for release as of this morning and are beginning the QA process. We can't wait to hear what people think!
As always the team is incredibly grateful for your interest in Airship Commander and thank you for your support and attention!
Minor Features of Airship Commander 0.3
https://youtu.be/RBJPXpGAqBw
Once we started down the man portable weapons route for missile and point defense targeting, lots of ideas came bubbling up. The ambient creatures (currently birds) were always meant to have gameplay associated with them, so this seems like the perfect opportunity to expand their role.
The unambiguously named Bird Gun is what we came up with. Shooting from the deck of a moving ship adds a surprising number of challenges, but we finally tuned it to where it feels pretty good (heavy deflection shooting required). While blasting the robo-birds currently offers little more than a distraction, we’ve got lots of plans to use this mechanic. Think a “swarm” weapon that you can use on an enemy airship, with the defenders having the option to shoot the individual elements from the sky.
Another nice addition are in-world tooltips. It’s not remotely obvious what many of the deck props do, and these popups convey lots of useful information. At the very least it’ll allow us to remove the info-kiosks that litter the decks and replace them with tips that only appear when close.
We’ve been trying to find a good options screen solution, since we want to keep the player in-game and commanding the airship at all times. A solution that we’re starting to circle involves a row of levers that the player can flip to do option screen kind of things. The two initial options are the ability to disable the play area chaperone and enable tooltips regardless of player distance. I suspect we’ll add a few more before we’re done done done.
If this update seems a little brief it’s because it is. I lost a bit of time when my beloved nvidia 970’s fans got so clogged with dust that the thing actually started to melt in my case. The acrid aroma was easily noticed and I shut everything down quickly, but it took some doing to track down what happened. I’ve replaced the card with a 1070 (it was surprisingly tough to find a 970) and am back up and running. I’ll have to be sure to stay honest on perf though with the new hardware. Until we replace the minimum spec machine, please let us know if you feel perf is slipping from where it currently is.
We hope to lock down new features by mid week and start the QA process for release by the weekend. The next update has lots of great stuff in it and is another solid step towards realizing the vision our team has for Airship Commander. Thank you for being a part!
Capital Ship Combat and Man Portable Weapons in Airship Commander
https://youtu.be/Tnx91_6psVM
The first thing you’ll notice in that video are weapons you can pickup. The current tact is that these weapons are “painters”, devices you use to target ship mounted ordinance. Each “function” is a different weapon, though we’re considering making it a single “gun” that you can switch modes on (rowboat targeting, point defense, anti-capship missile, and new stuff we’re think about).
Capital ships always served the goal of Airship Commander with their great scale and gameplay. Our first stab at taking down these monsters are three critical hit points, in the video above the giant green cubes. Paint one of these targets for 5 seconds and your airship will launch an anti-capital ship weapon to destroy this vulnerable ship component. Destroy all three and the capship goes down.
Torpedoes were all over Wing Commander for anti-capship missions so that was what we prototyped first. Beyond working well with “painting” weapons, missiles do that great virtual reality trick of looking cool at different distances. When a missile locks on and launches, whips across the sky and detonates against it’s target, it fully realizes the vision of what we set out to do with this game.
Enemy escorts are going to be part of these engagements, but we also wanted the capital ships to be able to defend themselves. Their weapons up to this point were the massive cannons used to take out OTHER capital ships, so we reworked parts of the missile prototype to be the anti-airship-sized weapons. In the video above the cap ship fires volleys at the player, which the player can use rapid fire “point defense” cannons to neutralize. Using the same “painting” mechanism (albeit with a much shorter required time on target), the player can counter these counter measures. Cool!
Lots of work to do but the initial investigations are paying off in a big way. As always the Airship Commander team appreciates you checking us out and reading this update. There are a lot of great things planned for this game and we can’t wait to get them implemented! Thanks again for your continued support!
Airship Commander 0.2 Released!
Here's a quick overview video of the release:
https://youtu.be/jhlUOlKPXds
Detailed build notes below!
Please let me know your thoughts! We can always be reached at airshipcommand@gmail.com.
Thanks for checking out the new Airship Commander release!
Additions:
Motion controller support for both Rift and Vive (with custom robot art).
Traversal via teleporting for motion controllers.
Birds now fly random patterns.
Collisions with towers are now a instakill.
Airship large wreckage now inherits the forward velocity of the vessel when spawned.
New Museum map that allows you to easily use manned rowboats to board all available vessels.
New 5 new city block assets integrated.
Engine props now animate.
Robot First Mate salutes when you change to the main deck.
New Waypoint Scryer prop.
Textures for Map, Wheel, Deck Info and Altitude Lever props
Docking to an airship with a rowboat now dumps the player on the lower deck instead of main.
Fixes:
Birds will now gib if they collide with an airship.
Fade in/out works for autopilot, boarding rowboats, and scene loads.
The propeller of the raptor no longer clips with tail fins.
Significant vertex reductions on city block and tower assets.
LODs added for all vessels.
Dynamically disable props on decks the player isn't on.
The "AI Flying Off Into The Distance" bug has been decidedly fixed (squadron leaders were managing to target themselves).
Unified all movement code (attack run, crash, altitude, move forward) for significant performance gains.
Birds now use the volumetric shader.
Vulture HP increased to 350 from 300.
All altitudes increased by 200 units to reduce collisions with city block assets.
Known Issues:
Some minor flicker in a few of the environments (Mission 3 in the campaign for example).
Quick Update
Supporting both Oculus and Vive, plus controller and now touch, is a time consuming testing burden. I thought we were done on Friday, but found a showstopper. It was an easy fix, but had to restart the checklists for all platforms.
Since steam doesn't take submissions over the weekend, I kept playing and kept finding little issues worth fixing. Still, the extra polish is worth it even though I've must have spent 8 hours in the HMD yesterday alone. I'm starting to get crosseyed.
Stay tuned! Shouldn't be long now!
Details on 0.2 of Airship Commander!
The biggest change to the game comes in the form of touch controls for both Vive and Rift. This new input mechanism caused a lot of ripples to butterfly out through the game. Getting the props to work initially went smoothly, again because of the awesome Virtual Reality Tool Kit. Using these prefabs and components, I quickly made steering wheels spin and levers pivot. The props worked pretty much as expected.
All that changed however once the props were added to airships. When the props moved with the ship "grabbing" them would cause them to vibrate violently. Sometimes they’d teleport from where you touched them to an extreme angle, often actually triggering gameplay input like an altitude change. I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but fixing it required an almost complete rebuilding of the airship prefabs, which introduced loads of bugs and took a while to get cleaned up. They’re in a good spot now, but that was a way bigger change than I anticipated.
Almost as large a change was adding room scale, using teleporting for traversal. The ships scale had to change quite a bit to get it working right, but the sense of presence also increased after the adjustments. Being able to walk around under the ship, or lean out over the deck is super cool. A real focus in the coming releases will be decorating these “deck sets” that each vessel now contains. Making them thematically cool as well as interesting places to interact with will be a priority.
When we discovered just how much we were relying on asynchronous time-warp and re-projection in 0.1, we knew there was a lot of work to do on performance. Digging into both the code and assets, we found many areas to improve. One optimization came along with the rebuilt airship prefabs I mention above. Cleaning up all those competing physics components refunded a millisecond or two off the CPU right out of the gate.
Another area of improvement was the city. Lots of geo details were lost at gameplay altitudes and removed without any fidelity lost. While the large towers continue to cast and take shadows, the city itself now only takes shadows. Lastly we implemented LOD models for all gameplay assets. Our GPU ms was always pretty minimal, but we threw something like 3x the draw calls and polygons at the graphics card that Oculus recommends. Hopefully this improvements will let Airship Commander rely less on the crutches OpenVR and Oculus provide. It certainly feels more smooth on my minimum spec machine.
There are lots of other changes, mostly small but cumulatively a nice additional level of polish. Vessels will now collide with towers, basically insta-gibbing. Birds do the same should they collide with an airship. The fade in/out on changing stations now works everywhere, including the autopilot at the end of a waypoint and manned rowboats. Many of the props now sport textures, there are 6x the city block assets for more diversity, and custom art for the touch controllers.
Hopefully by this time next week the 0.2 release of Airship Commander will be available! Thanks to all of you that have provided feedback, both positive and negative. Airship Commander is a true passion project, one that is fueled by an unquenchable desire to will a game into existence that I’m desperate to play. I deeply appreciate your time and thank you for reading this update!
What's in the next Airship Commander release?
The initial plan after the first Early Access release was to focus on integrating capital ships and missile combat into the core combat loop. Both of these features were well along in development when we approached October 6th, but we decided to shelve them to ensure other parts of the game got the attention they deserved. Pushing capships and missiles to completion seemed like a natural next step.
Once we launched though, one of the most consistent pieces of feedback we got was how much folks wanted room scale and “touch” input. We realized early in development how compatible Airship Commander was to both those ideas. Relatively small decks made for easy teleport aiming, and the game was filled with levers, wheels, and other naturally grab-able props. Like a lot of good ideas it was shelved to help get the first release complete, but it was never far from our minds.
So based on this consistent request, we changed course and implemented room scale and motion tracked controls. The foundation of this work was the WONDERFUL Virtual Reality Tool Kit, available on both the unity asset store and their website. This very rich collection of prefabs, scripts and examples let us hit the ground running with basic inputs like touch, grab and teleport.
There was still a decent amount of work put into mapping the existing controls to the tracked wands. The steering wheel in particular took a lot of tuning. The first implementation split the wheel in two and if you “touch” the right side it would rotate to the right (steering the ship in the process). While functional it didn’t fulfill the fantasy of spinning the wheel, so v2 incorporated grabbing. Now you can grab each of the spars on the wheel and give it a good spin to turn. Very interested in what people think!
https://youtu.be/QnAE65fPdSs
Another major focus of the next release was improving performance. The cities in particular were grossly over budget, not playing well with either the engine (meshes too big for batching) or the graphics card (draw-call-apalooza). We spent a lot of time tearing apart each frame we were drawing and started make good process in getting verts and draw calls under control. There’s still a lot more to do, but on machines similar to mine (the min specs of the game) you should be relying less on asynchronous time warp or re-projection to maintain a playable framerate.
We’re hoping to lockdown new features in the build in the next day or two, then spend a week or so bug fixing, optimizing, and polishing. Thank you for your continued interest in Airship Commander. It continues to be a dream come true being able to realize this game, and we appreciate you being a part of it!
How Airship Commander?
At the end of 2014 I was working at a company named Dynamighty, and we had just finished shipping CounterSpy. While the executives worked on our next deal, many of us were given opportunities to work on things of personal interest.
There was a great game jam, that actually birthed our next game Fingers of Fury. I worked on a project with the art director, which gave me the opportunity to pick up c# and scripting in unity to bring his assets to life. Building upon this knowledge I banged out a quick mobile game called Moons of Bovis in my spare time. It married the choice driven progression of Starcraft 2 with a game I thought I could actually finish: Space Invaders.
I was halfway through a “sequel in tech” to Bovis when my Oculus DK2 landed. After getting it up and running, one of the first things I did was see if I could get the existing game working in VR. It was pretty straight forward, but the twitch gameplay wasn’t a great fit for the technology. This lead to a swift shelving of the current project, and revisiting my dream game about airships (see last diary).
There are countless methods that result in good games, but you can see a pattern among many of the most successful studios. That unifying trait is playing their own game…a lot. The development process for all of Airship Commander took this philosophy to heart and made it a cornerstone of how our time was spent.
Every day went pretty much the same way:
a) Play the game for 30 minutes
b) Identify the number one thing that would improve the player’s experience
c) Implement that thing you identified
d) Goto step a
In addition, we targeted improvements that impact the core gameplay loop. Whatever the player does in your game 90% of the time is always a safe area to make better. For Airship Commander that’s steering the ship to line up broadsides. Ideas that made this interaction more compelling almost always won priority fights with features less impactful to the moment-to-moment experience.
We were also biased towards tasks that could be finished in a day or less. Working on smaller features that improved the core loop gave the team a great sense of progress every day. There are absolutely times where multi-day projects had to be tackled, but the baseline was high tempo modest improvements.
In the end, this focus on achievable doing let us accomplish more than otherwise would have been possible for such a small team. A couple of months in early 2015 resulted in the prototype you can see in this video:
https://youtu.be/GwJ2hVjwbEk
Most of the Airship Commander gameplay can be seen here. Much of the same code running in the video is still operating under the hood, albeit faster and more stable. Prototyping using primitives enabled lots of mistakes to be cheaply made, and future development will always exist in extensive “greybox” prototypes before committing precious content resources.
The direction of the game’s development has been influenced greatly by all the feedback provided since the Early Access program started. We’ve paused finishing capital ships for the moment and are targeting the next release to focus on room scale and tracked motion controllers. Other valid feedback we hope to address is vessel collision with the environment (buildings, birds) and overall performance.
As always I’m grateful for your time and thank you for reading this update! We’re excited about what’s coming and can’t wait to show more in the coming weeks!
Jeff
Why Airship Commander?
Why Airship Commander?
Hey folks. Thanks for reading the first developer diary for Airship Commander!
In this outing I want to discuss some of the reasons Airship Commander exists. Future diaries will cover the development process we use as a tiny developer, where I see the game going in the short and long term, and progress updates.
My obsession with the “airship” genre started in the 1980s. When I was around 14 years old, I was able to convince my parents into letting me attend a gaming convention in Anaheim, California. Some favorite sessions were given by computer game developers. One by Hero Quest makers Lori and Corey Cole, another from the team behind the ill-fated original Champions computer game.
As memorable as those were, the game of the show for me was a role-playing game called Space 1889. It was focused on an 19th century world where all you needed for space travel was an airtight ship, some balloons to take you into orbit, and enough plants on board to make oxygen.
Of particular electrifying impact was Mars in this universe. The Red Planet was a frontier, where swashbuckling Earthlings could become captains of “liftwood” airships. I wanted to experience what it was like to stand on the deck of one of these Sky Galleons, order broadsides and chase down merchantmen.
Fast forward years later and I’m an undergrad at San Francisco State. While I consumed interactive games of almost all genres, vehicle simulations were my favorites. Dogfighting games were plentiful, but what I really hungered for were capital ship sims. Task Force 1942 got very close by letting me command massive vessels, but the lack of the fantastical kept it from scratching the itch introduced by Space 1889.
I spent a lot of time time between classes bemoaning this absent dream game by taking copious notes and drawing countless doodles. Sitting on benches in Golden Gate Park, I spent many afternoons scraping out of my head every idea I had about what this game would look like.
Shortly after college I was able to get a job at Origin Systems, Inc. in Austin, Texas. The Ultima and Wing Commander series were base components of my gaming identity and I was floating about two inches above the ground when I joined. Beyond the amazing opportunity, being surrounded by colleagues making games daily was just the inspiration I needed to stop lamenting my dream game not existing. I made a commitment to try and make it.
Digging through all those college notes, and using a old copy of Turbo C donated to me from Origin, I was able to cobble together a MS-Dos version of my vision.
A shocking number of similarities exist between this 1990’s version and Airship Commander. In this show you see two "screws" in the distance (the cigar looking things with silver pins up front). There is a "kite" at high altitude barely visible and a POV-Ray rendered cannon discharging on the left for a broadside.
As crude as it was, it was playable, interactive and was the first tangible evidence outside of my head that this game could exist.
A career in video game production put my dream game on hold for over a decade. I can often determine how satisfied I am at work by the number of person projects i have going. It’s a good sign that for most of the 21st century I’d been focused on my day job exclusively, and the "airship" idea collected dust.
But in 2015 I started learning unity, and dabbling in VR, and the “airship” game started to eat more and more of my cycles. The stars started to align and in my mind it seems like now could be the perfect opportunity to polish up these old ideas and give them a fresh take using today’s technology.
Airship Commander was born.
Next diary will cover how I got started, my daily development philosophy and some lessons learned in making a game like this with a very, very small team. Thanks for reading!
Airship Commander Controls!
When you spawn in you'll be on the main deck of your airship in a neutral zone.
Look behind you for mission selection and objective props. Each deck has a similar prop telling you it's primary function.
There are five campaign missions, four random waypoints, and two pre-alpha scenes that preview the next update.
Please let me know about any bugs, things you like (and more importantly don't), and any suggestions you think would be a fit. You can always reach me at airshipcommand@gmail.com.
Controller:
view: HMD
left stick - turn ship (main deck only)
right stick - altitude (main deck only)
dpad up/down - change deck
left stick click - launch raiding rowboat
right stick click - launch piloted rowboat
bumpers - cycle mission (main deck only)
A - load selected mission (main deck only)
Left Trigger - drop bombs
START - Pause
BACK - return to mission select
BACK - quit (mission select level only)
- Insta-win Waypoint Objective
Mouse and keyboard:
view: mouse
A/D - turn ship (main deck only)
W/S - altitude (main deck only)
Z/X - change deck
N - launch piloted rowboat
M - launch raiding rowboat
bumpers - cycle mission (main deck only)
Left Mouse Button - load selected mission (main deck only)
Left Trigger - drop bombs
START - Pause
ESC - return to mission select
ESC - quit (mission select level only)
Q - Insta-win Waypoint Objectives