Another dimension

Skylarks is now a 3D game.

As drastic as this sounds, the core gameplay hasn't changed. Your ship still moves in 2D. Most ships still do. The flight and combat controls are the same as before. (The default keybindings have changed, but you'll be able to change them back.)

Many of our assets were already 3D models. Where we used to render them down to spritesheets, we can now simply import the models into the game. This doesn't always work out, because many of them have polycounts or textures that would make our renderer puke, but it's a simpler content pipeline than it used to be. Paradoxically, it also allows us to make certain animations less demanding on your graphics card. We can be a lot more ambitious here.

The biggest change we've made, and the main reason for the switch, is about how much you see during gameplay.

Let's rewind. Skylarks was originally inspired by the Escape Velocity franchise, and we always had the goal of improving on its core gameplay. Other games have tried to do this before — and we consider almost all of those attempts to be failures. They generally take one of two directions. Some remain very faithful to EV, carrying the 2D torch into the present day. Others translate the trading and roleplaying elements into a fully 3D environment with free-roaming spaceflight, much like the Elite franchise that in turn inspired EV.

The latter direction is popular with players who demand "realism." Like many developers, we think that's a dirty word. To paraphrase George Box: All games are unrealistic. Some games are fun. EV itself was made less realistic than Elite by switching to 2D gameplay in the interest of fun. We do keep an eye on the implications our designs have for physical plausibility, a topic which I'll write more about later on. However, we don't think gameplay based on maneuvering a vehicle is a good match for physically accurate depictions of the vastness of space. They're fundamentally at odds. Realistic spaceflight is less about maneuvering your ship and more about living in it.

(Of course there's plenty of room in the world for games where you just live in your ship. We've even prototyped a couple. More on that some other time.)

Our initial efforts on Skylarks went down the "faithful" path. After all, the other half of our game is a visual novel, and we still don't need 3D models for that, probably. However, while 2D gameplay was more fun to us than 3D gameplay, we felt it was missing something. Something right under our noses, or over them. Something that could make the difference between a game that looks empty and soulless, and a game that is instantly recognizable and fun just to watch.

So we put it on a sphere.

In the EV franchise, space is a square — or rather, a torus. On a toroidal map, you can fly north and end up in the south, or fly east and end up in the west. For a while, we looked at changing this to a cylindrical map, where space is a coin, and flying to the edge just flips over the coin. It worked, but playing it was rough. Flipping everything over looked really weird, and realism does make a difference when it comes to motion sickness. We had taken something that wasn't good enough and made it worse.

If the camera wasn't going to stay put, we needed to ensure it would move smoothly from one angle to another. A sphere was the next obvious thing to try, if we could sort out the math. Doing that took us longer than we'd like to admit, but we put together a gameplay prototype we were happy with, and a whole lot of things suddenly made so much more sense. When the entire star system is always spread out in front of you, it feels more like a place the player can become familiar with. You can see things happen in the main display area that were previously only visible in the minimap. Ships in the distance can glitter as they warp in and out of systems. Their battles with each other can be flashier and more stylized. And with the right kind of weapon, they can shoot at you, right through the middle of the system.

Our next gameplay demo will be based on this same prototype. We have a lot to move over from the old codebase, and some that we'll just have to rebuild or throw out, but we're convinced we're on the right track.