Endless Skies

Disclaimer: the following blog post is lengthy. Grab a snack.

A major focus of this blog will be a number of Games and program I am working on, or would like to work on in the future.

One Major such project has been unofficially in the works for about 2 years and is a collaboration between me and Geoffrey, a close friend of mine who will be more properly introduce in a later post.

Said project is a Dragon game, which from now on I will refer to by the working title of  ”Endless Skies”.

Back-Story

The story behind Endless skies begins during my junior year in High school. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had just been released, and Geoffrey, myself, and a couple of friends were hooked. We loved the huge expansive world, the beautiful terrain, the Lucious Forests and stunning graphics. We marveled at the fact that you could play it for literally weeks, without ever touching the main storyline. (We also played many other games that would inspire us such as Wolfire’s Lugaru but this post will focus on ES4)

But all was not well in Cyrodill. Over time Geoffrey and I noticed that ES4 was lacking in a few departments, most importantly a multi-player aspect which was non-existent. Often we yearned for cooperatively exploring the world or taking on monsters as a group effort. We were not asking for an MMO; Simple 2 player coop would have been enough for us, and though we were not to be satisfied in this regard it got us thinking:

If we could change this game, what would we do better?

We had many long discussions on the topic and slowly we began to expand outwards and think not solely about ES4, but about making a game of our own, and how we would do something that had not been done well before.

And then one day it hit us… Why aren’t there any good dragon games out there? We could make a dragon game… And not just any dragon game, not just riding a dragon, or simply going down a rail-style path and destroying x-many villagers, but a massive, free-to-go-anywhere world, where you are the dragon, and similar to Oblivion’s style, you would be able to choose what to do freely.

Once we had thought of it it seemed obvious. To the best of our knowledge no such game had been made at that point, not how we wanted it at least.

Over the course of a year we slowly figured out what we wanted to make:

The engine

1. We would write our own engine. Geoffrey had already done a good bit of work programming with C++ and OpenGL, and strongly believed that for what we wanted, writing the majority of the code ourselves would be best.
2. As such Geoffrey would write most of the code and I, having more experience with computer graphics would provide the art.
3. This engine would be cross platform. With Geoffrey being A windows/linux and me a mac, this was the only possible solution.
4. The engine would support large maps, huge in fact. the whole world would, similar to oblivion, be one large chunk, no loading screens, no small sections, all accessible in one piece.
5. Multiplayer could easily be done, but wouldn’t have to be in MMO style. small, locally hosted games would be enough.

The Game

1. You would be a dragon. Not riding a dragon, but actually being one.
2. This means you would be able to do anything a typical western dragon is known to do: Run, Fly, Perhaps breathe fire, and do so anywhere you chose to. First and foremost the game would be sandbox-style, with no limitations on what you do or when.
3. Though the player would be able to be ‘evil’ or ‘good’ if he chose to, it would be important for the dragon not to be portrayed as the typical fantasy game dragon, namely the big bad grotesque monster. Ofcourse dragons are mythical beings and therefore there is no wrong or right way of portraying a dragon, but I believe that a dragon would be powerful, yet graceful, strong, fast and brutal, yet beautiful and wise. A ballance of opposites, and it would be up to the player of how they chose to tip the scales when they played.
4. First and foremost what would matter is the experience of flight and really feeling as though you were the dragon. Once again, how it would feel to actually be a dragon is up for debate, but I feel that the thrill of flight, the speed, the power should be a state of adrenalin-filled bliss. I have a very clear picture in my mind of how this should feel.

Where we stand now

Since we decided that we would make this project, between school and starting college, and moving to different states, progress has been bumpy at best. We took a break from the project for a few months but have recently begun work on it again.

Geoffrey has finished the bare bones of the engine, and over the months I have  begun to make some tentative concept art.

Neither of us have ever attempted anything like this, and as such we do not know if we will accomplish all that we would like to.

In the coming months I will try to show our progress in this here blog, and talk more in depth about various aspects of this Project that I’ve only touched on here. Hopefully I can get Geoffrey to make some posts about the engine as well.

Please let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions or just comments in general =)

In the meantime, I think this post has gone long enough, and so I will leave you with a few pencil sketches I’ve made for the project.