Windward - an open world adventure

[euanc]

In Windward, players will take on the role of an earnest inventor determined to explore the skies. In his world there is no ground to speak of - just infinite sky and floating rocks. Players will be able to traverse this fantasy world using the flying machine - a crazy airship designed to allow people to move between islands. Gameplay will mainly be based around story and exploration, with players being allowed to go anywhere in the world at any time and take content at their own pace. Dungeon crawling will also make an appearance, with challenging puzzles and huge fights.

Focus will be placed on player decision. Players will be free to fly wherever they want whenever they want, although they may not have the knowhow or items to complete certain tasks. For players who dislike a game having very little direction, the main story will allow players to see a large chunk of the games content. Of course, you can deviate from the main story at any time to explore.

Another big factor in development will be immersion. Rather than attempting to create a realistic world, Windward will create a world with a supernatural feel. All story and player information will be told through ingame texts. Any tutorial information will be spoken by NPC characters presented in a way that does not break the fourth wall. Of course, player understanding of texts will be key to the game experience. To encourage players to think for themselves and memorize things, the game will not include a “Quest log” feature. Instead, if players forget what their goal is, they must return to the NPC that gave the quest and ask for clarification. All this helps foster an adventurous feeling in the player.

The final main development philosophy is diversity. The game will feature a large selection of environments, each with its own culture, geography and overall “feel”. The aim of the world design is to make every island feel like a unique place.

So this is my pet project that I hope to accomplish some time during the next hundred years. So far I've spent my time writing pages upon pages of design documentation and creating mockups of graphical styles.
I think I've just about got the charming yet open feel down:



At the moment I'm trying to get myself into the swing of content creation for this graphical style. Hand drawing textures is hard, y'know?





Next on my list of things to do is UV/texture that house. After that I'll replace that BSP chunk with a rope bridge. After that I should have the style down so I can start working on some real content.

The game might go commercial if I ever manage to finish it but with the amount of content I have planned it probably wont happen in UDKs generation.
Of course, anybody that likes the idea is welcome to join me. Just don't expect anything to come of it for a while.

Opinions on the overall concept?
Suggestions or ideas?

[DuckSauce]

Oh man, this does excite me quite a bit more than most of the things I've seen on the UDK forums(except for perhaps Hawken), why? It reminds me of this awesome game I rented from the library twice, floating islands, flying around in air ships, immersion, exploration, it all sounds very alike and thus I'm digging this.

So tell me, is this inspired by Skies of Arcadia?

I've experienced I'm rather terrible when working on other people's projects the few times I tried, but I think this could work out because it resembles one of the games that are in my top list of excellent games

If you wish to talk about working together, perhaps send me a pm, or add me on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/DuckSauce01

Note: I'm a programmer, so if you got that covered, then you got that covered :P

[merc-ai]

Flying islands game is always great, we need more of these (whether it's with steam/dieselpunk or magic or both). Also you got that nice "calm feeling" with sky colors.
Definitely looking forward to seeing more of this.

[phobossion]

You could try CG Textures, you'll find tons of great stuff there for free..

Anyway, I like the concept of your game and wish you all the luck and skill you'll need to finish it Just one thing in the design snippet seems not right to me - the "No QuestLog" part. If I'd be an inventor exploring a huge world, I'd write everything down, which is what QuestLogs try to simulate. You should include a Journal GUI that would allow player to make notes for himself, so that your game does not need to be shipped with a notebook&pen combo

[euanc]

Ducksauce joins the fray as a programmer!
With some actual gameplay programming inbound, things look good.

Meanwhile, I did some work on the terrain of Proem island. This is the peaceful island that holds your hand whilst you learn the basic game mechanics.



Still haven't got around to doing the texturing I said I'd do though. Oh well, should be easier to judge things when I have the true 3rd person camera set up.

You could try CG Textures, you'll find tons of great stuff there for free..

Anyway, I like the concept of your game and wish you all the luck and skill you'll need to finish it Just one thing in the design snippet seems not right to me - the "No QuestLog" part. If I'd be an inventor exploring a huge world, I'd write everything down, which is what QuestLogs try to simulate. You should include a Journal GUI that would allow player to make notes for himself, so that your game does not need to be shipped with a notebook&pen combo

I'm trying to steer clear of stock textures, I want this to be as original as possible.

I think the ingame journal is a really good idea though, it could turn out to be a really immersive game mechanic.

[DuckSauce]

I'm trying to steer clear of stock textures, I want this to be as original as possible.

All the better imo, a good lucking game is nice, but there's also immersion, too much realism and you lose immersion.(recently read a nice article about that)

I'm hoping this gets a more unique style, not photorealistic, just unique and still look good in a way it will make you feel immersed into it.

I think the ingame journal is a really good idea though, it could turn out to be a really immersive game mechanic.

I agree, but especially the writing part there gave me a spark.
Because I'm also working on sleepy tomb samurai with the "drawing" mechanic, it made me think of letting the player actually write, so they hold the mouse and move it to draw letters, so they can make visual notes, or just text written, however they want it.

[euanc]

Did some texturing today. The grass isn't as bland now and the houses finally got UVed. Ducksauce also got the 3rd person camera working, now we just need a character model to go with it!
Also removed the skybox in favor of fog. Static skies just dont work for open games, I'm hoping to get some sort of dynamic particle sky going.

[Permanent]

I like the idea, and I totally agree with the journal thing, I think it could be very immersive; if you forced players to make their own in game notes. You just have to make sure they know that is expected of them otherwise they would spend forever looking for the journal.
Great to see a community coming together!
Wish you best of luck and godspeed!

[DuckSauce]

Did some texturing today. The grass isn't as bland now and the houses finally got UVed. Ducksauce also got the 3rd person camera working, now we just need a character model to go with it!
Also removed the skybox in favor of fog. Static skies just dont work for open games, I'm hoping to get some sort of dynamic particle sky going.

Good updates to the map, I'd like to mention I've also got a basic melee weapon set up with combo's!

It basically just plays an upper body taunt, 3 combo attacks, 3 taunts. Working pretty good, I hope we can start luring someone to get us some animations going for that though, it feels very weird to pelvic thrust enemies to death :P

[euanc]

So, after discussing gameplay, we came up with the following ideas:

From the start of the game, the player will have a looking glass. This will allow the player to, at any time, jump into a first person perspective and see the scene from another angle. Not only does this help with immersion but it also solves the timeless problem with 3rd person cameras - how do you look up without getting a screen full of the characters crotch?

Items in the game will be unique and split into 3 categories - melee, ranged and magic. with around 3 items in each category, that makes for about 9 items in total, all hot swappable during gameplay. This solves the problem of having multiple items that do pretty much the same thing and also helps players enjoy the "game" part of the game without having to look at an inventory screen every few seconds.

After discussing the flying machine overworld section of the game, we came up with 2 options.
I proposed that we keep the overworld 3rd person to make the transition between island and sky more seemless.
Ducksauce proposed we switch the camera to a top down view whilst in the flying machine sections to help us provide a wider variety of gameplay options.

We'd love to hear your opinions on any of these!

In addition, I drew up a mockup of the HUD.



The yellow circles in the bottom left will display your currently equipped item and the action button will display the contextual action that hitting whatever key will make. The counter in the bottom right displays your current "moolah" - we haven't thought of a name for the currency yet. The minimap in the top right is probably going to be removed because an exploration adventure game shouldnt need anything more detailed than an overworld map.
We also decided that the parts of the UI will only be shown when needed - moolah will only show near traders or when money is picked up, equipped items will only show when they are toggled etc. That way, the UI doesnt get in the way of the game.

In regards to what we've been up to, well...
Ducksauce refined the combat system a lot. The combo system is working fairly well although since our animation skills are nonexistant we're pelvic thrusting enemies to death.
I've been working on getting all the ideas into the design doc which should take some time.

[DuckSauce]

It's not much to look at because of a lock of proper animations but here's an early look at the sword combat(one sided bot pounding)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72UaEulS7UI

Sword attack animations would make this so much better

[euanc]

Here's a preliminary concept sketch for Interchange island, a large hub of explorers and travelers:



We're holding off content creation until we get some solid planning done. That said, we still need an animator!

[J.adkin]

This looks brilliant!
Are you looking for anyone to join you in making this?
Im a 3D modeller / games design with a little knowledge of animation and would love to work with you on this!
Cheers!

[euanc]

Time for a big update!

First of all, some new pieces of concept art:

Here's a rough sketch of our hero:



And here's a few weapon concepts. Note that the wooden sword will be obtained through the starting zone and the more ornate sword will be obtained through a dungeon.



Programming wise, we got a rough version of a conversation system down.



And, as for models, we got the centrepiece of Proem island - the windmill - fully modeled and textured.



And here's what it looks like in game:

[DuckSauce]

That duck is DA BOMB!

[death-coder]

lmfao @ the duck rofl XD ... it looks so godamn funny