This is a world not to unlike our own…except for the fact that humanity are flightless bird people that have made aircraft to fly instead. There’s also the fact that instead of continents, majority of the world are islands within the sky. In this world, you play as a Sparrow. In this line of work, you effectively do what’s asked of you. Fast personal shipping between islands, sure! Body guarding larger ships to their destination, it’s all in a days work. Prototyping parts on your aircraft that’s on loan from the organization that gave you the parts themselves…well let’s hope you stay in the sky in one piece then.

The game play will be purely within the plane itself. The plane will have full 3D movement, and most likely combat features. For this class, I want to get one of the possibilities I listed above, implement it, and hone it.

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I want a specific experience out of this game. I especially want to capture the freedom of flight. To do this, I am going to heavily focus on the polish of movement the most, making sure it feels and looks good to fly around in this blue sky. You need things to do though. An open world by itself doesn’t make you feel free. If I was continuing this concept past this, I would also need to make sure quests weren’t tedious. I was considering a Monster Hunter style system, but at the moment it isn’t a worry since it won’t be in the vertical slice for this class.

For the audience I want to appeal to it’s a bit difficult to say. I could say people that don’t have a lot of time on their hands, using a more mission style/Monster Hunter type game play so they could easily drop in and out.

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I took a lot of inspiration from a PS 2 game called Skygunner. There were just so many things that drew me from this game, especially its world. The uniqueness of each airship, plus the general art style of the game instantly got me hooked. The game play loop is alright (and the frame-rate terrible), and thus I’m not taking as much from it.

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Typically when I think of humanoid birds in game, I think of the Rito from Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. With this game, I liked the idea of bird people who couldn’t fly and thus had to make their own devices in order to fly. It’s just a bit of extra fluff on the world, but I feel like it adds a bit more to it. I’m planning on designing the airships like the one’s pictured above, so having a general character design is semi-important to this as well. I was considering either making the models a style similar to Wind Waker or to something like the second picture, which is a game called Gurumin.

Here is my concept drawing for potentially the design of the player’s ship. As you saw, I did take some inspiration from the ships shown above. For now, it’s still rough and a concept so it’s bound to change in the future.