Hello and welcome to this weeks blog post! PAX East has just wrapped up and we’re super happy with how it went. A huge thanks to the teams at Reverb and Leviathan Core for representing Sky Noon so well. Welcome to all the new people who have join our community from Pax and social media.
With all the new people seeing Sky Noon for the first time, we thought it would be cool to share where it all began. This blog post will showcase some early iterations and concepts of the game that eventually became Sky Noon.
Sky Force
Sky Noon started out as a prototype called Sky Force. The following footage is the result of a two week prototype, so of course some things will be incredibly rough.
Grappling with Movement
In Sky Force players would not always have grapple. The Left hand would hold the players current movement ability which in the prototype were a grapple hook and a jetpack. Players could pick up a crate to change their movement ability, but through our testing we found that the grapple was superior in most situations. In addition the grappling pull contrasted with the opposing push in a fantastic balance, so we decided to make it a constant while the jetpack was put into the general ability pool.
By streamlining the player movement we could make sure that all players would be able to confidently traverse the map. The flow on effect of this was that the grapple hook became a foundation mechanic for which we could design and balance other mechanics around. All abilities would now come from the same source, ability crates, being streamlined to each have some offensive and defensive function. The bonus was that you could grapple and jetpack at the same time!
The lasso was another exception that began as an ability called the pull hook. As a throwaway ability this wasn’t very useful as you immediately lost it by pulling a crate to you, so a little later in development it was reintroduced as a permanent ability, this time in the form of a lasso which fit excellently into our western theme. It became a staple in the gameplay, being used to pull enemies close for a follow up shot or dragging campers out of their corners.
Removing Health and Stuns
The Sky Force demo originally had health. Players would start with 100 health, and gain health when a weapon crate was picked up. The weapons and abilities would deal numerical damage to players as well as knock them back, and when the health reached zero the players would be stunned for 3 seconds. During this stun, players would regenerate their health to 20. We thought this would create good opportunities to finish players off and get eliminations, but in reality caused a lot of frustration for the victims.
Thus, health mechanics we’re quickly abolished heading into Sky Noon, and by extension, stuns. We quickly discovered taking control away from a player in a game this fast paced was a bad idea, and the health mechanics simply did not fit the skill-based mold we were starting to create. By removing Health from Sky Noon, we discovered it left room for a lot of heart stopping saves and invigorating eliminations for players to enjoy.
Birth of a Western World
Sky Force was originally planned to be a modern post-apocalyptic themed game with cobbled together weapons mixed with a little super-natural magic. For a few reasons, including the name Sky Force being used by another game, we reconsidered our choice of name and theme.
We decided to take a more unchartered direction with our theme, and an enjoyment of old Western movies took us in the direction of a unique twist on the Wild West genre you see today. The new theme was readily embraced by the team and has been helping to guide us into interesting creative avenues, like incorporating the alternate steampunk theme. When introducing the western theme to the island like levels we created a Shanty Town aesthetic that gives the levels a sense of history and utility.
We Hope you enjoyed taking a peek into Sky Noons history a little bit, and thanks for joining in for the ride, it’s been a blast.