Game Mechanics

In the two months since the release of the public preview, a lot of progress has been made. The graphical glitches from the preview have been fixed by using double-buffering for the line control tables.

On the gameplay side, all main features have been implemented:

• Fuel & Oxygen system (fuel depletes over distance, oxygen over time).
• Special tiles (refuel, slow up/down, ice, burn) from Skyroads have been implemented as well as a few unique ones.
• Scoring system has been added. Your best progress (as a percentage) or fastest completion time is recorded.
• If you beat a level fast enough you can get a Silver time, and if you manage to beat or tie my own best time a Gold time can be earned!
• The MPEG Encoding process for the CD-i has been improved. The quality of the existing video has been improved, and 11 more background video’s have been added, for a total of 12 worlds.
• Added “Coyote Time” to make timing your jumps easier, as well as making other improvements to the controls.

Level Editor

Up until now I have used the existing Skyroads levels for development/testing purposes. I always planned to create my own levels. In order to make the level editing process a bit easier I created a level editor (SkyMaker) for SkyWays. So far 10 levels, out of a planned 48 have been completed.

SkyMaker can be accessed online, feel free to test it out for yourself.

Menu

If there are a lot of levels, one would need a way to select these levels. My final bit of progress is the creation of the main menu/level selection screen. Levels are split over 12 worlds, each with their own background video and music. A mockup of this can be seen in the image below. The video attached to this post shows the menu in action.

Roadmap

Things that are still on my todo list for SkyWays:

• Creating a lot of levels
• Polish up ship graphics, perhaps even adding a “shadow” to help see where the ship is
• Sound effects
• Adding Settings to the menu
• Beating every level as fast as I possibly can, to set the Gold time.