Dev Blog #2

[p]Hello Captains and Crew, [/p][p]Welcome to the second installment of our hopefully monthly dev logs! This week we’re focusing on another big change in Stars of Icarus from the past Guns of Icarus games, the move from airship flight to spaceship flight.[/p][p][/p][p]The jump to space brought with it a pretty big question: how do the ships fly now? As a life long sci-fi and space lover, moving to full 6 degrees of freedom motion was always the goal if we could pull it off. But pulling it off certainly wasn’t a given!
[/p][h3]6 Degrees of Freedom[/h3][p]When we say 6 degrees of freedom, we’re talking about what axes you can control your ship in. There’s 3 spatial axes, and 3 rotational axes. Guns of Icarus was a 3 degree of freedom game. You could yaw the ship left and right, set the engines forward and back, and float up and down with the balloon. Stars of Icarus moves to 3 spatial axes with the addition of lateral thrusters, and 3 rotational axes with the ability to freely pitch and roll your ship.[/p][p][/p][p]Now there’s a pretty long history of space flight games with freedom to pitch and roll, but the vast majority of those have been heavily focused on “planes in space” type flight. Great inspiration for fighter combat for sure, but crewed ships? A lot less history to lean on. Not even that many larger ships with even the ability to roll and pitch freely. (For a personal favorite, see 2002’s Star Trek: Bridge Commander.) So we were treading, as we love to do, on some new ground. And the fastest way to know for sure was to start building it and find out. You can theory craft design all day, but there’s no replacement to having a prototype in your hands, so I got to work.[/p][p]An early 2023 prototype screenshot with crewed ship to ship combat[/p][p][/p][h3]Under Control[/h3][p]We learned a ton in the early stages of prototyping, which informed a lot of our design decisions throughout development. A few of the more important lessons included:  controls, managing the relationship between FPS Crewing to 3D Flight, and orientable level design. We also weighed our lessons against several of our design goals, including maintaining many of the slower, more naval combat elements of the Guns of Icarus series, and making sure the smaller crews of these 2 and 3 player ships got to make interesting decisions without being totally overwhelmed.
[/p][p]For controls, we knew we’d need a good mouse steering system to offer fighters the precision needed to both fly at speed and aim their front weapons at various enemy ships and components. But even moving some of those steering axes off the keyboard, still leaves a lot of bindings. Throttle for forward/back, lateral thrusters for up/down and left/right strafing, controls for rolling, and a few more miscellaneous keys for other game systems, didn’t leave a lot of axes or buttons left anywhere. And I’ve created a new problem… you can’t look around![/p][p][/p][p]What actually helped the most was leaning into the game design goals. The push for broadside combat meant we knew where we wanted pilots to be looking. So we kept building, and designed a freelook system that kept you looking where you set it, letting you line up a broadside with your camera and rotate and steer your ship relative to your camera direction. (We also built up a control scheme a little closer to Guns of Icarus for players mostly interested in flying those larger ships, freeing up the mouse for freelook in that control scheme as well.) But we weren’t out of the woods yet.
[/p][p]Looking out the broadside at an enemy[/p][p][/p][p]One of the things we learned after a bit, was that the relationship between your FPS-style controls walking around the ship and using the helm, had some limitations on ship design we had to really consider. Early attempts to put guns that fired directly upwards and downwards were cool and thematic, but were nearly impossible for the pilot to keep on target. You couldn’t easily track a target as it went under your feet or over your head. It was also pretty difficult for your crew to be looking in 6 directions for enemies while running around the ship fixing things. So we ended up keeping most of the guns on ships pretty even with the artificial gravity plane of the ship as well.[/p][p][/p][p]Staring at the floor… turns out it’s not a fun way to fly a ship[/p][p][/p][p]But those limits also clearly answered our questions about how these larger ships can interact with a 3D space and mobile enemy ships. They succeed by positioning themselves to engage swaths of the map with their broadside, aiming both the ships and the guns to keep targets in sight, and then moving the ship through the map to tactically change those engagements, coordinate with teammates, and try to keep control of the fight. All things we wanted to recapture from Guns of Icarus! And it also gave some really interesting shape to fighter v crewed ship combat. Fighters have some safer sides to approach from on the top and bottom, but if they make themselves too much of a problem, or fly poorly, a broadside will be quick to line up and take them out. And after adding a few other gameplay systems, we really brought out the hit and run fantasy of flying a fighter against these crewed ships. And on the crewed ship side, we managed to maintain the fun of flying a large ship with its tactical positioning and weighty firepower. All while the crew still kept the experience of manning the turrets and managing repairs.[/p][p][/p][h3]Designing Maps in Space[/h3][p]We learned a ton of new quirks of 3D level design as well for this game. There’s a lot of options when you make the leap into the void. Similar to ship layouts, we first tried playing around with everything fun it had to offer. From big spheres, toruses, and tubes, to dense asteroid fields, space stations, and caves. What we’ve found were the most successful designs though, were maps that had a really identifiable up and down direction. Without that visual reference locally, it’s a lot harder to know where you even can look, and which directions are useful to fly towards. On a large scale, it’s easy to get lost when so many directions and orientations look the same. So while we can bend and twist the levels, to give them some uniquely 3D combat environments, human beings still need to know roughly where the floor is. And while we were a little worried that limitation would make flying less interesting, there’s still plenty of obstacles and routes to navigate in 3D that matter a lot. Having a good grasp at flying through these levels without keeping your belly to the ground will let you pick options you couldn’t fly any other way. But your eye does need something to settle on, and clue you into what’s happening. We achieve that a little differently on some levels, but we try to always make it obvious which way around you’ve ended up.[/p][p][/p][p]Surprisingly, knowing where the floor is is more important when you’re upside down[/p][p][/p][h3]Zero-G Combat[/h3][p]Another thing that changed with the move to space was, well, a lack of gravity. And that had some impacts on the gunplay that we knew were going to need some attention. No gravity meant no bullet drop, which was a fun aspect to manage in Guns of Icarus. Thankfully another natural fit in a space setting ship combat game is projectile inheritance. While Guns of Icarus also featured projectile inheritance, the faster speeds of some ships, additional vertical movement, and additional rotation means that it plays a much larger role in gun combat in Stars of Icarus. Fighters, being the fastest, and being in direct control of the ship and gun at the same time have to be careful managing their momentum, much like an airship has to manage its height. Meanwhile the crew and pilot have to communicate and work together to prioritize targets, manage linear speeds and angular velocities, and manage ranges in order to get gunners in arc and firing without their shots flying wildly. It’s certainly not a one to one replacement for bullet drop, but we feel it adds a similar layer of skill to our array of weapons.
[/p][p]To hit a target all you need is bullet velocity, your own ship’s velocity, your rotational velocity, your enemy ship’s velocity, distance to the target, and some linear algebra. What could go wrong?
[/p][h3]Fighters vs Crews[/h3][p]Now I’ve mostly talked about our larger ships, but I did want to touch on fighters again really quickly. Fighters avoided a lot of the harder problems we ran into for larger ships. You’re pretty much always facing ahead, you move and reorient yourself more quickly. Plus we had a lot more reference points from both older and modern games to draw on to make flying a space fighter fun and intuitive. We didn’t end up with a fully Newtonian freely drifting gun on a gimble, nor did we end up with a WWII fighter in space, but somewhere in between with its own set of quirks and nuances you’ll need to pick up on. But once you’ve mastered it, you’ll be speeding through enemy lines, and drifting your way past an enemy frigate with your guns raining lead and plasma. Getting a grasp on managing your momentum and using your thrusters without overheating them will make you a difficult target to pin down, despite the fragile frame between you and the vacuum of space.[/p][p] So I hope that gives you some insight into the changes and attention we’re putting into adapting the Guns of Icarus series to full 6 degree of freedom space combat. It certainly wasn’t a fast process, and we’re still constantly learning how to make navigating these spaces and combat situations even more interesting, fun, and tactical. But it’s incredibly exciting to be able to make something really original, that still captures the magic of ship combat that makes the series unique.

Anyways I’m off. Need to go finish up some work on a sign up sheet for our first… well… you’ll see soon enough.

Stay tuned, and see you in the stars,[/p][p]- Matthew[/p]