Community Update 2

Greetings, Skyward Adventurers!

The Kaliko Crew has been hard at work these last few months – hence the radio silence on our part. We’ve gathered a remarkable crew of developers, modelers, artists, designers and more, and their talent outshines even the arcus itself. If you’re interested in hopping aboard – more on that momentarily!

During this time, we’ve had our heads down crafting the realm of Lyra, creating skylands and airships in our quest to create an awe inspiring landscape for your adventures. In addition to building the world itself, our team has been creating the technology and infrastructure to support the realm. Our ambitions are high, but we’re confident that if anyone can do it, this crew can!

We initially set out with the intention of making an arena-style PvP mode, serving as a crucible for fresh Skylanders joining the world of Starfall. Yet, the heart of Starfall is adventuring with your friends. It’s in this spirit that we’ve decided to alter our course and hold back on arena development for now. Fear not, PvP is still going to be a core tenant of your experience. From engaging in airship battles, crossing swords with pirates, or embarking on perilous missions – PvP will be very much alive and well, but amidst the stars and skylands, not confined within an arena.

Though we’re holding off on its development, the work we did to date on building the arena was integral to early testing of ground combat – an area we’re spending significant time and attention on.

Moving forward, we’re going to be sharing larger development updates on a monthly. Up until this point, a lot of our development has been in our physics engine, code bases, switching from vanilla to modded, etc. and now we finally have the ability to begin showcasing some of that work. So in the spirit of airship physics, here’s what we’ve been working on:

Physics Engine

Building a game’s physics engine is a complex task requiring multiple steps, including: defining the specific physics rules of the world; designing the data structures to store information about all interactive objects; implementing collision detection; perfecting collisions, gravity, and block interactions; and thoroughly testing and debugging the engine to ensure it functions correctly under various conditions. Also, you have to have the discipline not to spend all your time crashing airships… which is super fun. Anyway, as you can see, this process requires a profound understanding of physics, mathematics, and computer science. This is why Starfall has been assembling a crew of amazing people who are experts in these fields. (They’re basically the Avengers of Airships). In fact, this amazing team is so badass they’ve already started building out a custom physics engine for Starfall that’s gonna be like nothing anyone’s ever done before. And this is where YOU come in! As we continue to refine and expand this engine, we will be reaching out for community feedback, after all, your ongoing support is the engine that keeps US going! We look forward to sharing regular updates and taking you along on this on this journey with us. Here’s a little glimpse of a progression we’re working on, where we hop onto an airship platform and fly around.

Mechanics, Story, and Style

But it isn’t just airships and physics that have been keeping the Starfall crew busy. We’ve also been working on gameplay mechanics, story, and overall visual style in the last few months. This has all helped us define the project’s scope to prevent scope creep (IYKYK) and aid in estimating necessary resources such as team size, skills, budget, and timeline. It hasn’t been easy, but by taking the time to do the work, we’ve been able to lay the foundation for a Starfall game that is worthy of the ever-growing community that we’re so lucky to have!

Which brings us to the game loop. The game loop is essential as it ensures continuous operation, facilitates real-time interaction, manages the game state, and provides a smooth, interactive gaming experience. It functions as the core control flow, consistently checking user inputs, updating the game state, and rendering the game to the screen. Creating a dynamic, interactive gaming experience is only possible with a game loop.

In our opinion, the Starfall game-loop is tied with Fruit Loops for the best kind of loop.

Additionally, we continue to conceptualize, plan out, and confirm core components within the game. We’re incredibly excited to share a glimpse into some of our processes, so here’s an example of our team taking concept sketches and turning them into objects for the Starfall game.

Roadmap and Plans

So as you can see, we have a long journey in front of us, but one with a lot of cool stuff along the way. We have recently completed the game loop, an essential part of a game design, and we’re super excited about it! Players will set off on their airships, explore the frontier with friends, and collect loot. Then they will embark on their journey back to port, avoiding pirates at all costs, until finally, they can upgrade their ship and their character at the harbor. While it’s a simple loop, it gives us the foundation to add more features and content to grow over time. From here, we will work on taking this initial concept to the first alpha release (MVP). Check out the roadmap below to see where we’ve been (Phase 1 and 2) and where we’re going!

Phase 1: Conceptualization and Planning

• Brainstorming and Idea generation
• High-level game concept creation
• Game Design Document creation
• Project Planning and timeline definition
• Requirements Gathering and Analysis
• Tools and Technology Selection

Phase 2: Pre-Production

• Detailed game design and mechanics definition
• Artwork and design concept creation
• Prototype creation and validation
• Team building: assembling the right team for the project

Phase 3: Production (MVP) (Current State)

• Core game engine development
• Level and game world design
• Asset creation (Characters, environments, etc.)
• Scripting and game logic implementation
• Sound design and music composition
• User Interface and User Experience Design

Phase 4: Internal Testing

• Fixing bugs and refining gameplay based on feedback

Phase 5: Launch and Post-Launch Support

• Launch Day! The game is released to a closed public release
• Gathering and analyzing user feedback
• Regular updates and patches for bugs and improvements,

Please note that game development is an iterative process. We will revisit earlier phases based on feedback and testing or to make improvements.

Final Words

Like we said earlier, YOU, our community, are the engine that keeps Starfall going. So every Friday we’ll be sharing our work on our socials – because we want to hear from you. Make sure to give us a follow and let us know what you think! In addition, in the months to come we will be hosting Q and A’s with Crew members, doing community challenges, and adding more Starfall emoji’s here on Discord! And finally, we’ve got more announcements coming this year, and trust us, some of them are gonna be BIG.

If you made it this far then THANK YOU! We’re so appreciative of how supportive this community has already been. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome you aboard our airship and embark into the Arcus!

See you in the skies,
The Kaliko Crew