Arkin Windows game

Arkin

Raven Sword Industries | Released 2019

Arkin is an indie space combat game featuring intense dogfights, epic battles, and an in-depth story-driven campaign.

Arkin is set in a future where humanity has been at war for decades, only to find that their true enemy, a threat to their very existence, has just appeared. As a veteran pilot in the TDF navy outfitted with the latest in starfighter technology, you are on the front lines of the battle for our survival.

Feature Rundown

Intense fast-paced combat, the core of Arkin
Utilize the advanced energy routing of your ship to switch strategies at a moments notice
Fully featured single player campaign with an in-depth story
Extensive ship customization

Combat

Combat is at the heart of the Arkin experience. It’s fast, dynamic, and most importantly revolves around your playstyle.

The most powerful ability you have is the Orion’s dynamic energy routing system. This allows you to change strategies on the fly by instantly sending your ship’s power reserves to whatever system you need most. You can use speed to outmaneuver your enemies, power up your shields to survive the most dangerous assaults, or overload your weapons to rain destruction on your foes.

Story

The year is 2563, and humanity is locked in a civil war. Desperately looking to break the stalemate the TDF has developed an advanced prototype ship with unique capabilities: the Orion. You, the Orion's pilot, are part of the first TDF battlegroup to encounter a new and hostile alien race; the Arckin. With both human factions weakened by decades of war a desperate struggle begins against the Arckin, who appear unstoppable and merciless in their destruction of every human ship and colony they encounter.

Customization

The Orion was designed around a new philosophy in starfighter engineering; the idea that he who most easily adapts is victorious, and adaptability is achieved through modularity.

Nearly every system on the Orion can be easily swapped out for a different or upgraded version with almost zero downtime. With Project Orion still in full swing those upgrades are becoming available at a steady pace.

HUD Update

For some time, we’ve been mulling over the issue of feedback and presenting important information to the player. Things like weapon overheat, cooldowns, and target information were not being effectively communicated leading to annoyance and frustration. While all this information was on-screen it was hard to find easily while in the middle of a dogfight. In some cases, this was so bad we had players suggesting we add information to the HUD that was already there!

With all these issues in mind we went about overhauling the layout of our HUD to move important information to within a quick glance of the target you’re chasing. Here is a comparison between the old HUD layout and the new:

No information was removed in the overhaul despite everything being much more compact, in fact we added new information that had been previously requested in feedback, like target health. Making the majority of the HUD elements smaller and moving everything to the center also has the added benefit of completely cleaning up the sides of the HUD leading to improved visibility.

Art

On the art side, there is plenty of stuff in progress as usual, but we do have one thing we’re very excited to show you all – the finished launch tube hangar! This is one of 6 hangars in the Fury where fighters are maintained, loaded, and stored. The launch tubes are directly connected to the hanger for fast loading and deployment. This is where the Orion remains between missions, and where you’ll see it when customizing your load out.

Playtest

A few weeks ago, we once again had the opportunity to host a playtest session at our former school, Algonquin College. The session consisted of about 20 students who were in their final year of the Game Development program – the same program we all graduated from two years ago.

The build that was play tested was the latest version of Arkin, including the updated HUD. The playtesters had access to the first part of the game in its entirety, including the prologue, tutorial, and the first two missions of the campaign. We were really looking forward to doing this playtest in person. While all feedback is invaluable there are some things that only come out when you observe people playing the game first hand. You’ll see things that a tester wouldn’t know were wrong, or that they might not write up in their feedback.

We were both excited and nervous heading into the session with all kinds of questions in our minds. What kind of feedback will we get? Will people like it? Is there going to be some disastrous bug we missed that will ruin everything? In the end the answers to those questions are: great feedback, they did like it, and yes there was a disastrous bug but it occurred late enough that it didn’t ruin everything.

So what did we learn from the playtest? Short answer – a lot. Our primary goal was to get as much gameplay feedback as possible – bugs and technical issues were secondary. Our testers all provided great responses with lots of detail and using that information we’ve compiled a list of priority items to tackle. We’re looking forward to seeing the impact these improvements will have when we release our next build to our Alpha testers.

Conclusion

That’s all for this update! One final note regarding our next Alpha build: we’re looking to release a new update soon that includes the new HUD, updated hangar, more voice acting, bug fixes, and playtest-based improvements, so if you’re a tester you can look forward to that! Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next time!

- The Arkin Team