Hi All, Just in case you haven't noticed our game I want to point it out here as well. This game is currently being developed by myself, and 15 other volunteers, under the company EVV Games. I started this project alone around July '12, and managed to gain support over the following months, and we easily have over 2k hours of time in so far. With such a team, we should be able to launch this by our Aug '13 target fairly easily.
A lot of games hope to be the next biggest title, so I won't bore you with this old song and dance, I will simply list a few of the standard and optional gameplay features and let you decide. It will be based on a city building sim, have a deep and rich storyline like the days of yore, have standard PvE battle encounters (which will have auto units and auto kill for the less experienced mobile gamers), and progress through levels using experience and gold. You will be able to enhance the buildings through building modifications and decoration based enhancements. There will be a unique leveling system, designed to prevent game breakage, which will progress the player through 10-20 levels, and then enter a new "age" which will start the levels over for the next age. Throughout the leveling,players will unlock new buildings, be able to combine the resources using streamlined mechanics, and unlock new buildings and building enhancing decorations. There will also be special "automaton" units that will be able to be created, and man the buildings, in order to add their bonuses to the particular buildings they oversee. These automatons will also have their own customization screen, and be able to be set on display for the player network. Other social features will currently include being able to build a network of fellow city-builders, who will be able to come to your city and collect money for you and restart your shop's recipes, which can be done a number of times based on the total number of people in your network. It will have a customizable UI for the main screen, user-definable play list for the music, the previously mentioned top-level "out-of-game" network, and allow the player to get full screen, high resolution pictures of each specific building.
The optional features will include a technology tree based on a level triggered points earning system, which can then be spent on the technologies, somewhat like a skill tree. Strategic combat with a multitude of units, using an 8-way square "star" grid, which will combine the flexibility of the hex directional capabilities, and the square's multi-sized unit practices. A crafting system using basic and enhancement elements gathered from battles and exploration. Customization of the PC and NPC with standard attribute based stats in order to create specialty population units. Random overhead and underground special encounters with special enemies and loot (a-la dungeon crawlers) along side standard random encounters. PvP and co-op, turn based battle options.
These are what we currently have, but will add and/or modify as development progresses. Unfortunately the programmers insist that I will have to have a "feature freeze" at some point, but that hasn't happened yet.
The game will be a F2P with a premium currency based system, which will also have premium buildings to go along with it. The premium system will allow players to save time only, and also be a unique implementation of a currently abused mechanic. You will be able to "downgrade" premium buildings in order to receive somewhere over 50% of your premium currency back into your stash, and there will be plenty of promotional opportunities to earn free premium currency. This will be a generous system to basically "allow" players to spend money on the game if they wish, and help us sustain development and support for continued updates and expansions. It will also be successful, because no matter how much premium currency you give away, as long as there are more things to purchase with it, people will always want more. Plus we will have additional external things to purchase in a more real way, such as a limited Collector's Edition with all the appropriate swag, more game slots to supplement the beginning 3, physical coins from the game's model, figurines, etc.
To the best of my knowledge and research, nothing quite like this set of features has exactly been tried yet, not to mention being on mobile, so I hope it to be at the very least a unique gameplay experience. At best, I do hope it is very successful, so that it raises the bar for the current mobile development community in order to prove that not only can this be done, but is what should be done.
If you would like to keep track of our progress that we will be showing in the upcoming months, please help us by voting our game up, and watch us for updates. We are only posting here temporarily and will have a website up soon at www.airshipdowns.com. We will continue to participate with this community until people migrate to our forums and wiki that we will provide on our site. From then we will have most of our updates there, but we will continue to update here on a less frequent basis.
If you have read through to this point, we greatly appreciate your time, and whether you decide to help us out or not....have fun gaming!!
