Kinship was small enough to work out of a rented bedroom from a house just turned into a co-working space in São Paulo. We had a very clear goal right from the very start, we would develop a multiplayer game, a competitive team based multiplayer game. We just had to find common ground on what kind of experience.
It had to be different from what was already available, there’s no point or joy in developing a game that already exists. All of our initial efforts were spent trying to figure out what we were gonna do. That meant a lot of studying, a lot of meetings, and a really large amount of arguing as everyone was dropping ideas and laying out their vision and opinions. As is with almost everything in game development, it was an evolutionary, iterative process. After a lot of back and forth, we ended with two directions to follow. We wanted to do a third person action game, as well as a strategic tower defense game.
We really liked the idea of mixing both, ever since playing Hero Line Wars back in the day. HLW was a really popular mod that spawned a lot of different other mods in the same vein, if you were into Warcraft 3, chances are you played one or two of them. They offered separated battlefields for the teams, with no close combat whatsoever. It was a survival mode, with teams spawning large number of creeps to attack the enemy base, while also having to defend their own. There’s still no consensus over what this ‘genre’ is called, some call it hero defense, income war, reverse td… Anyhow, no matter what you call it, what matter is that this ‘Indirect PVP’ concept was competitive, strategic, addictive, had great progression and above all: really, really fun!
And with so, so much potential to be expanded upon! We didn’t want to develop an spiritual successor to a mod, we should do our own thing. We wanted to develop Skydome.
For obvious reasons we decided to call it an action-tower defense. We made our own approach to the Indirect PVP concept, more fluid, fast paced and dynamic, with matches lasting about 15 minutes. The strategy is there, players can pick the troop they want to spawn, choose by where it’ll attack and change it anytime they want. Troops march forward to the destroy the enemy Artifact, gaining more and more terrain. It’s the players job to stop them and protect their artifact, while also disrupting the enemy defenses by raining down interventions.
Uff! Thanks for reading this far, hope you found this story interesting. We will share even more about everything with you in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! Also, let us know in the comment section (or anywhere, really) your thoughts on the video, this post (as well as if you also played Hero Line Wars-like game)!
That’s all for today folks!
