This game has been in development, since about August 2012, by myself and 6 other volunteers, under the company EVV Games (officially Ex Vortex Vita). I started this project alone in July ’12, and managed to gain support over the following months, and we easily have hundreds of hours each in this project so far. With such a team, we should be able to launch this by our Aug ’13 target fairly easily, with at least the planned 5 ages (50-100 levels) of gameplay.
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 simulator and have a deep and rich storyline like the days of yore. It will also 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 modify the cities xp earnings and leveling requirements for the following group of levels. 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. If you’ve ever wanted to see your city from a close-up view, this game will have that, too! You will be able to select the buildings you’ve created to get a full-screen, close up view of each building.
The RPG element will be found in the technology pyramid, which is based on a level triggered points earning system, which can then be spent on the technologies, somewhat like a skill tree. This will allow you to enhance your city’s xp and gold earnings, as well as streamline resource and shop goods production. This system will truly allow you to make your city unique.
The optional strategic combat will boast a multitude of units, and use a flexible (multiple squares possible) 8-way square grid. Aside from allowing your city to now defend itself and get more goodies from the baddies, this will also take your city mobile, allowing you to explore and conquer other regions….and even go dungeon crawling! This will also introduce optional co-op and PvP play to those who wish to compete on the leaderboards as the baddest city around.
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 and units 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 get back 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. There will also be an building that serves as a bank, which will allow the upgrade and downgrade of standard currency and premium currency.
To the best of my knowledge and research, nothing quite like this set of features has exactly been tried yet, 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. We will need the community’s support in order to do this, however, because the other mobile devs don’t think you want a more engaging or deeper game than games about farm villages or upset avians, so come help us by showing your support!!
Airship Downs was developed by EVV Games, Released in 2013-08
Airship Downs was Released on Web,Mobile,iOS,iPad,Android,AndroidTab
Airship Downs is a Single & Multiplayer game
Airship Downs