As promised, here I am talking about our new game project! Sun Shy isn’t far enough along yet for a proper trailer or much fanfare, but it has lots of cool tech in it that I want to talk about, so I need to at least mention the game first. This post is meant less as a marketing pitch and more as the beginnings of a development blog. Hopefully it will give a bit of an idea of what we want the game to be.
Sun Shy is, or will be, the following things:
- A 2.5D platformer
- About exploring, finding resources and other treasures, and building a home/workshop/base
- Focused on simulation and systems
- About crafting and automation
We want Sun Shy to make the player feel like an engineer when they’re building their home, and an adventurer when they’re away from home.
Right now, Sun Shy looks like this:
Most of our development work so far has been building the engine, so it’s pretty bare bones at this point, but I think the bones have promise. The engine is almost at the stage now where we can switch to adding content and gameplay, and things will start looking a lot more fleshed out.
Half a third dimension
Sun Shy controls and mostly looks like a 2D platformer, but there’s a good reason we describe it as 2.5D. The game world consists of two ‘layers’, back to back, that the player can swap between and explore. We’ve put together a quick video that should explain this a bit better:
We didn’t want to go all the way to a 3D game, but working in strictly two dimensions can be restrictive in terms of the player’s machine design, building layout, and so on. Hopefully this system will be a happy medium between the two, and we think it looks and feels pretty cool, too.
Feeling like an engineer
This is what the simulation focus is all about. We want the home/workshop to feel active and functional, like a machine.
To this end, we have a already implemented the core functionality of a gearing system. Crafting will be done at stations, and later in the game this process can be automated. Sophisticated crafting stations will require power, and power will be transmitted mechanically, with gears and pulleys. This video shows a gear assembly in action:
Here we have set up a hand crank and geared it way down – you might have a set up like this if you need to do something that requires a lot of torque, but your only source of power is yourself. Of course, if you have something slow but powerful (like say a wind turbine) and you need to power something quick (like a lathe), you’d want the gear ratios the other way around.
We have a bunch of systems like this implemented or planned, all with the goal of making your home, workshop, and garden more interesting. Needless to say, we’ll be talking a lot about more about this.
Feeling like an adventurer
We hope to make exploration challenging as well as rewarding, with the player needing to prepare for travel, set up camps or outposts in distant lands, and think carefully about navigating different regions. We want travelling to feel like an adventure. Different regions will provide differing levels of difficulty, and a core element of player progression will be their ability to physically move through the world. Getting this part of the game right is going to be less about fancy engine technology and more about getting the design right. We will soon share some thoughts on how we hope to do that.
Sun Shy’s status
Sun Shy is an ambitious game, and we have plenty of work still to go. Rather than attempt to enumerate every part of the game here in the introductory post, we’ll be fleshing out some of our features, design choices, and programming misadventures in future posts. We hope that over time, we can communicate some of our passion for this project, and that you will all become as excited to play Sun Shy as we are!
