What is Skyland Kingdoms?

Many of my favorite games are resource management games, Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, Anno series, Cities Skylines, Frostpunk, RimWorld, the list goes on and on. Naturally I would want to make a game I would want to play, and Skylands borrows elements from most of these games.

The core game loop is around building and growing your city and production chains. You place building blueprints, zone areas, build roads and infrastructure and manage your workers. The focus is on production chains, e.g. placing wheat farms, mills, and then bakeries to make bread.

Everything (or at least lots) of elements within the city will level up, buildings and their production chains being the most obvious, higher levels unlocking more byproducts, more recipes, more efficiency, more work shifts, more upgrades and modules. Level ups will cost resources and experience points (XP), taking a long time to level up. People will also level up, contributing slightly more productivity at their jobs, but costing slightly more/different resources to keep it up.

The player exists within the world (like everything does) as a powerful magic user, moving around the island helping out by casting spells, boosting production, researching new spells and magic usage and normal research. Again the player levels up, as do the spells they cast.

Magic is a science in Skylands, and creating a safe ‘power grid’ of magical energy will be needed for many advanced production chains and upgrades. Magic exists as ‘just another resource’ in the world, the player builds ‘mines’ and assigns workers to gather the raw magic, however magic is toxic and dangerous, so providing safety equipment, training and medical services would be necessary. Once gathered, raw magic can be processed into a ‘safer’ state and then sent though the magic ‘power grid’ for use.

The city is built on a magical floating island, and given time, research and resources the player is able to control. Moving the Skyland Island City slowly around the game world to gather unique materials, avoid storms/weather, moving higher/lower could also be possible, affecting temperature and other elements.

The game world will be made up of many other islands, some owned by players, others by NPCs, some empty or dangerous, all floating around in a great huge crater. In the center of the crater there is a huge magic world tree (which is a dangerous source of rare materials), and the edges of the crater also contain rare materials.

Main transport between islands is done on flying airships. Ideally the player can customize and design their ships, but technically this is quite difficult. Automated trade routes and logistic networks are possible, moving resources and people around. Combat between ships will also be possible.

Island vs Island combat is another big feature I want; big slow islands slowly circling each other, slinging huge siege level combat spells and counterspells. The different buildings and production chains all contributing to the battle. Military units and ships attacking and ‘boarding’ the enemy island.

Expeditions: yet another feature I want. As your ships discover islands, empty ones can be ‘surveyed’, some of which will have dangerous ruins and dungeons. On these islands, an expedition can be launched: pick your team, assign resources and weapons, and guide them through the expedition.

Finally, the entire game is built around multiplayer. I have spent too much time already getting multiplayer development to be as easy as possible, building complex systems and tools to do parts of the work for me. And it works. I have very large goals with multiplayer, first any player will be able to host a game, a dedicated server executable will be provided and I will do what I can to make connecting as easy as possible (steam networking API?). The dedicated server is not the only multiplayer mode I wish to build, a long term ‘slow paced’ persistent universe with thousands of players is also in the plan. This ‘Persistent Universe’ server executable will unfortunately not be released publicly, but any player can join and play. The ‘Persistent Universe’ server is a massive undertaking, needing to build loads of complex tech to scale, and paying for servers would be expensive. Initially I’ll host the server at a small scale on my own machines, but I hope to provide a large ‘real’ persistent universe eventually.

Hopefully this paints a picture of what I want to build, it is very large scale, in my mind effectively endless, which is great for me, but less so if you ever want to play. One of my future posts (see The Plan) will detail how I want to release this. Spoiler, I want to release small and often, constantly improving and gathering feedback but not on any major stores.

Thanks again for reading, please bookmark, and if you wish to discuss or be notified of updates, join my discord server.