During development in the first few months, player movement was often quite an undecided aspect of a game that heavily relies upon it. We ended up slowly moving away from features like Gyro Aim (Which made a lot of people spin out in previous playtests) and a movement style that was frankly as intuitive as Marmite - some people got it but many didn’t. We knew these systems were holding us back, not necessarily because that style doesn’t work, but because we were trying to cram standard flight game conventions into a game that didn’t need them.

So that led to stripping back some elements and moving in a direction that gave player’s more control. Our movement essentially turned into a version Minecraft’s creative mode, allowing the player to still move in any direction, but without Roll and the capability to go upside down. In a way it was a little sad to depart from the 6DOF movement, but we noticed immediately players were able to pick it up easier.

Now that we were hard set on this style of movement, the visuals needed to match it. Zach and I had a proper sit down for a solid 2 weeks, really asking the important questions on the kind of world we wanted to create. We were always so frenzied trying to get an updated build ready for the next convention, we actually never had the opportunity to sit down and plan things out properly. This was super liberating - There’s something so relieving about giving yourself a set of rules that can’t be broken.

The game was still about flight, but jets didn’t fit the vibe anymore. In fact, jets just stuck as long as they did because of the same reason we never got to properly plan things; Time. Instead, we opted to experiment with several different designs. We knew we needed modularity and a very clear silhouette.

Some very primitive 3d sketches, trying to break up the different parts (Still trying to save the set style)

Trying to break away from the Jet stuff, more into some strange VTOL machine

Works more as drone design, but still far too Sci-fi and not cool enough

Then I took a step back. I was locking myself out of true modularity by including a central Hull that everything stemmed from for each design. That was the wrong way to go about it. What I should’ve done was create a standard frame that all components attach to, so I did! We were fairly set on the requirements;