![]() ![]() ![]() We always talked about this concept of surviving and thriving." "It's not like SimCity where the people are just numbers. Mumbach's follow-up was to discuss about the goal for the game design *after* players figure out the basic physics and survival problems to keep their city afloat. "You have to work to understand that you might need a couple more houses, or a minaret, but what you really need is a fan to lift up the city, and those buildings might block it." You might want to have your industrial district on the left and your citizens all on the right, but I don't know if that's necessarily going to stay literally balanced, or you have to work to keep it balanced," Wander said. "That's the stuff in the city-building part that's pretty unique for us. The player's city relies on massive propellors to stay afloat, so along with managing food, water, and comfort for the city's people, players need to make sure it can stay skyborne, and not literally tilt in any particular direction. ![]() Here, Wander explained that the vision for the game's society-building tended itself toward literal balance. Classic examples include how the underlying structures of SimCity reflect values about tax propositions, or how public transportation may be more limited in some games compared to the power of cars. Once consideration was put toward exploration and resource gathering, Wander explained that a lot of thought was put into what kind of city players were creating.Ī lot of great writers lately have pointed out that the city-building genre is one that reflects the political realities of the people who make them. The motivation for exploration becomes aligned with gathering resources to grow the city. We're sending workers to gather resources, it was just instinctive right? So we added a right click in the game-a classic "right click to move" like it was a top-down RPG or something, and that was really when we felt like we had something special."Īirborne Kingdom's metropolis isn't just a hub of resource management, it's a kind of playable character. Once the decision was made that their city would live in the sky of a fictional fantasy world, Wander said the first instinct was to make it move, to make it an entity that could explore and unknown space. These are games where, instead of fast-paced combat, player tension slowly grows as decisions about resource management play out over a long period. In Wander's words, the original design goals of Airborne Kingdom were centered on the relaxing nature of the genre. Here's why they hope theirs will be a relaxing, inclusive experience that will find an audience in this genre. Zach Mumbach and Ben Wander, two of the four ex-triple-A developers that make up The Wandering Band, dropped by for a discussion about the design of city-builders with Gamasutra. It's a visually resplendent city-builder that aims to add a dash of exploration to the classic balance of urban architecture and resource management. ![]() Exploring the randomly generated desert map from above will also mean meeting new people, setting up trade routes, bartering and researching, and picking up migrants to join your travelling town.Īirborne Kingdom is hoping to take off in 2020, but you can already take a skim across the surface of their official website and Steam page.Where should the genre go next? How about to the skies? That's where the developers at The Wandering Band are heading with their upcoming game Airborne Kingdom. As long as you manage to keep your city flying and gathering enough resources for the people and buildings within, you’ll unfold an 80 Days or Sunless Skies style of location-based, anecdotal worldbuilding. Wander also explained some of the inspirations behind the game's story. These are some of the best people that I know that make video games," he said. "If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be working with this group of people again, I would have probably signed that contract in blood with the devil, in order to make this happen. All four previously worked at Visceral, the Dead Space studio that shuttered in 2017. In an interview with Polygon, Wander talked about reconnecting with the other developers: Chee Fong, Fred Gareau, and Zach Mumbach. This time, though, he’s banded together with three friends to create, well, the Wandering Band studio. This is the latest work from Ben Wander, who previously made video-team-recommended A Case of Distrust. Watching the tiny towers and houses pop up in the announcement trailer (below), I can practically feel my free time slipping away in the way only games like this can achieve. Your growing town is, as the name would suggest, airborne, and you’ll have to keep it that way unless you want to crash unceremoniously into the desert. Upcoming city management sim Airborne Kingdom has a stat you’re not likely to find in many other games of the genre: lift. ![]()
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