Pitch
In Sky Piercer, you play as a brave pilot, Earth's final chance against an ancient weapon set on destroying the world.
Dodge its barrage of attacks and sneak into its tentacles by breaking its protective crystals with your powerful spin.
Navigate through thrilling, fast-paced challenges, dodging obstacles as you aim to take down this threat from within.
Goal of the game
Sky Piercer is a third-person arcade flight game where you pilot a nimble aircraft in a high-stakes battle against a colossal boss creature.
Navigate along the monster’s massive tentacles, using your plane’s spin maneuver to phase through enemies and strike at its weak points. Outsmart its defenses, break through its core, and take it down from the inside.
What we decided to do
Sky Piercer was my final year project at ArtFX, completed during my fifth year of study. We were a core team of three, supported by a transversal team that contributed to all student projects.
Our initial intention was to create an arcade plane game inspired by Crimson Skies. The game had to contain dogfights, and a battle against a giant boss alternating between indoor and outdoor phases. The project is built around three main pillars, the first being the arcade: the plane flying feeling had to be perfect. The second was spectacular: We wanted explosions, impressive attacks and the feeling of a battlefield. And the last one was staging, with the impressive shots of an action film and intense cinematics.
Our first idea as a team was to have a pilot protecting his island against other aircrafts and a giant industrial mothership. After a break, we came up with new ideas and decided to change the universe and remove dogfights to focus more on the feeling of the plane and the boss fight. The new cloud covered Earth and the Boss as a giant tentacular weapon of mass destruction allowed for a better use of an outdoor open area and specific indoors sections with very intense gameplay.
From the outset, we decided that the most important part of the game was the feel of the plane and the spin, and after much thought and testing we came up with a complex solution that gave us as much control as possible over the plane's movements.
The system is based on the lerp of positions, using a large number of curves for each position the plane can take on the screen.
This system allows us to independently and precisely modify the speed at which the plane reaches a given point on the screen, and the movements it makes to get there. We managed parameters and specific curves in data assets for the plane position, rotation and speed to make the movements smooth and pleasant. We adjusted the distance of the plane and the FOV to make different speed feelings depending on the player velocity.
The main mechanic of the game is the spin attack.It allows the player to rush on a target and destroy it. We increased the camera FOV, made specific curves and added VFX and sound to create a feeling of speed. We added retarget and lock system to improve the feeling of the spin and reach the target more easily.
We imagined different gameplay elements to add specific challenges through the levels
exploiting the spin mechanic as much as possible.
My role in this project
I was the Lead and Game Designer on the project. As we were a small team, I also took on project management responsibilities—planning and organizing tasks according to our upcoming milestones.
You can download the game on Itchio by clicking here.
