David Stark / Zarkonnen

I've been thinking about games where you build stuff again. This is both because of the ongoing popularity of colony builder games such as Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress and The Wandering Village, and also because I'm embarking on another community-driven balancing round for Airships: Conquer the Skies, my own game.

I've come up with a typology of players for the sorts of games where you build things, especially strategy games. It also applies to games like Minecraft. This is probably not especially novel, but I wanted to get it down for my own reference, if nothing else.

So in annoying personal news, I have really messed up my shoulder again.

This is a recurring problem that's been with me for 20 years now, but this time it's pretty bad. I've been unable to do any work for more than a month now. According to my physiotherapist, my infraspinatus and supraspinatus are messed up. Apparently, those are muscles, not dinosaurs.

A steampunk autoshooter where you fight your way through waves of enemies on your way to a safe harbour. Destroy your foes, harvest wreckage, and upgrade your ship.

Press Info & Discord

Some shenanigans your captain might experience in Sunless Sea.

So what have I been up to in 2023?

So currently city builders (base builders, colony builders, whatever) are a very popular game genre, and so it would arguably make sense for me to get in on that and make one too. After all, I already made an airship builder, so I have plenty of experience making games where you place structures and then little people run around. Except, unfortunately, I find myself pretty bored by the genre. I've played a fair amount of SimCity, Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld, and now I feel I've kind of... seen it when it comes to the genre.

But I think I also have Problems with the way these games work, which I will now try to explain.

The heroes introduced in the Heroes & Villains DLC can be modded, changing them or adding new ones.

You can download a simple example mod here, for you to study and modify. You can also look at the already existing heroes in data/crossplay/heroes/HeroType. You can probably figure things out just from that.

The rest of this post attempts to document everything exhaustively

With Heroes & Villains releasing in one week, here's a post about some of the design decisions I made.

Last year, I taught a class at the Zurich University of the Arts about using game mechanics to tell stories. It was a very small class, and so we spent our time sitting together, playing games, and discussing them. We played Crusader Kings 3, Rimworld, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind, and more. I'm not sure if we figured out what was intended to be the core theme of the class, but we did learn a bunch of things about characters in games and procedural narratives.

Conveniently, I then immediately got to apply these things to the design of the Heroes & Villains expansion.

I am happy to announce that Airships: Heroes and Villains will release on July 20, 2023. It's the first DLC for the steampunk ship-building strategy game Airships: Conquer the Skies.

Thank you for tuning in! Today we have a special guest on our show, Mr. Zhax from the Galactic Federal Hyperfund Site Management Organisation.

Having just discovered that Eric Gill was an awful person, I've changed the font of this site from Gill Sans to Dosis, by Pablo Impallari. That's all.

Today's DLC preview is about Vex, a druid who often appears at the same time as some spiders or gargoyles settling into your territory. They can be hired as an airship captain, providing a number of magical spells.

So the other day we looked at Commander Bertelli, an airship captain. Today it's the turn of Viviane Garcia, a city governor and ardent socialite.

Heroes & Villains, the upcoming DLC for Airships: Conquer the Skies, will introduce captains and governors with special abilities. Today we're having an in-depth look at Commander Bertelli.

I've been playing a bunch of Vintage Story (think a more survival-oriented Minecraft). One of the things I keep returning to is how I'd like a structural integrity mechanic for buildings, so that the things you build have to make sense, and so that higher-quality building materials matter more.

So today I coded up a little web-based toy for how I'd handle this.

I am happy to announce the upcoming DLC for Airships - Heroes & Villains:

I really like doing Secret Santa Jam, an online game jam where you are randomly assigned a giftee to make a game for. I think I might be too old and creaky for those high-intensity 48-hour jams now, but having a specific person to make a game for really works to get me focused on finishing a game, even if it takes weeks rather than days.

In previous years, I made Witchcraft, a non-violent game about being a helpful witch with a gigantic hat, and Corvus Sector, a 100-turn space 4X game. So perhaps I was setting the bar a bit high, because this year's game, Isle of Beasts, took a lot longer than planned.

Special eras are one of the features that I introduced in the co-op and conquest update in August. These work by temporarily changing the rules of the game, and may also have a victory condition, where an empire can be rewarded for ending the era early.

Like pretty much everything in the game, these are data-driven, so you can add new ones by modding. Here's how.

Here's a quick tutorial on how to mod a new city upgrade into Airships - a Workhouse, which increases city industry but also raises unrest.

Nearly all of the data in Airships: Conquer the Skies can be modded, and modders have created some excellent additions to the game. I want to encourage you to try modding too, so here is a detailed guide.

If you have any questions about modding, it's worth joining the Discord, where you can find helpful, seasoned modders. You can also contact me directly with any questions. If you get stuck, you can even send me the mod you're working on and ask me to help you.

To learn how to mod, you can read this guide, watch this video, or if you just need a starting point and are happy to explore on your own, here's the very very short version:

An in-depth guide to how modding works in Airships, and how to create a mod that adds a new module.

Plus a surprise feature.

A Mesopotamian Necromantic Cyberpunk visual prototype.

Play Online on Itch.io