The game also contains a seamless matchmaking system, so players entering a portal may find themselves in an adventure quest with another participant, allowing them to co-operate on the journey. The program then checks to make sure the castle makes geographic and spatial sense – that all its rooms are explorable – then it adds the world to its collection, ready to serve to players. When we visited, coder Mark Witts typed in a few constraints and let the program build a new world focused around a vast castle it took seconds to generate and there it was, a new adventure landscape, with a massive citadel, built into a ragged cliff face. The computer builds its own castles, houses and other constructions, using a complex modular system. Radiant Worlds has built a system capable of generating thousands of these quests a day, each using a series of pre-set rules governing the size and nature of the environment. Players who explore the portal landscapes fully will discover much rarer keystone fragments, which provide access to more challenging in profitable quests. When these are returned to the player’s home world they can be joined together to create new quest adventures. So it’s a Roguelike role-playing game, within a Minecraft creative world – although design director Ben Fisher cites the original Legend of Zelda as an influence on the design rules behind the dungeons, which often offer different route options, but retain an easily navigable layout.Įach quest also contains pieces of keystone. They must then battle their way toward the end-point, defeating the boss character and collecting the treasure. When players pass through, they materialise in a procedurally generated landscape, complete with its own enemies and a quest objective - perhaps a castle, village or dungeon complex. On each home island there’s a portal, which leads to an adventure quest. Every sky island exists in a cloud-based persistent online universe, so players are able to visit each other’s homes, co-operating on building projects.īut this is only the base station of the Skysaga concept. Every inhabitant of Skysaga has their own home world, a floating sky island, which they can customise in the standard Minecraft way – by gathering resources and crafting them into building blocks, tools and items. Although we didn’t want Blitz to go under, we now have a new culture, a new philosophy, we’re all dedicated to this one game.” “We got on well – they’re a lovely company. “Smilegate were looking for a game that could go global, a game that was creative, that had sandbox elements, and they wanted a western developer,” says Philip. Imagine a cross between Minecraft, Legend of Zelda and Journey and you’re on the right path. There’s a dynamic food chain – which players aren’t always at the top of Photograph: PR Skysaga: Infinite Isles – worlds are filled with beasts like sheep, wolves and bears. So the brothers formed a new studio, Radiant Worlds, re-employed about 50 former Blitz staff and started work. When Blitz went down, Smilegate CEO Herald Kwon said he’d publish the new project if the Olivers could get a development team together. Its major series, it turned out, is Crossfire, the biggest first-person shooter in the Asian market. He’d taken it to the major GDC event in San Francisco in March and met a company he’d never heard of, Smilegate, a South Korean publisher and developer of free-to-play online titles. Blitz collapsed.īut Philip had an idea for a new game, a sandbox adventure set in a persistent multiplayer universe. But then the smartphones and app stores came along taking a lot of that work away the publishers stopped calling. For 20 years, the business model had been to work with publishers on comparatively quick licensed game tie-ins – console versions of kid’s brands like Barbie, Sponge Bob and Shrek. On 12 September, 2013, Philip and Andrew Oliver, founders of Leamington-based development studio Blitz Games, stood in front of their 200 staff and told them the company had gone into liquidation.
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