Concept: Flight Runner Universe is a fresh take on a concept I had in mind for a while. Unlike traditional flat maps, players engage in combat on a 360-degree battlefield, providing a unique and challenging environment that requires strategic movement and positioning.
Gameplay Mechanics
Spherical Map: Players navigate a globe-like arena, utilizing the curvature of the world for both offensive and defensive maneuvers.
- Gravity technically points toward any surface beneath the player's feet. In this sense, players and vehicles can rotate to match almost any orientation of the bumpy surfaces along the sphere's edge.
- Speed Boosters give players a 30 seconds burst of extra speed. This effect then wears off over a short period of time, until the player's base speed is reset.
Diverse Arsenal and Combat combos: A player is equipped with primary, secondary weapon, and a Utility object slots. As well as Flight and combat abilities that can be used create offensive combos and also can be used defensively to steer away from danger. For weapons there are melee, hitscan, and projectile weapon types to ensure diverse combat styles. Each weapon has unique attributes and combat dynamics. (More Flight and Combat abilities coming soon)
- Currently the loot pool consists of a primary and secondary weapon item, primary ammo item, utility objects (Speed boost, Health, and Shield consumable items) These can be inspected and managed from the in-game Lootbag Tab.
Vehicles: Fast-paced action is heightened with vehicles that can traverse the spherical terrain, adding a layer of tactical depth. (More Vehicle types coming soon)
- With the current vehicle type in game, there is a turret mounted on top, for defensive and offensive capabilities.
A Mobile Battle-Royale Game
- I came across Photon Fusion Networking while reading up on updates to Networking solutions for games. Immediately, I was impressed by the highly optimized, low latency, net code solution that I wanted to showcase it in my next project, Flight Runner Universe.
- For this project, being a mobile game first, using a Shared-Mode server architecture, balancing server performance with server costs, allows me more flexibility in scale up the game as an indie solo developer.
- With plans for dynamic content, and in anticipation of install sizes getting larger with the number of assets from prefabs, images, to shaders and materials.
- Loading assets after initial install provides greater content scaling capabilities going forward.
- I wanted to setup a secure and scalable backend solution for managing player data and profiles, while maintaining low latency for a global player base. Firebase Authentication in conjunction with social logins, as well as FireStore databases helped me achieve my needs.
- Using FireStore databases, I setup the necessary data structures I needed to track games, and user profile data. From which I can manage game related data, such as ids, descriptions, to urls to CDNs where downloadable assets reside.
This allows me to link any assets to the data retrieved. Useful for creating store items, rewards, and user obtained items.
- Future goals are to implement leaderboards with Game History datas, given enough players.
- Developed a progression system with dynamic reward tracking and database integration. Season Passes come in free and premium tiers.
- The premium season pass can be purchased using premium Purple-Tokens, that can be obtained from the In-App Purchase system.
- From the Free season pass, users can unlock season rewards with Purple Bits, a free currency earned through gameplay. The rewards are unlocked by a user's level. User's experience per level follows a geometric sum formula with a set exponential rate, where the base XP for the level 0 is 100xp, and a cumulative of 1,000,000xp at level 100.
- Designed IAP screen and integrated store functionality for app monetization.
- Using Firebase as a backend to track user datas and to build out the necessary database tables required for creating "StoreItems" based off generic "Items" to "Rewards" from a user's season pass.
- With Purple Tokens being a premium currency that is currently obtained via the "Store" tab, users can spend these premium tokens to unlock / upgrade to the Premium Season Pass upon which further Premium only rewards can be obtained. And also the premium tokens can be used to obtain further items within the "Store" tab.
- Created a locker screen with filtered selection functionality for personalized skin customization.
- Specific optimizations for Scrolling UI is done by activating only visible UI cards. Created custom scroll elements with LeanGUI and LeanAnimations instead of using the default UI scroll elements. This ensures I can load hundreds of cards without scroll performance being affected.
All loading is performed asynchronously as to ensure app responsiveness during loading and/or processing of data.