Skyclimbers Update: The Road to Beta

We’re excited to share a major update on the development of Skyclimbers!

After multiple delays, we have decided to reduce the scope of Early Access to expedite release, while still delivering a strong foundation of content.

Deep Forest Jarl, Warg, and Mage class

Early Access was initially planned to ship with three playable dynasties: Drakonian, Foryoku and Rokkuhito. Instead, each Dynasty has now been fragmented into multiple unique Districts. Early Access will be limited to the Drakonian Dynasty, featuring multiple unique playable Districts.

Jarls control each District, and your relation to them will dictate diplomacy.

Deep Forest District Jarl on the left, Coastal Meadow District to the right.

Rivalries between districts will lead to conflicts that you can resolve through one of three methods: diplomacy, trade, or warfare.

This District dynamic is bound to each biome, which will be a small scale representation of Dynasty conflicts across continents.

Districts have unique warfare capabilities, for example the Coastal Meadow Infantry carry spears, while Deep Forest Infantry carry one handed axes and oval shields.

These changes in armor and weaponry will influence the outcome of district conflict, and encourage the player to conquer all 5 districts to attain all distinct unit types.

One of the more prominent results of our procedural design architecture is the character randomizer system.

Artists define the rules of variation (body proportion ranges, curated outfit sets, hand-picked color palettes, hairstyles) and procedural generation creates unique characters by randomizing within those boundaries. The result is a division of labor where artists control quality and visual coherence, while the engine handles the work of populating the world with hundreds of distinct looking characters.

Deep Forest character attributes include pointed ears, thin frames, dark face paint to reflect the ancient woods they live within. These restrictions apply to villager generation and character creation.

Generated villagers support dynamic hair and improved animations.

Every detail from candlestick, to table has been built custom to each district, ensuring players have a completely new experience when exploring Drakonia.

Players can construct blueprints from other Districts after conquering them.

Below is a side by side comparison of Deep Forest \ and Coastal Meadow \ architectural styles, showcasing the contrast in both materials and construction methods.

Procedural Village Generation

Another powerful result of procedural generation is our new village generator.

Designers put together the "ingredients" for a town, i.e. what buildings exist, how dense each neighborhood is, what decorations or clutter go where, how roads should sprawl. The engine then assembles unique variations from these hand-crafted building blocks, producing anything from small farming outposts to large sprawling settlements. NPCs automatically populate the resulting village, wandering between buildings and roads in natural looking patterns or gathering in small groups at key locations.

Unique village iterations of various shapes and sizes above.

The preview gizmo system that allows designers to review village presets before generation.

Everything is runtime generated, including villager pathways and villager profiles.

This is a work in progress, and as the town generation evolves, our goal will be to generate settlements will look and feel lived in.

Deep Forest Architecture features dark wood harvested from the redwood forests, dragon head beams, and thick angled roofs to account for snowfall.

All districts specialize in unique resources not found elsewhere, with each having a unique crop: wheat for Coastal Meadow, and cabbage for the Deep Forest.