This is a short breakdown of the project, with some lessons learned from the development process and plans going forward.

Firstly, I have to mention Skyy Tribes 1. You can play the game here on Itch too. What is important about that is, I just needed to complete a project from start to finish because creating too many unfinished games can start to have an effect on your work rate and completion rate. You might end up never completing a game again!

Skyy Tribes

This game was essentially just the building blocks and stepping stone to creating Skyy Tribes 2. I wanted to build the world, the characters and the combat system, so I stripped out most of the fancy features and pushed hard and fast to have a finished game, without the bells and whistles.

Published as fast as possible and I was able to breathe! It was an open and shut project that was successfully completed, and gave me alot code to reuse for the next project, so I'd be able to focus more on the game content than building the game elements.

Skyy Tribes II

This development process was slightly different, because it is almost a backward development plan. From the beginning I outlined the features I wanted to build and then scrapped everything in the first game that would slow the build down too much. Now this game is a very similar process, except I have the foundation already built so it is just selecting which features to add for this game.

Polishing the game took much more time for this game. I built the full sequence for the game story first, then did two or three passes over to make incremental improvements to the code, characters, dialogue, sounds and effects. Then again to make some changes to pacing and difficulty and other small bits here and there. Much more care was given to the final presentation, without the stress of a time limit.

So, with this game complete, work has began on Skyy Tribes 3. If you have some time, go ahead and play Skyy Tribes, and then Skyy Tribes II. The difference between the two games is what you can expect from 2 to 3.