About The Project

Sons of Ryke is an open world exploration, trading, dogfighting & management pseudo-sim set in a fantasy/post apocalyptic setting on a distant earth-like world. At this early stage the testing focus is on flight & combat. I've disabled trading, cargo, fuel management etc. for now. 

The game currently supports both keyboard & mouse & gamepad setups, as well as some flight sticks (Currently tested with my Thrust-master T16000M). All keys are fully rebindable in the options menu so if you don't like the default control scheme play with the controls until you find something that works for you.

Alpha 0.2 has just been released! It adds a bunch of new stuff including a new ship type, settlements, reputation, racing, persistence & so much more! You can read about all of the improvements here.

Flight & Combat

At dusk you'll be pitted against multiple waves of increasingly difficult enemies. You can also fly into the desert & take on rebel outposts, or turn against your starting settlement for the ultimate challenge.

Flight & combat are designed to be simple to understand but difficult to master. The current flight model manages a lot for you. It will perform bank turns, prevent stalls & level you out automatically. Mastering it requires careful management of your ships inertia & thrust. While it's possible to move at extremely high-speeds, any velocity gained needs to be countered or accounted for to maneuver successfully. Knowing when you have room to accelerate  & when to lower speeds is critical to fighting in tighter spaces & maintaining the unpredictable flight patterns necessary to avoid fire. 

As combat is extremely fast & controller support is critical, the game provides lead pips &, to some extent, soft-lock onto targets for you. This shifts the focus of combat from aim more towards positioning & maneuvering. Cannons have limited firing arcs & you'll need to get close to targets to lock onto them. Approaching enemies from their blind spots & hitting them where they're weak is critical to coming out of any engagement alive.

World Generation

The game starts in the desert biome, but this is procedurally generated at start-up. If you don't like this biome or are simply curious you can hit (F5) & it will swap to another.

The game will be largely focused on exploration & trading so this is fairly critical to producing enough content to fill a large open world at a reasonable pace. The eventual goal is to have a procedurally assisted world, in which all settlements, outposts & points of interest are hand crafted & positioned with a tailored data-set, while the bulk of the world in between is filled from a pool of re-usable nodes. 

Most of this tile & node system is already in place. It's the higher-level data set that defines which tile is which biome & where to place points of interest, as well as biome blending itself, that I've left to build.

Content Creation

If you like the art/world & want to take screenshots you can pause the game with (Esc) & hide the UI with (F11) or the ship with (F9). You can even toggle between biomes while paused with (F5). This is useful if you want to capture multiple shots in different settings. If you make any content please send me a link, I'd love to see it.

Solo Development

Currently I'm just working on this in my spare time. So updates aren't likely to come too frequently. That said, alpha 0.2 is already a pretty substantial improvement over 0.1 & it's coming together a lot faster than I anticipated. If you like what you see & want to help development, please share it around. This is a labor of love. That you've taken the time to play means the world to me.

Feedback

Feedback is critical to development, doubly so as a solo-dev. If you have a moment after playing I have a quick survey up here -  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/J28PZWB. 

It's completely anonymous, multiple choice & should only take 2 minutes or so. You can also leave comments or contact me at twobears.dev@gmail.com. Thanks for your time!