About

Skyblaze is a mobile arcade air combat game that offers a variety of levels that you complete in ascending order. The fun comes from the many scenarios you can encounter, and the ability to upgrade your planes, unlock new weapons and progress through the game. The game features game services like leaderboards/achievements, cloud saving, sharing functionality, and in-app purchases thanks to the Essential Kit API.

Gameplay

By completing levels, you gain points which you can subsequently expend on new game content such as better weapons, new planes or upgrades for existing planes. Game economy is dominated by two types of currency; cash and gems. Cash you use for unlocks/upgrades, and gems are used for special abilities like being able to respawn where you left off. Points are converted to cash after the closing of a level. While gems have a chance of dropping from enemy kills.

Details

The game makes heavy use of custom shaders to resolve lighting. There is not a single built-in shader in Skyblaze. 3D content is simple and angular with vibrant colors. It uses a mobile-optimized bloom plugin to help make it really pop. The sky system supports any time of day and dynamically changes the angle of the celestial objects based on time of day. Hierarchy is minimalized to save performance, and gameobject count is kept to an absolute minimum by defining all central game systems on a single gameobject. The game uses ECS-style architecture, this design pattern I've found both performant as well as capable of supporting the various complex game mechanics. Addressables are used for memory optimization. On the game's insta page, some code snippets can be found as 2nd slide on some of the earliest posts

Future vision

The plan is to expand to about 40 levels total spread out over 2 stages. Currently you have 2 stages: desert and ocean. These will be accompanied by a grasslands and a snowy mountains stage for the final levels. Also important for me is an iOS release to really get the game out there.

Availability

This game is available on Google Play, link below.