#lookingupward

I released my latest game, Looking Upward, earlier this week after over a month of development time. Looking Upward is a zen game inspired by looking up at the starry sky on a clear night. Players can look around a sky filled with pretty stars, and click on planes to take control & fly them around. It’s a calm experience with ambiance and pleasing sound effects to help players relax.

And it looks like something I could’ve made in a weekend.

This project, more than any other project I’ve worked on, evolved significantly over its dev time. Probably a solid 70 percent of the time I spent working on the game was spent just trying to figure out what the heck it was supposed to be. This, I think, was the result of starting with an idea that only really described visuals. They say you should never start with a story, and I think perhaps the same applies with art style. I had a picture in my head, but that picture did not illustrate any mechanics. 

Originally I decided the game was about drawing lines between stars to form structured constellations. Then it was about flying planes, with a talking moon in the sky to provide commentary on players’ actions. Then the moon was replaced by an earthly cast of characters providing the commentary. Then the text commentary just came out of nowhere (?). In the end I got rid of all the text stuff and the game was simply about looking at the sky and flying around planes. That’s it. 

My latest game, Looking Upward, is a game about, well, looking upward on a starry night. It's a simple, relaxed game in which a player can look through a sky full of stars and click on planes or satellites to take control of them.

The game is available on itch.io here: thickspit.itch.io/looking-upward

This was an interesting project for me in a couple of ways, so I’ll probably be writing a longer post about that soon.