Steambirds: Survival: Goodbye Handcrafted Levels

Steambirds: Survival: Goodbye Handcrafted Levels:

Steambirds: Survival, the sequel to our original steampunk airplane strategy game was just released today.   You can go play it right now at Steambirds.com.

Steambirds: Survival takes place on a grim fall morning at the start of the Battle of London.  The British forces are taken by surprise as thousands of Axis steam-planes descend upon the doomed city.  Outnumbered and outgunned, your heroic mission is to delay the invaders long enough that a handful of civilians might escape the genocidal gas attacks.  You have one plane.  How long can you last?

David has a great post about how we integrated microtransactions, but today I wanted to focus on a couple of design lessons that came up while building Steambirds: Survivial.

• Removing handcraft levels as a method of finding deeper fun
• Create game modes, not levels 
• Corollary: Focusing on static levels decreases the depth of your game.

Find deeper fun by killing levels

Create game modes, not levels

Static levels decreases the depth of your game

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