Building & Skiving
Updates on my game
About time I talk more about skive.
If you don’t know what it is, it’s a mobile game based on competitions you see on youtube. I started building it a couple months back, and had to pause development of it for a little bit. But now I’m going to be more consistent with talking about it’s development.
Skive - Timeline of event
2021: Got the Idea
Back in 2021, post-covid blues, I had the idea for this game. Didn’t even think of a name for it, but the concept was pretty clear. At the time I was juggling contracts with mobile publishers, so I kept it on the back burner. Every game dev has that one dream project, and Skive was mine.
2022: Set up the company
Incorporated skive studios. I was pretty attached to the name and always wanted to launch a game with this name, but at the time I couldn’t (stuck with publisher contracts)
August 2023: Started Development.
Took part in this online bootcamp thingy called nights & weekends by buildspace. Turns out other people thought the idea was cool too, and I ended up winning a gameshow with it.
Skive was just one of those ideas that felt so overwhelming, but doing nights and weekends and just launching something made building it so much easier.
Launched the game on both iOS & Android with a single concept - Archery but as a race. Grew to ~200 users.
September 2023: Announced a new update integrating gymnastics
This updated still has not made it out of beta, and was only played by a handful of testers.
November 2023: Expanding the core + adding content
Became a victim to scope creep. Extensively experimented with ML for unity. My idea was to train a self aware agent that I can deploy and livestream tournaments with, but while this is something which seems fun and I still would like to try out, It’s stupid focusing on this while the game hasn’t finished development.
Switched the AI in my game from ML to A* Pathfinding Algo, with a complex sensor to handle non movement related use cases and local/obstacle avoidance.
I started adding content and tying in the core loop of the game a bit more, ditched the self aware agents. One half of the game was always supposed to be a competition style format — similar to fall guys with different stages.
The other half is the secret sauce. Based on what research I’ve done this past year, no game currently exists that has incorporated the duality of these game mechanics, so I’m excited and curious to see what it likes when it all comes together.
Current Progress on the game:
- Added a bunch of new mechanics
- an obstacle course based inspired by this video.
- Created 7 different rooms with randomisation & variable scaling difficulty.
- Created an army of AI that works on different movement approaches in order to simulate playing with other people (input randomisations, lags, errors, path solving and local avoidance
- Reworked archery level (made it more challenging)
- UI/UX Improvements
- Sneak peek: Character skins + Skin Shop (coming soon).
Doing all this alone has been fun yet challenging. For now I am going to focus solely on iOS since maintaining the project for android simultaneously is simply too taxing at the moment (sorry android users), and I’d like to perfect one platform first.
Current progress feels like this
More groundwork laid out for future updates with scalability in mind. The goal is to get momentum and not let it drop. Update is going out live this month.
I am hiring
If you’re an experienced unity developer or game artist then hmu @maybeprithvi, I’m looking for talented developers & artists to help build skive.