A real-time strategy game where you design airships and then fight with them. The aim is to have pretty chaotic explodey fights and interesting ship design choices. Ships are put together out of modules, and the layout of modules matters a great deal: everything on board is done by individual airsailors who need to run around, ferrying coal, ammunition, water and repair tools - and sometimes their fallen comrades.
Ship Editor
Combat (Singleplayer and Multiplayer)
Strategic Conquest
Nice i like these kind of games !
Just a suggestion can you make an open world for this game?
Looks interesting ;D I remember making such drawings in intricate detail during my childhood. This is like these drawings coming alive.
Goog luck with this, I’m curious it will turn out.
I am fundamentally very up for open-worldness. Can you describe a bit what you would like to see? No guarantees any of it will make it into the game of course, but so far the design is still pretty open. 
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I spent so much time laying out submarines and stuff. In fact, here is the original drawing I made for this:
This looks quality, I love the idea but also the gfx. What sort of size limit are you planning to impose on the ships?
No quarters? 
So heraldic charges give you in-game bonuses, which means I’m restricted to relatively simple layouts. Still, more layouts is definitely something I want to add soon.
If you’ve been following my Twitter, you may have seen a series of increasingly exasperated tweets about my computer. Basically, for work reasons, I had to upgrade my Mac to Mavericks, the newest OS X version. Unfortunately, Mavericks causes my machine to freeze irretrievably after a few days, and only a complete reinstall temporarily fixes the problem.
So now I’m, grumbling, back on Snow Leopard (IMHO the best version of Mac OS X), having lost a lot of time in the process. So yeah, that whole idea about releasing the early access version around now isn’t happening, but I hope to get it out there before the end of the month.
I have not been entirely non-busy, though. A week ago, I was afforded the opportunity to do some playtesting. As I wrote before when I did this with Patent Blaster, there is just not substitute for putting down someone in front of your game and wordlessly watching them trying to figure it out.
The day after the playtesting I filed something like sixty new issues on Airships’ tracker, ranging from trivial graphical adjustments to “feature X does not work”. I selected the ones that I felt were important enough to get fixed before the first early access version, and have been plowing my way through them. (At least when I wasn’t trying to fix my computer.)
One big change, visually, is that I adjusted the color of the sky to be less saturated, on the basis of this great article on game visuals and user feedback that the ships didn’t visually “pop out” enough.
While doing graphical adjustments, I also took the opportunity to put in an early version of the main menu background, a digital painting of airships that I’m working on. It’s by no means done, but I just, er, blurred it enough that you can’t really tell. As time goes on, the picture will come into focus more.
So I was watching the video, it seems like the thing is ai controlled maybe make it so that you have to control each ship so to keep it flying you need to get people to shovel fuel into he engine and that if you run out of fuel it splats to the floor(not sure if thats what brought the big one down) . That said there is huge potential in this and I would willingly play this and have a lot of fun. ps love the graphics 
;D Pretty much, yeah. Everything on board of an airship is done by the little people, who are needed to do the following:
Job allocation and movement is all done automatically, so you just give high-level commands to the ship as a whole.
I did a blog post on AI programming you might find interesting. Also, the early release version of the game will probably be out this week! (Details also in the post.) ;D
The early access release is up!
3iki9rKIixE
Some more details about the game:
At its core, the game is about designing airships and fighting with them. Ships are put together out of modules, and the layout of modules matters a great deal: everything on board is done by individual airsailors who need to run around, ferrying coal, ammunition, water and repair tools - and sometimes their fallen comrades.
You can command fleets of airships both against the computer and against other players across the Internet. (A match-making and ladder service is planned, but right now, you just enter your opponent’s IP address.)
In addition, there is a single-player strategic mode, where you use your fleet to conquer city after city, unlocking new modules and bonuses with each of them.
The game has an authentic-ish system of heraldry where you can create your own coat of arms, and register it with the game forums as unique to you.
Interested? You can get it on itch.io for $5.
This is an “early access” release, which means the game is by no means done or perfectly polished. There’s lots of features which I’m planning to add in the near future, such as boarding combat, more modules, varied terrain, etc…
Today marks the release of the second early access version of Airships. I’ve been working flat out to improve the game over the last week, and there’s some cool new stuff:
Smaller modules
There are now small versions of various ship modules, opening up more ship design space. Previously, the smallest viable ship was about 300 gold. Now it’s 90.
Internet multiplayer
There is now a game server where you can create multiplayer games and join others’. Come and measure yourself against other players!
Active enemies in strategic mode
The AI empires now go conquering, which means it’s very important to keep your cities defended.
Shouty crew!
The next release is likely to take longer, as I plan to add major new features such as boarding. I also have about a zillion blog posts I want to write about the game, such as some lore things on suspendium and a ship design guide.
As before, the game’s available on itch.io, and existing players can (of course) download this upgrade for free.
Have you thought about checking the collision of the text boxes, so that they don’t overlap? A few collision checks would be very low cost, and you’d make your flavor text a lot more readable. (and I imagine they probably have some sort of importance?)
Very good point, thanks.
Hey there, I just bought the game because it looks so much like my dreams when I was young ;D
Here’s my thoughts while buying and playing it:
My system:
First try was on fullscreen resolution (1920 x 1080), second windowed (1024 x 768) but both crash to desktop and have an unkillable exe in the task manager. I have to restart my computer to get rid of them.
So unfortunately I had no chance to actually play it (no refund needed though, glad to support ;)). You may want to add some form of logging, though.
I’ll look into that ASAP! Have you tried the newest version (v 2.1 from https://airships.zarkonnen.com/download )?
If yes, there should be a log in %APPDATA%\AirshipsGame.
Hi Zarkonnen, thanks for the quick reply. After some experimenting I got it working! Apparantly its my Avast antivirus DeepScreen technology which was being “helpful” and messing things up for me. Now I’m off building a bigger ship ;D
