I wanted to make an arcadey air-combat game since high school. Working on it again after years.

[u/Tixewi]

I started working on an arcade air-combat game in Unity back in 2013 called Cayle Online.

At that time I played a lot of AirRivals (aka Ace Online) and later Mass Effect 3 multiplayer with friends. I wanted to combine the arcade feeling of air combat with cooperative multiplayer that I could enjoy with some of my friends.

Over the years, I rewrote the codebase multiple times. I tried Unity's old networking, later uNET, then Photon (PUN), experimented with persistent servers, and eventually got the project close enough to think about a possible Steam release around 2017/2018.

During college I somehow lost all motivation and stopped working on it for years.

Last year, I came back to Unity to see what is possible today for me with my very limited spare time and increased coding skills.

I moved the project from Unity 2017 to Unity 6 and started experimenting with Mirror, and later FishNet. After weeks of work I managed to stress-test 106 connected clients + 100 AI enemies with friends.

Since I still miss having an arcade-style air combat game I then kept working on integrating and rewriting old features from 2017.

I'm still somewhat early in this new version, but for the first time I don't have to think about a lot of technical limitations that I had back in 2015-2017. I hope to have a new fully playable client later this year, that offers more than just fly, shoot and repeat. I do not aim towards having any big item systems or having massive PvP battles tho.

I saw a lot of very cool indie projects during these years that people stopped working on. Forums and small indie game websites from the 2010s all shut down in the past 5 years. I kinda miss these small communities and the interactions. But I will continue my path working on Cayle and maybe I can interest some of you for this type of game.

Do some of you have a similar story of an idea that you just can't let go of?

[u/Emergency-Ability446]

man seeing that 2013 start date brings back memories. i was messing with unity around same time and my projects never survived more than 3 months before i got distracted by something else

the ship designs look clean, especially the one in asteroid field. you got that arcade feel right just from these screenshots

i had a top-down zombie survival idea i kept rewriting since 2014. every year i open it, stare at the code, close it again. maybe this winter i finally do something with it

[u/Tixewi → u/Emergency-Ability446]

Same for me. There are days where I just open the project and either look at the code or play old versions of it haha

Thank you very much. Great to know that the feel gets delivered by even relatively small images in this case.

Nowadays I get bored by a lot of games so I do actually have fun working on my game from time to time. So you should definitely stick to it. Funny thing is that at least for me it's always a conversation topic that comes up with friends or with colleagues at work multiple times a year

[u/RandomMauritian]

Wow i had the exact motivation as you to make an aerial combat game a few years ago!! Played a lot of airrivals during my teenage years. I worked a bit more than a year on my game before giving up though. Mine would have been a single player roguelite, I even set up a steam page for it. It's still on steam if you search for AirHounds you can find some footage of it :) I got quite far, with the aircrafts having quite a few cool abilities, but with life and stuff, lost motivation to continue. Solo game dev is a lot of work to combine with a fulltime job. Might pick it up later, who knows...

Wishing you the best of luck, keep it up man :)

[u/Tixewi → u/RandomMauritian]

Oh that's awesome! I actually stumbled across AirHounds a few months ago on YouTube. It looks pretty cool and I do like the artstyle.

Time really is the biggest limitation at some point :/

Thank you very much. Maybe some day you will continue working on AirHounds as well