Sky Barons: WW1-Style Flying/Dogfighting for the iPhone

These are some shots of the iPhone game I’m working on. The game is designed to use the iPhone’s accelerometer like a virtual flight stick–you pull back, the plane pitches up; you angle left, the plane rolls left. The premise is a ridiculous false history: instead of entering WW1, President Wilson calls for a massive international tournament of the air to decide the victor. The warring nations agree to abide by the treaty, each builds its own arena, and the best pilots in the world get sent to duke it out.

Since I got my iPhone with the goal of building this game, a few other such apps have come out (XPlane, FAST), but I don’t find any of them very fun. For example, in FAST you just fly an F-22 in the open sky and launch heat seeking missiles in the right general direction. It’s a lovely gane, but it gets kind of old. Sky barons is designed to let you swoop dramatically between obstacles and do ridiculous-nosedives-with-last-second-pullups with ease, all with the goal of putting a few shells through your opponent’s fusilage. It’s got online p2p combat and crazy complex courses like Germany’s “gauntlet” with swinging mines and turret guns, or the US “Southwest Canyon”, a snaking canyon/tunnel complex filled to the brim with dangerous stalagmites.

I’m finishing up the single player stuff and need to finish out a good set of debut levels and then build all the multiplayer capabilities before release.