Skyland GBA

Skyland
General
Author	Evan Bowman
Type	Strategy
Version	beta
License	MIT License
Last Updated	2022/11/02
Links
Download
Website
Source

Skyland is a homebrew game demo created in about twenty days. It is a simple realtime strategy game where you build flying castles and fight AI players. Also includes a multiplayer vs mode.

The homebrew was presented in the GBA Jam 2021.

User guide

Gameplay

All of the action in the game takes place on flying castles. At most two islands comprise each level, where the player controls one island, and an AI controls the other island. Hostile fortresses will attack the player, while neutral or peaceful islands may give the player coins, items, or blocks.

Each Island consists of a layer of terrain, atop of which the player can build structures. The game generalizes all structures as rooms, although not all rooms can be occupied (players cannot move characters into solid rooms, like cannons or walls, for instance).

To build new rooms, open up the construction menu and pick the construction site, structure and room. The game may reject your request to build structures, if you have not collected enough coins, or have not constructed enough power cores to sustain the new addition.

You may also salvage and recover some value from existing rooms, by selecting the room with the cursor.

You may pause the game to make adjustments at any time. Pausing frequently does affect your highscore a bit though.

See below for a complete annotation of all structures that you may build:

Structures

Hull:

• The simplest block in the game. A purely defensive structure.
• The only structure in the game that does not supply or deplete energy.

Cannon:

• For attacking other islands. Mainly used for attacking horizontally.
• By default, the selector will move between targets sequentially (left to right, top to bottom), but you can tap the R bumper while choosing a target to detach and move the selector without constraint.

Missile Silo:

• For attacking other islands. Missiles will launch vertically, and fall down vertically on the other island.
• For attacking the top face of an island.

Stairwell:

• A tall room, with no function other than to allow your fortress' residents to move between blocks stacked on top of one another.

Infirmary:

• Heals each idle occupant controlled by the owner of the infirmary. Your characters will not heal while fighting an enemy.
• The health provided by the infrirmary will be distributed evenly across all occupants, so a player will heal more quickly if other characters are not attempting to heal at the same time.

Bulkhead:

• Select a bulkhead and press A to open/close. Four second recharge when the bulkhead changes state.
• Characters cannot walk through closed bulkhead doors. Use to limit invading enemy movement within your castle.

Workshop:

• A square room. Slightly lowers the cost of building all rooms, and allows you to build the more complex structures listed below.

Power Core:

• Your island will include one power core at the beginning of the game.
• If all of a castle's power cores are destroyed, it will sink into the clouds, and all of the island's residents will perish.
• You must have a workshop in your castle to build aadditional Power Cores.
• Each room on your island consumes an amount of power (with the sole exception of hull blocks, which consume no power).
• If the total power consumption of your island exceeds the combined power output of your power cores, all systems will shut down, until you salvage rooms to free up power, or until you build more power cores.

Forcefield:

• Almost identical to a Hull block, but consumes power, and your own weapons may shoot through forcefield blocks without damaging them.
• Mainly intended for protecting weapons (otherwise, you could just build Hull blocks). You must have a workshop to build a Forcefield.

Transporter:

• Allows you to transport one of your characters to another island.
• Move one of your characters into the transporter, select the transporter to use.
• Your character will be transported to a random room in the opponent's island.
• Transporters have a cool-down period, so you may need to build multiple transporters if you want to effectively raid enemy islands.
• By selecting an empty transporter, you may also retrieve characters on other islands.
• A light on the transporter tile image will change from red to blue when the transporter finishes recharging.

Radar:

• Allows you to see the interior of your opponent's structures.
• Fragile, and consumes a relatively large amount of power. You must have a workshop to build a Radar.

Ion Cannon

• An energy weapon. Fires projectiles that pass through hull and rooms, and cause bulkhead doors to open.
• Deals significant damage to forcefields.

Flak Gun:

• Fires projectiles that deal small amounts of damage to large areas of a castle.
• Deals twenty damage at the point of impact, twelve damage to grid locations adjacent to the point of impact, and ten damage to grid locations one-tile-removed from the impact site.

        10
     10 12 10
  10 12 20 12 10
     10 12 10
        10

Rooms larger than one 16x16 tile will receive damage from each tile that overlaps with the blast radius.

Replicator:

• Produces replicants. Move one of your human characters into the replicator, select the replicator to use,
• The game will be give you the option to create a replicant.
• Replicants cannot heal in an infirmary, and have 75% of the health of the template character from which they were created.

Characters:

• Characters, such as your castle's residents, or enemy goblins, can damage or repair rooms.
• When successfully destroying another castle's room, a character will plunder a fraction of the room's construction cost, increasing your coin count.

Controls

R - Construction menu

A - Select construction site/structure/room, Use cannon/bulkhead/transporter/replicator

D-Pad - Scroll through a list of structures to build

B - Salvage and recover value from existing room

L - Pause

Select - Toggle interior view of your castle

Screenshots

Media

SKYLAND Tutorial Player (Evan Bowman)

Compatibility

Supported peripherals:

Gameboy Player (Gamecube) rumble support
Link cable multiplayer
SRAM or Flash storage, but SRAM strongly recommended

Changelog

2022.1.7.0

• Found another bug in SKYLAND beta, introduced recently by accident. In the previous version, if you raid and plunder a power-core in an enemy castle, the AI will destroy the plundered-room structure that was produced when raiding the power-core structure, in an attempt to rebalance power usage. This kills any characters who happened to have plundered a power-core. Patch 2022.1.7.0 updates scripts/config.lisp to add an entry for plundered-room, so that it does not consume power, and will therefore not be destroyed by the AI player. Because the rooms.lisp script was missing an entry, the engine defaulted to a power usage of ten, which confused the AI.

External links

• itch.io - https://evanbowman.itch.io/skyland
• GitHub - https://github.com/evanbowman/skyland