The Flight Never Ends - Reinventing the endless runner genre

Community Showcases
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Mobile game with unique gyroscopic controls about the customizable plane in an endless random cave

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We are Ukrainian students and it is our first real project! We’ve decided to change mobile gaming world and make something innovative by going Nintendo Wii way and concentrated out effort on the innovative controls.

Completed features:

  • Unique control scheme - your device becomes a window to the endless level

  • Completely random, infinite cave filled with bonuses, enemies and sharp turns

  • Sharp turns mean that you have to rotate your device completely

  • Your hands may get tangled in the process, that’s a feature

  • THE FLIGHT NEVER ENDS, unless you hit a wall. But the game can be restarted instantly

  • We have no designers at all and use amazing public domain art by Kenney

  • Plane is fully customizable in a feature-rich in-game editor

  • Architecture for the bosses

  • Complete tutorial

  • UI is built and animated using the new incredible Unity UI system, so it looks very smooth and pretty

  • Google Play services. We’ve even contributed to the Unity plugin development, but it went slightly wrong and they still haven’t implemented features we’ve helped them with

Work in progress:

  • Sounds. Kenney pack has the sound effects and two amazing composers offered us help us with the music!

  • Perks that will change gameplay to make it more casual or hardcore, depending on the gamer preferences

  • Achievements

  • Boss fights. Imagine trying to hit a stationary object with our controls. You’ll have to make real bombing run maneuvers with your phone

  • Social features

  • Bug fixes. Who doesn’t have bugs?

  • Monetization. We hope to make games for living, so it has to be done. It won’t be bad or annoying as we are gamers, too, and know how painful painful paywalls etc are

  • Porting to every mobile platform, as currently we’ve tested only on Android and an old hacked iPad because we have no iOS developer account…

Screenshots here

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From screenshots alone, it’s very hard to understand what’s so unique and interesting about our game.
So, here’s a trailer about our studio and our game:

We’ve had some problems, too, with the 2D physics engine. The plane is actually stationary, it’s the level moving around, as the game is infinite and we wanted to avoid rounding problems with big floating point numbers. Level is made of segments, segments are made out of top-bottom block pairs and those blocks have 2D colliders. We have to constantly move and rotate (around the plane) hundreds of colliders that are parented to the different segment objects… You can imagine how painful it was. But we’ve got through and have a good and steady FPS that drops slightly only during level re-generation, as the colliders are being turned off and on during block reusal. Maybe we’ll write an article or a tutorial on that in the future. Two Unity trials on different machines were spent on profiling physics…

And that’s how we work in Ukraine :slight_smile:

Power outages are frequent and usually we spend 4 hours per day with no electricity. Doesn’t stop us from working, though.

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We’d be happy to hear any feedback. What do you think?

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I’m one of the developers of this game, and wanna tell, that as it’s our first real project, we faced some difficulties, primarily because of changing level generation architecture. Because of it, stuff like shooting had to be rewritten completely. This feature works by principle “fire and forget” and means that you don’t have to aim your targets while flying, foremost because you really don’t have time for that :smile: . Moreover, projectiles are smarter than they seem to be. They don’t aim target behind walls, don’t go back to enemies that player has already passed and some more features that contribute shooting looking well. Hope you’ll like it! : )

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While not a game update, it’s worth noting that we’ve got ourselves a web site!
http://catsknead.me/

And we’ve solved the notorious sound delay bug on Android, nearly perfectly. Stay tuned.

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Well, this looks fun i guess ! When it’s gonna be done ?
By the way, love the way you used Kenney’s art, it is used in most of my learning projects, and it would be cool to see “Big Deal” game with it :smile:

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Hello! It’s been a long time.
We’ve had some problems, some disorganization, but we’re happy to announce that we’re alive and back into business.

Here’s an old new gameplay trailer:

The Flight Never Ends is currently in an open beta stage, in which everyone can participate here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!members/catsknead
And, after that, here:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.Catsknead.TheFlightNeverEnds

Enjoy and tell us what you think!

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Better late than never i just downloaded it and tried it. The controls are awsome, very responsive, at least for me (i heard Gyro-performance varies by device, I used a Galaxy S4 Mini for testing this).

What i found to be improvable:

  1. you should be able to choose the starting orientation, i would rather hold my device top-up for this kind of games (as it seems that the starting angle appears more frequently)

  2. Maybe you could add a mode where the game doesn’t force you to change hands in flight. What i mean is that sometimes you need to rotate the device by 360° which requires you to change hands (i know, it’s a feature). You could make this mode by making the tunnel only ever turn left or right within ±90 ° of the starting angle, like this

Then you could add some other things that increase and thereby balance the reduced difficulty for this mode. -but 2. is just my opinion, i really like your current implementation