On 12 September, 2013, Philip and Andrew Oliver, founders of Leamington-based development studio Blitz Games, stood in front of their 200 staff and told them the company had gone into liquidation. For 20 years, the business model had been to work with publishers on comparatively quick licensed game tie-ins – console versions of kid’s brands like Barbie, Sponge Bob and Shrek. But then the smartphones and app stores came along taking a lot of that work away; the publishers stopped calling. Blitz collapsed.

But Philip had an idea for a new game, a sandbox adventure set in a persistent multiplayer universe. He’d taken it to the major GDC event in San Francisco in March and met a company he’d never heard of, Smilegate, a South Korean publisher and developer of free-to-play online titles. Its major series, it turned out, is Crossfire, the biggest first-person shooter in the Asian market. It makes $1bn a year. When Blitz went down, Smilegate CEO Herald Kwon said he’d publish the new project if the Olivers could get a development team together. So the brothers formed a new studio, Radiant Worlds, re-employed about 50 former Blitz staff and started work.

The result is Skysaga: Infinite Isles - a hugely ambitious free-to-play online multiplayer adventure.

Skysaga: Infinite Isles – worlds are filled with beasts like sheep, wolves and bears. There’s a dynamic food chain – which players aren’t always at the top of Photograph: PR

Imagine a cross between Minecraft, Legend of Zelda and Journey and you’re on the right path. “Smilegate were looking for a game that could go global, a game that was creative, that had sandbox elements, and they wanted a western developer,” says Philip. “We got on well – they’re a lovely company. And there’s a joint goal here. Although we didn’t want Blitz to go under, we now have a new culture, a new philosophy, we’re all dedicated to this one game.”

The set-up is familiar. Every inhabitant of Skysaga has their own home world, a floating sky island, which they can customise in the standard Minecraft way – by gathering resources and crafting them into building blocks, tools and items. Every sky island exists in a cloud-based persistent online universe, so players are able to visit each other’s homes, co-operating on building projects.

But this is only the base station of the Skysaga concept. On each home island there’s a portal, which leads to an adventure quest. When players pass through, they materialise in a procedurally generated landscape, complete with its own enemies and a quest objective - perhaps a castle, village or dungeon complex. They must then battle their way toward the end-point, defeating the boss character and collecting the treasure. So it’s a Roguelike role-playing game, within a Minecraft creative world – although design director Ben Fisher cites the original Legend of Zelda as an influence on the design rules behind the dungeons, which often offer different route options, but retain an easily navigable layout.

Each quest also contains pieces of keystone. When these are returned to the player’s home world they can be joined together to create new quest adventures. Players who explore the portal landscapes fully will discover much rarer keystone fragments, which provide access to more challenging in profitable quests. Radiant Worlds has built a system capable of generating thousands of these quests a day, each using a series of pre-set rules governing the size and nature of the environment. The computer builds its own castles, houses and other constructions, using a complex modular system.



When we visited, coder Mark Witts typed in a few constraints and let the program build a new world focused around a vast castle; it took seconds to generate and there it was, a new adventure landscape, with a massive citadel, built into a ragged cliff face. The program then checks to make sure the castle makes geographic and spatial sense – that all its rooms are explorable – then it adds the world to its collection, ready to serve to players.



Players together



The game also contains a seamless matchmaking system, so players entering a portal may find themselves in an adventure quest with another participant, allowing them to co-operate on the journey. Players will also be able to organise themselves into guilds to attempt the tougher adventures – there’s a trading element too, allowing adventurers to sell valuable elements or items they’ve discovered on their travels.

The visual style owes a lot to Mojang’s seminal block building world, of course. Like Minecraft, Skysaga is built using voxels, so landscapes have an angular look. However, the engine is more sophisticated, allowing for greater visual complexity. Flora sways in the wind, a dynamic sun casts real-time shadows as it passes over; in colder areas, snow settles on the landscape – even on new areas freshly dug out by the player. Every quest world is segregated into different biomes – desert, snow, forest, etc, all with their own geographic properties. Furthermore, the properties of those worlds are all different. So, a castle in a tundra world will be built using different stone than a castle in a swamp world – and enemies will have access to different materials so their weapon and armour looks different and has contrasting properties.

Progression is based around a levelling up system. There are various skill paths– architect, blacksmith, explorer, miner, etc – as players rank up in these disciplines, they unlock new recipes which can be used to construct more advanced items.

The game will be PC only when it launches next year, though there are plans for other Skysaga titles on other platforms – though Radiant Worlds won’t specify which. An alpha is starting in the UK next month. Skysaga: Infinite Isles will have plenty of competition in the sandbox adventure genre – not just Minecraft, of course, but also other smaller contenders like Tug, Oort Online and Proven Lands. However, not every studio has the support of an emerging Korean free-to-play giant, and there are so many really neat, interesting ideas in this title, it has the capacity to define rather than merely explore genre conventions.



Players will need to learn how to survive in the more challenging environments, crafting furs to explore frozen areas, while staying in the shade in deserts Photograph: PR

Indeed, if the various generative and player-focused systems can truly work together in dynamic and unpredictable ways, Skysaga could prove a fascinating step forward for creative procedural play. The Oliver brothers took a major role in the British games industry of the eighties, exploring and expanding the concept of narrative adventures in their legendary Dizzy titles – now they are back with something similarly bright, appealing and imaginative – just many times more complex.

“I feel like in those last few months at Blitz, we managed to establish a brilliant vision for this game,” says Oliver. “The staff feel invested in it - when we made those job offers to them, we’d just laid them off. They had the choice - there are enough games industry employers locally. But they joined us. And then Smilegate said, okay, you’re going through a tough time, but if you can set up we’ll back you. Now it feels like a joint goal, a joint vision. Anything is possible.”