The producers of Skydome, a free Brazilian competitive multiplayer tower defense game, have said that they plan to start the game’s first competitive season later this year. Cheny Schmeling, director of the game, and João Gava, publishing director, went to Chat Aberto, an ESPN podcast, to talk about the production and plans for the game.
The game was released for free on Steam’s Early Access service back in November 2020, but it has been in production since as far back as 2016. Gava commented that they had planned for Skydome to have a competitive focus ever since its conception, and that, during development, it was taken to professional eSports players for testing and feedback. They even took the game to the Brasil Game Show (BGS) in 2017, where they set up an arena with commentators and professional teams to test its eSports potential. It was a success.
But how does tower defense with competitive multiplayer work?
Skydome is a free PvEvP multiplayer tower defense game in which players battle in teams of 4, with the objective of destroying the other team’s artifact. Each player controls a champion with unique skills, very similar to a MOBA, but with the addition of being able to build walls and towers to defend their artifact. The battle between the players is indirect, because each team’s arena is separate, with the attack being made by waves of AI minions, which makes the game way more strategy-based than a MOBA. This gameplay draws direct inspiration from the old Warcraft 3 tower defense mods, the same game in which DotA was created, also as a mod. Skydome follows the Free-to-Play model, with paid cosmetics and customizations.
Although the game is constantly compared to MOBAs, the producers said that they have always intended it to be a tower defense game, and that they avoid using the former word to describe it. In the podcast, they mentioned that Skydome was conceived to be more strategy-based than the competitive games that already existed.
Skydome is being developed by Kinship Entertainment and published in Brazil and in Latin America by Nomad EGL, a joint venture created by Kinship and Octagon, a São Paulo marketing agency responsible for some of Nike’s, Mastercard’s and NBA’s Brazilian campaigns that recently started representing eSports athletes. The fact that the publisher is co-owned by the developers makes decision-making more in sync between creating new features and announcing and releasing them. Schmeling mentioned that many times the devs have many new features already developed that they would otherwise just release together and cause confusion to the players, but since they’re planning everything with the publishers they know how to time things better.
The decision to first release the tower defense game on Steam’s Early Access service was to be able to let players test it and contribute to its development before the 1.0 version. Skydome has already been through many changes before Early Access, and since its release, players have found many unexpected ways to play it, which the game designers must acknowledge to utilize what’s good and eliminate what’s bad, said Schmeling. The producers created a Discord server where players can gather to give feedback, help each other, learn more about the game and create teams.
Schmeling has also said that Skydome will have constant development even after it gets out of Early Access, but it still only has around 70% of the content expected for its official release. Currently, it has 9 champions available for players, but Schmeling expects 6 new ones to be released until the end of 2021. The 1.0 release also depends on negotiations with international publishers that are already ongoing, said Gava.
Tournaments and the Competitive Scene
The producers want Skydome to give players the opportunity to become professionals, and they hope that one day the game might reach the level of CBLoL, the League of Legends Brazilian Championship. They said that the 2021 competitive season is in the final stage of planning, and that this first tournament will certainly have what is expected of a competitive game, with full transmission and commentators.
Gava and Schmeling have also brought Cleber “Fuzi” Fonseca, eSports specialist, co-founder and partner of CNB eSports Club, as product manager of Nomad, to help them reach the competitive status they want. CNB is a renowned eSports club, created in 2001 as a Counter Strike team. The players used CNB as an acronym for Cannibals, and it became so famous that the organization decided to make it the official name. By 2010, they had already solidified themselves on the national scene, with 88 cyberathletes in 13 different games like Street Fighter, Guitar Hero and DotA. Their most important team was the League of Legends one, with titles like 2013 ESL Brasil Open, 2013 Brasil Game Show – International Challenge and 2014 Torneio dos Legends #20. They have since left the LoL competitive scene, but remain as an important Brazilian eSports club. Fuzi’s contribution will certainly be essential for Skydome to reach the great heights in the competitive scene that Gava and Schmeling expect.
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