Just letting you know that I've pushed the Blue Sky Aces demo update out tonight, enjoy.
Feedback: I have already completed the game and it is rather short, and I would have liked it if you could put in more missions to advance the date more slowly, and in turn, make the game seem a bit more long, especially since the combat sort-of-stretches beyond 11/11, AKA end of war. A bit strange.
Hey thanks for more great feedback. The game content is limited because it's just a demo at the moment, the full version will be released later in the year. Because of this the date does progress faster than it will in the full game, this is to avoid forcing players to have to grind away at the same missions for hours, just to be able to play all the aircraft available in the demo. I'm not sure what you mean regarding combat stretches beyond 11/11, as that is the latest date that you should be able to reach, however I don't prevent you from continuing to play and improve your scores, or try out new features as I release updates.
Well, to be more specific, I can still play it even though it is past 11/11. You can still access missions past 11/11. A bit strange, but I don't mind too much. Also, you know the link for the video above? It is on Gamejolt. Maybe you could set up there too? I originally started playing games there.
That's a bit odd about the date, in theory it should stop increasing at 11 Nov 1918, I'll have a look at the logic to see if there's a way it can slip past this. My plan was to post it here in Itch first before looking at other sites, however I need to do a bunch of work to swap out the Steam services such as leaderboards, achievements, and statistics. For now my priority is releasing on one platform first before trying to post on any more, which is purely a time limitation.
Further feedback: Bombing is actually proving somewhat tricky because aiming them is tricky. You have to rely on instinct for when you release them. You can't see downwards. The rockets have a worrying pattern. Is there a single-fire option? Mission ideas: Attacking a zepplin, attacking a zepplin yard, attacking an "Aircraft carrier" (I mean a retrofitted cruiser).
I know exactly what you mean, but I think you're just discovering the challenges that ww1 pilots had with the very primitive technology available to them. For bombing they had very limited sights, and in smaller aircraft they typically relied on the mark 1 eyeball for aiming, possibly with a simple iron sight, or nail sticking out of the side of the fuselage. In practice I find the best technique is what I would describe as shallow dive bombing, where you dive at the target at a roughly 45 degree angle, releasing the bomb(s) just short of the target at the same time you start to pull out of the dive. Using this technique allows you to use the gunsight to aim the bombs, and is far superior to level bombing which is only really suitable for large area targets where accuracy doesn't matter as much. At some point I want to add a tutorial to help teach this as it's something that requires a bit of history knowledge.
The rockets used during the ware were also notoriously inaccurate, and were generally fired on mass. From my research the pilots appeared to have had two switches in the cockpit, one for each side which would fire all rockets on the relevant side with a small delay between rockets. I suspect that in practice they fired all at once to avoid the negative impacts on handling that would have existed if they left the rockets on one wing. That all said this is a game and so I've added an option to fire the rockets in pairs which you can find at the bottom of the preferences screen.
A Zeppelin model is under construction and there will be missions to attack them in the air, and on the ground. I'm also looking to add missions where you launch from a carrier and attack the Zeppelin yards as this really did happen, although I don't think any of the strike group returned. If you want to keep up to date with the latest progress then you can join the discord server here https://discord.gg/UXnD7Q4UJ4 where I post daily updates.