Powered by LootLocker: How a Smooth Switch from Proprietary Backend to LootLocker Fuels an Ambitious Genre Revival
Who?
Vector Z Studios is a passionate team of developers, designers, and gaming enthusiasts dedicated to crafting polished, innovative gaming experiences. Their flagship title, Midair 2, revives the jetpack shooter genre with fast-paced, physics-driven gameplay in a striking sci-fi universe.
Features Used
- Player Authentication (docs)
- Unified Player Accounts (docs)
- Progressions (docs)
- In-App Purchases (docs)
- Economy (docs)
- Messages (docs)
The Story
Indie studio Vector Z is currently spearheading a fascinating renaissance of the dormant jetpack shooter genre – and they have picked LootLocker to drive their success from the backend.
Their game, Midair 2, has a remarkable development story, and is primed for significant success. But before we get to all that, it’s worth pausing to take a closer look at the jetpack shooter genre itself.
Sometimes referred to as FPS-Z games – because the player has extensive freedom of movement on the Z-axis – jetpack shooters play fast, intense, and dynamically, and typically offer team-based capture-the-flag battles over enormous maps. As such, they take considerable development effort. For years the Tribes series dominated the FPS-Z space, after emerging in the late 1990s. As Tribes’ star faded, a new contender arrived in the form of Archetype Studio’s Midair. Despite attracting a vast and loyal audience, a scattering of imperfections deterred mainstream players. Midair never quite met its true potential, and the jetpack FPS genre seemed to have ended its run.
Until, that is, a passionate group of modders and coders from the Midair community came together, initially to maintain and modernise the game they adored. Things quickly grew, and with Archetype’s blessing, a full team was assembled, and work on what would become Midair 2 began.
That team is Vector Z.
It takes a lot of ambition to build a game as dynamic as an online FPS-Z. It takes a whole lot more on top of that to embellish it with player accounts, meta progressions, in-game economies, and all the other elements of a modern live-service game. That considered, Vector Z clearly isn’t intimidated by demanding projects. The team were so ambitious, in fact, that they initially started building their own backend in tandem with Midair 2’s development.
The issues there came when we wanted to start thinking a little bit bigger about what we would like to implement with our own backend, and how we would like to achieve it. We knew that tech choices we would make would need to allow us excellent flexibility in the future, which wouldn’t require heavy custom back-end creation every time. We have big dreams. We’d like to be the first shooter in our genre on consoles one day. And we would like for our players to be able to contribute their own maps and maybe later – mods, modes, weapons, and anything they dream. We also knew that our own custom backend couldn’t extend that far. This is a part of a future-proofing that really tipped the scale for the use of LootLocker.
Vector Z Studios
Switching to a fresh backend mid-development is an intimidating prospect in principle, but the Vector Z team found the process of adopting LootLocker straightforward and manageable, freeing them up to put more effort into meeting all their aspirations for Midair 2 as a feature-rich, free-to-play, and fitting return for the FPS-Z form.
The team harnessed LootLocker's authentication systems not only to make it simple and efficient to authenticate players across all the platforms they are targeting for launch, but also to let users connect their accounts together to enable cross-save and cross-progression. Meanwhile, LootLocker's economy systems and progression systems are being developed to create a meta layer at a game systems level that rewards players for successfully winning matches, and to power an in-game store where users can spend their hard-earned in-game currency.
Building those features themselves would likely mean Vector Z hiring an additional engineer, potentially adding a year to the overall development process – and then there’s maintenance post-launch. Fortunately for the team, implementing these features was as straightforward as the transition to LootLocker itself.
Almost every use-case that we needed, LootLocker already had support for. When it wasn’t supported natively – we had an easy time contacting them to figure out a quick solution or workaround to our issues. The LootLocker team’s indie and supportive attitude is really the cherry on top of working together – they have been proactive, curious, and helpful in understanding our goals for the game and the needs.
Vector Z Studios
Midair 2 is currently undergoing playtesting, in the build up to launch on Steam. LootLocker is proud to have been part of this ambitious, commercially minded, fiercely creative passion driven project, and we can’t wait to see it unleashed.