BGMC 26 | Skies Over Titan

My game for BGMC 26 will (hopefully) be a third person atmospheric (in more ways than one) flying simulator where you explore Saturn’s moon, Titan, which will be procedural and endless. Your ship will be very fast and nimble to test your piloting skills, and there will be obstacles and enemies to challenge you further. Since it will be more or less a walking sim, but flying, objective based gameplay will be minimal, leaving it up to you to decide how to play.

I’ve never made this style of open world no objective game before, so we’ll see how it goes.

Also I’m getting a lot of inspiration from Simon Fetscher’s artwork, particularly this piece:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8eB6x

If I have time, I want to add multiple ships that you can unlock and pilot, each with their own style of flying/combat, and possibly more random things for players to explore and interact with.

Latest Pic:


Latest Video:

Update 1:

Controls and basic world generation are done. I will post video as soon as my screen capture software starts working again.
All models are placeholders for now. The rocks might stay.
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Sounds like a cool idea! For an atmospheric game it’s important to have a great and consistent visual style as well as good sound. Instead of working on other ships if you have time, I’d recommend you polish the feel of the game.
If you can fly wherever you want, i think it would be cool to have non procedural landmarks on the distance you can fly to and explore. This would give the player a goal rather than just flying around the same rocks all the time.

Thanks CG, those sound like good ideas!

OK, I finally got my video to upload to YouTube, I had to downsize it a lot because my internet is running at a snails pace, so apologies for the quality. Here’s the day 2 update. I worked on the skybox and clouds and am trying to figure out the lighting. The controls are a little touchy, but that’s kind of how I want it.

Wow, that actually looks beautiful. Those clouds seem to give a bit of performance leaks for you when recording. Try different optimization methods (maybe graphics setting for cloud density so that more people can play it smoothly?)

Good luck!

Looks beautiful! Looking forward to see some stuff to explore in the landscape :smiley:

Woowwww this sounds amqzing bro Awesome Awesome work i really cant wait to play bro !!!

Fred/K.S

For the landscape try and focus more on how it looks from the sky and not the Ground are any pilots going to land and explore or is it just flying in space and also in the plannet?

Fred/K.S

Looks great!..I would added some sunrays and maybe some triggered asteroids flying down ( not too fast:) ) to the player to avoid ?

Amazing work wip, I love the rocky props over the clouds with planets in the back ground, very good idea… even it’s efficient and it looks great keep it up…

Thanks for the comments!

Asteroids sound awesome, I’ll try and add those!

There will be no landing, only flying. To keep the scope small I’m probably not going to add high/low orbit space flight, only atmosphere flight.

I can’t believe you can actually play that with so many clouds. My computer would just crash.

I had a good amount of time I could dedicate to this last night, and i got a fair amount done. I worked on:

  • Long distance viewing with megastructures to explore in the distance

  • A cloud wake effect

  • Screen effects:
    [LIST]

  • Lens Flares

  • Chromatic Aberration

  • A shooting system

  • Started adding sounds

  • A very basic AI that needs a lot more work

  • I optimized the clouds some, reducing the number by half, but still retaining a decent look.

  • I discovered a big performance issue with how the clouds are instanced, so I will need to optimize some more.

[/LIST]

I do plan on having multiple graphics options available, because I have a feeling it could be a rather heavy application to run.

Great…this cloud wake effect is so cool
I like this game very much

one question…what covers view on the Saturn in the background…some structure?
I think player should can see the whole view on the planet for a feeling a very large space…the tower-like structures( rocks ) there may be but nothing very big.
If this is a big structure I would move it somewhere else…but that’s just my opinion:)


Yeah I will. Right now it’s just a super giant cube I dropped randomly to test distance viewing and it happened to line up with Saturn.

Also, nice pic!

Latest screenshots. I added meteor showers, but they are very resource heavy so I don’t know how I feel about that, or what I can do about it in such a short period of time with so much else to do. Also, you can see a targeting reticle onscreen to help locate enemies.


So I’ve realized today that the project has grown larger than I originally intended… as usual… so I’m not going to make a menu, probably not going to model any ships (they will remain basic diamond shapes), probably calling sound done, and I don’t know what to do about music yet. Hopefully come Monday it will at least be playable.

Also, what’s this glowing thing in the sky!!??


Looks fantastic, noticed in your video that there was a clicking sound in the flying loop sound effect? Not sure if this was intentional but might be worth trimming out if it isn’t.