Sky Adventure - A Hot Air Balloon Exploration Game! WIP

Community Showcase Game Development
1

Hi everybody!

Recently in my spare time I have started tinkering around with a little prototype I have wanted to work on for a good while now: A little hot air balloon that you can pilot around the sky with!

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The main focus so far has been setting up the balloon itself and making it as fun as possible to pilot. There is a little bit more manual control of the balloon than you would otherwise get in real life, but I’m not going for a realistic simulation in this game, just something that feels fun to move about.

It’s early days, so there isn’t really an aim to flying around at the moment apart from bashing into the little clouds. I’m thinking about making the focus be around taking pictures of landmarks and creatures you might see around the sky, a little bit in the vein of something like Pokemon Snap, but we’ll see how it goes. :slight_smile:

Below I have attached a video showing where it is at currently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2tsxv9evss

The other main focus on this project is making something pretty: improving my technical art and material creation skills. I really want to see how far I can push the stylised look of this sky world, so it will be a very arty project when I get into things. Basically, I’m going to have a lot of fun making all sorts of types of clouds to pad out the sky with.

Some things I have done so far

  • You can switch the Balloon Burner on and off, the longer you keep it on, the higher the internal temperature of the balloon will go.
  • Some directional control over the balloon, I’m explaining these by having some side vents on the top of the balloon that you can open and close
  • Quick descent button - Hold Q or shoulder trigger on controller to let air out the top of the balloon for a quick drop. Useful in a pinch.
  • Wind Currents - I made some spline based wind currents that apply an impulse to the balloon in the direction of the tangent of the spline. I can also customize the speed that each current will take you.
  • HUD - Display Ambient Temperature and Balloon Temp, still need to add a upwards speed counter. I’m also considering adding a compass or something similar to the HUD for navigating later on.
  • Options screen, pause menu and main menu - Mainly implemented this now because of the options screen (some of my friends have really bad PCs) - Used this package: https://forums.unrealengine.com/comm…pe-menu-system
  • Lil’ physical clouds - these little balls of fluff randomly spawn within place-able cloud spawners, just some fun physics objects to hit your balloon with!

https://i.imgur.com/Om4hax7.gif

Next things I’m working on

I have pretty much finished my first set of tasks on this project, so the plan now is to tweak the feel of the balloon physics a bit more to get it feeling really good, build a proper test environment, refactor the code I’ve got so far and then I can move onto the Photo-taking mode!

I will post little updates up here as I work on them, in the mean time though any comments/feedback/critique are welcome. :slight_smile:

2

Quick update, working on developing the look of the sky in the little bit of time I’ve had this weekend. Using instanced static meshes for the clouds as well a a noise-based material with displacement for the thin clouds on the bottom.

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Will get back into tweaking the balloon physics more next weekend as I have applied for some desk space at a local gamedev co-working hub, I’m hoping this will allow me to focus a bit more and make even more progress on the project. :slight_smile: Also it will hopefully allow me to get a lot more immediate feedback.

3

A couple more cloud tests. I started off by actually trying to optimize what I already had to make it run at 60fps, but then I started getting into tweaking the lighting settings a bit too much. Also added in some volumetric fog to test out. :slight_smile: All of this stuff makes me really want to pour a lot of time into the game’s photo mode.

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4

Been working on the wind currents a bit more, now they don’t throw you out as easily when you go around the corners. You can now mostly travel through the wind currents with no player input! This is just done by adding an impulse in the direction from the balloon towards the nearest point on the spline, this little change will make the balloon naturally gravitate towards the center of the wind current.

The player can still break away from the current however if they apply enough force in one direction, they can also move in the direction of the current for an additional speed boost.

5

This looks fun! Keep up the good work :slight_smile:

6

Hello everybody!

Just to start: This project isn’t dead! Sorry it’s been a while since I have posted onto this thread. I have a bit of a catch up with what has been happening with the game since the last post here in my new blog post on my website: http://blog.idotri.games/2019/07/project-sky-adventure-hot-air-balloon.html

I haven’t had loads of time to work on the game very recently because I have started teaching again and it’s a new term, plus a lot has been going on over the last bunch of months but I’m hoping some time starts to open up soon to work on the game. In the meantime though here is quick summary of what I have been doing the past few months:

  • You can take pictures now! I have implemented a camera and photo mechanic
  • Doing LOADS more physics tweaks on the balloon (A lot of this has been boring behind the scenes things to make my life easier later on)
  • You can take photos of animals, currently bird are flying around. You can capture information about them and record it in your Bestiary.
  • Creating base concepts/art direction for the world
  • Figuring out what animals we want and how we want them to behave.
  • You can do more stuff with the balloon: the controls have been tweaked, you can level your height using a whisper burner, you can also release air by opening the parachute vent on the top of the balloon allowing you to drop quicker.
  • I have added a fuel system, that can be replenished by gathering little rescue crates that you will see floating about with a little parachute attached.

All of these things I will go over in more detail if needed later on, and there are probably loads of things I have forgotten about. Over the last couple of weeks though I have been working on some extra things; this includes a way for the player to have a temporary speed boost in the balloon as well as collectables that can be used for a tiny boost.

I have also been working on a progression system that allows you to open up more areas of the world, but I will show that when it looks a bit more visually appealing. :’)

So yeah, if you like the concept, check out the devblog link above, there is a lot more stuff in there. But I’ll try and make a bit more of an effort to throw a gif in here now and again. :slight_smile: