Announcing my new game - Solus - Survival/Exploration - Unreal Engine 4

I am proud to announce my new game Solus.

Solus is a single player exploration and survival game, experienced in first person and developed in Unreal Engine 4. It is set on a mysterious and uninhabited alien planet - http://www.solusthegame.com.

http://www.hourences.com/my-new-game-so…ploration-game/

It is meant as the spiritual successor to The Ball. Same universe, different planet. Like with The Ball it is a big new game early on in the Unreal Engine cycle. It is atmosphere driven and level design heavy just like The Ball. And like with The Ball I being the one man army doing loads of work on this all on my own. It is my vision, concept, and style. The whole sky and weather system is mine, the color pallet and atmosphere, a lot of the models, all of the scripting, many of the particle effects, etc. And I did all of that in just 4 months time, part time. Additional help was received from Wiktor Öhman, who took care of all the space ship debris, some texturing, and website/logo, and Daniel Kopp who took care of most foliage, some various random help, and some of the particle effects.

Also credits to Gametextures.com for various nice tiling textures.

[Blocked Image: http://www.hourences.com/soluscontent/solusscreen5.jpg]

The idea is to make a living and breathing planet, so you really feel like you are trapped on this beautiful but dangerously active alien planet. I took it far. I got tide, temperature, wind, and so on. They change dependent on the environment. If it is clear skies nights are colder but days are warmer. If there is a lot of wind, nights are colder. You can be hit by lightning and die. If it rains the temperature goes down. Flowers close during the night. The environment actually reflects everything when it begins to rain. And so on.

[Blocked Image: http://www.hourences.com/soluscontent/solusscreen15.jpg]

For me this wasn't just a challenge to learn the new tools and features, and to get the style right, it was also all about making it not just work and look good, but doing those two things in a way that I can reproduce and extend it further rapidly. On the beach scene, spaceship parts aside, the only things that were actually modeled were the foliage meshes and one single hexagon pillar. Everything else you see is generated through clever tricks.
Everything is highly modular. I designed a giant box of legos that I can now give to level designers and have them make whatever they want using the same pieces over and over again. The thing takes less than 1 GB memory while running, while using 4096 and 2048 textures for nearly everything you see.

The game is far from completion, this is just an early sneak peak and teaser. Nothing in the pictures is representative of the final quality.

[Blocked Image: http://www.hourences.com/soluscontent/solusscreen11.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://www.hourences.com/soluscontent/solusscreen14.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://www.hourences.com/soluscontent/solusscreen22.jpg]

Thanks people.

Player will wander around, scavenging for items while trying to not die from one of the many dangers in the environment. Think Cast Away with a touch of Minecraft (caves, gathering things), and some of the mystery from Lost.

I will post some updates as I go along, though I will be focusing on gameplay next and that will be harder to show in pics and such.

No idea if their DX11 rendering does that.

It is partially inside as I see no other way of doing this. The planets are gigantic in size. One planet is the size of the entire available building space in UE3, and orbits the middle of the level. The space beyond that is even larger. There are no skybox'es or such.