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

[Hourences]

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  - www.solusthegame.com.

 

Next gen Unreal Engine 4. I have been working with UE4 since last March, and have been working on Solus since July on an off and on basis.

 

http://www.hourences.com/my-new-game-solus-unreal-engine-4-survival-exploration-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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

 

Edited November 15, 2013 by Hourences

[Sentura]

Pretty damn beastly doing this by yourself. I liked The Ball, so I'm gonna look forward to this!

[2d-chris]

oOooO nice!

[Dennispls]

Looks great Sjoerd! Like Sentura said, pretty beastly doing this on your own (for the most part and especially in a couple of months). 

[PogoP]

Looks very cool so far. Looks kinda like Lost, in space. But not Lost in Space, because that sucks.

[knj]

0_o looks WOW !

[PaulH]

Looks awesome so far, good job

[Sjonsson]

Great stuff! Looking forward to see gameplay!

[FrieChamp]

The look and atmosphere is amazing! What is the player going to do in the game?

[0kelvin]

Does UE4 use that new texture DX11+ feature that loads the texture in pieces so that it consumes less memory for really large textures?

 

Something strange about that planet and moon on the sky, they feel being inside the planet's amtosphere itself?!

 

Nice alien world.

[Hourences]

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.

Edited November 17, 2013 by Hourences

[-HP-]

Wiktor is one of my favourit artists around, this should be good! Please keep us posted man! Looking great already.

[Sprony]

Yeah man, looks very promising. Please keep us posted!

 

Also, respect for doing this practically on your own. I've seen your work throughout the years and it's amazing to see how much you've grown since the early Unreal days. Talk about being self made. Hats of sir!

[Mazy]

Nice, looks great~~

[Sentura]

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.

 

Wouldn't it be a question of simply shading it differently rather than attempting to put it at a far distance? It definitely sounds like there's a tech hack buried somewhere that could help out with that...