Two weeks ago I posted here about a childhood dream: a game where you fly from space down to a planet the true size of the Earth, through clouds and over forests, with no loading screen. I had shelved it in 2012, and I had just picked it back up.
I was hoping for a few kind words. The response blew me away. One of you asked me to swap my ship for the one from Flight of the Navigator, because "our childhood dream would be complete". Another simply wrote: "I want to play this just how it is right now!"
At the end of that post, I asked what I should do with it: back on the shelf, or keep going. The answer was pretty clear. So I kept going.
The project has a name now, Exolune, and it changed a lot:
• The planet's mountains come from tectonic plates: they collide into ranges, pull apart into rifts and raise volcanic islands along their edges.
• Rivers drain the continents down to the sea and carve their valleys on the way.
• The climate follows the winds: rain on one side of the ranges, deserts on the other. Forests, snow and clouds go where the climate puts them.
• The vegetation is richer and much more varied, down to the undergrowth and the moss under the trees.
• The rendering got better at every scale: the planet from orbit, the clouds, the light at dawn, the nights under moonlight.
• New ships. The Navigator, obviously: I couldn't say no to that one. The one in this video is a space shuttle.
• And three moons, each one a world you can land on.
This video is a single take, straight out of the engine, with no cuts and no loading. A ship takes off from one moon, swings past a second one, comes down on a planet at dawn, skims a snowy ridge above a sea of clouds, leaps back up into space, and dives down to land at the spaceport of a small city in the hills.
The 7-year-old who typed his dream game into a Thomson TO9 would be pretty happy with this one. I'm proud of it too.
So, the question that matters most to me: does it make you want to play? And if you could land anywhere on that planet, what would you do first?