Logo of gameb

About

game type

this is a play as you desire game.

description

b free
flight experience: a newly created undulating meadow in spring / summer with a central big tree and day-night-cycle on every start is the playground of b -- a bumblebee of subgenus gaudium formosum, recognizable by their cheeky :p.

minimum Requirements with default settings and 1920x1080 resolution

recommended Requirements with default settings and 1920x1080 resolution

Controls

ESCAPE
open menu
left mouse button click (with menu not open)
toggle grass density to alternative value
r
toggle let camera rotate around b
p
toggle land on below place and stick to it
s
halt when moving only due to inertia
i
toggle slow down time to a halt
u
b at the starting position again
m
attempt to land on a moon beyond where the sun rises
k
toggle moon collider
backspace
recenter VR cameras
increase flight speed (accel)
w
slow down flight speed (brake)
s
turn left
a
turn right
d
fly up
space
fly down
left shift
roll left
q
roll right
e
move wings to forward flight direction
o
move wings to upward flight direction
l (lowercase L)

joystick meaning

thrust
speed
rudder
up/down
wings
roll
yaw
left/right
heli +/-
forward/upward

Updates

see Steam.

Download

Windows Steam storepage Android here, requirements different to above apply, see thither

Note

Made with

Game Engine

Unity

and third-party assets and libraries, see Steam storepage and launch game.

History

August 2013 (this is right :) ), in that month
Intending to create a racing game simulating the forces on the driver visually, very quickly realizing also correctly simulating a 4 tyre based vehicles path due to input, itself and surrounding is difficult, the vehicle was chosen to be a hovercraft having movement characteristics which were to be as developed.
Hovercraft modelling was done vertice by vertice. The driver was a 3rd party asset whose pose is freely configurable. The steering wheel was also modelled.
Environment was intended to be like in a green valley and as such having grass was a must. The grass was to be truly modelled polygons. Performance of randomly placed, statically modelled grass at a realistic density has even today a GeForce GTX 1070 rendering the scene below 1 fps. Game engine Unity s terrain has been given a try.

September 2016, in that month
Revisiting the idea of a flight based game above a grass landscape but this time it being wanted to be straight-forward performant and made from Game engine Unity built-in features, effort was made to model a nice landscape with Unity terrain sophisticatedally. A beautifully looking hardware accelerated shader for grass was found on Unity Asset store and it added to the scene. The plane was made from Unity built-in geometric primitives, fully animated and Unity built-in shaders nicely configured. The physics, particularly air friction, although estimated realistically simply implemented proved to be difficult, particularly in conjunction with gravity and the plane possibly moving at unrecovarable speeds when loosing lift and thus having a player loose fun with realistic-aimed for physics.

November 2016, in that month
Creating a tree generation algorithm for having a tree visualised on a private webpage. The visualisation was done by elementary webpage elements stylewise transformed to look appropriately. The leaf is a background image of an elementary webpage element. The image created for this leaf is exactly the one still growing from the trees b flies around today, as is the tree generation algorithm used but now implemented in a language more closely to hardware than found behind webpages and using hardly changed low-polygon count having geometric primitives from SketchUp as its branch parts. At the size of the tree on the webpage as shown on the image, the webpage animates almost smoothly on current as of writing this mid to high-end desktop hardware but only the leafs on the branch tips may animate to keep it so.

February 2017, a weekend in that month
Deciding to implement the tree generation algorithm in Unity for having more beautiful environment eye-candy assets at hand for the flight game being pondered to resume development on. Adding a statically rotating scene visualising the tree and making the light follow a day and night cycle.

February 2017, in the latter half
Realising the tree scene can be interactive on hardware and forgoing the addition of artificial objects the idea of b sprung to mind. Utilizing the method of using geometric primitives and pushing realistic movement based on input aside, straightforward controls allowing complete free 3D space movement were written. Those are b s code for following input today.

March 2017, in that month
Many exhibits were added to the interactive experience b to make this worthwhile, from hilly mesh deformation over flower textures to the 3rd party grass shader as found for the plane game used to a weather cycle and eye-candy as light at night by objects deemed fireflies, documented on video watchable here (column "b")

June 2017
b is greenlit and polish, and sophisticated code examination which always has been taken place, was performed on top of updates from authors to their 3rd party libraries used making and allowing for b to be hopefully visually more appealing than ever.