Onlook

Intro

Onlook is a bit unorthodox when it comes to video games but I found it super interesting to make. It may not have a story, any music, or any form of user interface but nevertheless it serves a purpose: showing us the vast beauty of Earth right "in plain sight." 

Concept

While space exploration is an interesting and insightful endeavor, I believe many fail to recognize, just how incredible and diverse our home planet is. I hope to show that through the use of different planets serving as some of the many ecosystems and environments we have on our planet.

How to Play

WASD -> Movement

Space -> Jump!

Hold Shift -> Run

Click -> Focus game

Escape -> Access mouse cursor

Mechanics

The mechanics behind this game were heavily inspired by the games Little Big Planet and Super Mario Galaxy where you aren't bound to the normal concept of gravity's direction being constant. Each planet has it's own gravitational pull and if you get close enough you're concept of up and down changes right before your eyes.

I was able to accomplish this using the Godot 4.3 game engine which is an open-source game engine with many useful tools including visual scripting, a powerful scene editor where everything is made of Nodes, a built-in code editor, a many other features! With Godot I was able to easily create my own gravitational physics and even add a cool pixelated low-res effect to accentuate the low-poly simplicity (and hide all the empty negative space lol)

What I learned

Unfortunately, my team was not able to attend this year and I arrived pretty late so I decided to tackle this project solo! As a Software Engineering major I don't get many opportunities to explore the interactive and visual sides of coding and I learned a lot about game engines.

I learned...

• how to make and export a project using Godot!
• how to create and use meshes to create planets and their environments
• how to edit materials and shaders to procedurally and post processing effects
• I learned GDScripting (Godot coding language) and other built-in functions from the open-source engine Godot

The future of this project

The project is very rough. There are no sounds, instructions, or main direction in the gameplay itself, however, I think it has potential. I hope to one day add multiplayer capabilities and make it so you can explore planets with other people. Maybe I can even make a level builder feature where each player can make and share their own planets to create a huge galaxy of planets promoting the diverse viewpoints of different cultures on Earth.

Thanks for checking it out!

-Bryant

Github link -> https://github.com/bluestarburst/onlook

3D Assets Used

Pretty Grass -> https://stayathomedev.itch.io/stylized-grass-shader

Pretty Low-Poly Environment Assets -> https://korveen.itch.io/lowpoly-environment-pack

Space Skybox! -> https://space-spheremaps.itch.io/space-spheremaps

Very Cool Pixelated Post Processing Effect -> 

Awesome Spherical World's Tutorial! -> https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/vdgfvf/walk_on_spherical_worlds/