About

Skyformer (formerly Xenion) is a first-person survival and automation game about building factories run by drones to power a machine that terraforms a tiny planet. As you terraform, geographic positioning and protection of factories becomes key to surviving different types of destructive weather that can occur.

Coming to Windows/Mac/Linux in 2024. Both single-player and co-op is aimed to be supported.

A couple of the main development goals:

• A factory-builder that requires less pre-planning and calculations. Instead of building massive optimized factories, the challenge lies more in strategic positioning and survival with a smaller material production tree.
• A game that dynamically simulates weather well and makes it a significant part of the game. As a meteorology enthusiast, I'd like to excite people about weather!

Design, art, and programming with a custom engine by solo developer @weatherfused.

Sound by Epic Stock Media.

Technical Features

Game Features

• Item / crafting tree system
• Automated factory pipeline system
• Dynamic weather simulation
• Storm rendering
• Dynamic climate, microclimates in specific regions
• Storms/clouds/radar/temperature/winds synchronized over client/server
• Weather forecasting
• Weather map rendering
• Snow accumulation / melting
• Dedicated or in-process server
• 2 player online co-op support with player-hosted servers
• Epic Games API integration for authentication
• First-person camera
• Wield and use items
• Mouse-picking with OBBs and AABBs
• Vegetation
• Generated based on regional climate
• Flight system
• Save system
• Base-building
• Building construction/deconstruction/configuration/repairs

Engine Features

• Networking
• Custom binary protocol or JSON (for debugging)
• Client/Server model
• Client-side interpolation
• TCP
• Authoritiative game server features
• Client-side prediction
• Renderer
• Shader loading / hot-reloading
• OpenGL support, more APIs will be supported
• Instanced rendering
• Transparency pipeline
• Pre-pass, post-processing
• Forward rendering
• Double precision world coordinates
• Input Processing
• GLFW
• Controller and keyboard/mouse support
• Game loop
• Fixed and variable rate processing
• 3D models
• OBJ file format support
• Normal maps
• Custom bounding volumes
• AABB/OBB calculation
• UV sphere generation
• Screen-space model outline rendering
• Programmatic animations
• Entity heirarchies for handling rotations
• Quaternion and euler rotations
• Sound system
• 3D spatial sound with prioritization system
• OpenAL
• OGG Vorbis streaming
• WAV sound effects
• World editor
• Terrain editor
• Model placement
• Model editor
• Used for loading, debugging, and configuring individual models
• Lighting
• Variant of Blinn-Phong shading
• Fresnel
• Point lights
• Frustum culling
• Terrain
• Height map with normals / tangents
• Custom serialization
• Texturing based off of the Witcher 3 terrain design
• Chunked terrain with multi-threaded streaming from disk + memory
• Tri-planar mapping
• Sky dome
• Day/night cycle
• Dynamic cloud cover based off of perlin noise
• Particles
• Soft particles
• Shadows
• Cascaded shadow maps
• Soft-shadows (Exponential and variance shadow maps)
• God/crepuscular rays in screen space
• Anti-aliasing (FXAA)
• Ambient occlusion (SSAO)
• Text rendering
• Signed-distance field fonts
• UI system
• Immediate-mode UI
• Scalable
• World-space HUD
• Water
• Gerstner waves
• Foam rendering
• Collision detection and response
• Swept sphere algorithm
• Gravity
• Fall damage
• Grass rendering
• Color grading
• Gamma correction / HDR
• Multi-pass bloom
• Spatial partitioning
• Distance fog, height fog
• Profiling system
• Console
• Custom binary protocol
• Used for both networking and file IO
• Object pooling