Solitary

Solitary is a homemade game prototype that was inspired by the Ace Combat franchise, and especially their latest entry to date, Ace Combat 7, that featured volumetric clouds for the first time. There is no combat in it yet though! All you can do is chill out by flying within the clouds.

Solitary is built on top of a simple and quite unoptimized homemade Vulkan engine, for Windows only at the time, as I don't own a new enough Mac to port it. Linux would be doable though.

The goals of this project were mostly to:

• sink my teeth into the Vulkan graphics API
• have fun figuring out how to render volumetric clouds, with the guidance of various online sources, presentations and papers released by game studios and scholars in the past. The lighting model currently used by the engine is by no means physically accurate. I took many liberties, especially with ambient lighting.
• implement some basic flight gameplay (and possibly aerial combat later)

Controls

If you own a gamepad, this is the recommended way to play the game. Controls can be remapped from the "Options" -> "Edit controls" menu, and analog axes can be inverted too if needed. The default controls shipped with the game are for keyboard though, for safety.

• Left analog stick / left-right arrow keys: roll control
• Left analog stick / up-down arrow keys: pitch control (can be inverted in options)
• Right analog stick: camera control (both vertical and horizontal axes can be inverted in options)
• Left bumper / right control key: yaw left
• Right bumper / 0 numpad key: yaw right
• Left trigger / left alt key: brake
• Right trigger / left control key: accelerate
• A, space key: shoot (useless right now as there are no enemies to shoot down)
• D-pad up-down / 8-2 numpad keys: increase or decrease clouds density
• D-pad left-right / 4-6 numpad keys: change time of day (sun direction)

Credits

• Game design / Engine & game programming / SFX: Christophe "CarboHydroM" Blondel
• Aircraft design & modeling: "F1-Br Arara" by Junio "jnpnhr" Pinheiro

Music

The game features a metal Ace Combat 7 soundtrack medley for music, that you can download separately from http://www.carbohydrom.net/.

• Original score composed by: Keiki Kobayashi
  
• Arrangement, guitars, mixing & mastering: Christophe "CarboHydroM" Blondel
• Bass: Max Noël