Kessler

Kessler is a 3rd person space janitor simulation game. Set in the relatively near future, where the Earth’s orbit has been surrounded by space debris as a result of nonstop launch attempts, discarded satellites, and more. It is the Player’s responsibility to use the tools at their disposal to remove the debris so as to clear Earth’s way back to the stars.

Major Systems

Enhanced Movement System and 6DoF

This game is driven by its movement system. For that reason, I have been experimenting with the Enhanced Movement System to get the functionality desired for Kessler’s character movement to both feel fun, yet hold to that feeling of realism that this project is aiming for.

Part of this process involved exploration into providing the player with so-called “6 Degrees of Freedom” (6DoF), to allow them to move and rotate in any direction as they may desire to while in orbit.

Character vs. Controller

In an effort to provide a feeling of delay between the camera and the character’s actual movement, I got to experiment with the differences and distinctions between utilizing the Character object type vs. the Player Controller object type in regards to handling movement input.

What I’ve found is that traditionally, the Player Controller is desired for controlling input elements for multiplayer titles. While this isn’t a multiplayer title, I found that adopting that same mentality helped when I needed to slow my player’s Mesh and prohibit it from immediately rotating with my camera. I found in doing so provided a satisfying delay effect.

Large Scale Lumen Lighting

A lot of this game’s aesthetics are centered around realism, and for that we wanted to utilize Lumen. To experiment with this, I used 8K images of the Earth to create a working Earth object, complete with clouds that move way too fast once you stop to think about it. Currently, the Earth model in the Engine is about to scale as I could make it. The intent here was to see how well Lumen could handle a simulation of that scale. The answer was: pretty well.

Video Playthrough

Development

Team Size: 3 (1 Programmer, 1 3D Artist, 1 Producer)

Status: In Progress

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Platforms: PC