Robert Utter

Flying Over the Influence

March 12, 2014 in category Projects and tags unity3d

By Robert Utter

Flying Over the Influence is a drunken flight simulator for Unity WebPlayer and mobile devices.

Choose your plane. Fly through rings for bonus points. Shoot or collect balloons to increase your time. Purple balloons will also get your pilot drunk, making flight more difficult.

Matt Shouse and I developed a protoype in January, 2014 for the Global Game Jam, and decided to continue working on the project through GDC. Our original build is open source.

All code, placeholder audio, and UI are by me; all 3D art is by Matt. We use one public domain music file and a few texture samples, otherwise the work is from scratch.

Key features include:

Flight with in-game physics
Multi-platform control system (keyboard for PC/web, gyro for mobile)
Rendering performance enhanced through dynamic/static batching, atlasing
Ability to calibrate a custom "neutral" position for gyro input
Camera and flight controls dynamically affected by inebriation

One curious note: my experience working on Bust-N-Rush was very helpful on this game, since I've spent a lot of time learning to create interesting camera movements without causing motion sickness for most players. It's a surprisingly fine line to walk!

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