Agent B40 in: Just Another B-Day

Linux & Windows: a 9×9km open world game of shootin' robots and flyin' aircraft.

(Download links way below.)

For my brother Ben's 40th birthday, I built him this game (with UE5) that combines his affinity for aircraft and flying with his penchant for open-world games — its main character being a UE5 MetaHuman closely modelled to his likeness (for the lulz).

Still, it could be (some hours of) gaming fun for anyone else, too! Who knows. So with said b-day well behind us, this hereby becomes Now Available For The Rest Of Us  =)

Synopsis:

The storyline is basically just cobbled together to "narratively justify" the choices made from  my constraints (limited dev time of 6-7 weeks for the birthday deadline, limited asset vault, specific flair & soundtrack preference) and told entirely in the intro sequence; in short — you're a top secret agent with world-class flying skills, summoned on your birthday by The Agency for a (untypically) not-saving-humanity-this-time special mission of (for you) almost menial chores: to salvage 40 military aircraft from a former villain's now-abandoned lair isle in the south seas, unlocking them by neutralizing their left-over guardian robots that still roam about.

Errata:

Flying, shooting and other game mechanics aren't all that sophisticated, more like bare-bones sufficient / arcadey to have something that can be justifiably called "game play".

The just-under 9km × 9km island (while sporting foliage, biomes, mountains, roads, "low-budget ocean" and 12 built environments) is lacking animals and nature sounds (and a real AAA ocean), there's no characters on it (other than said former-villain's left-over robots) and no drivable vehicles, but hey, it was a 6-7 weeks project essentially! For that it turned out looking rather mighty fine (if just a tad patchworky in places), in no small part thanks to the many artists whose assets I have had the privilegue of combining and composing together into this island scape. I will soon find the time to list them all and put them in the Credits! But the short of it, all art assets used incl. sounds, music, font, textures and 3D models are all works by others, not me. (My work here then was the overall-world design / composition, the coding, UI, and endless asset fix-ups / troubleshootings / workaroundings / tweakings.)

The initial game intro sequence might feel too long at over 5 minutes: it can be skipped-over by pressing the E key 3x on the keyboard (or the Y key 3x on Xbox-style controllers). If you do, just remember that whenever you deem something to be a weird game-play design decision: it was probably artfully and very-plausibly explained-away during that game intro's lengthy tirade dialogue  =)

Performance:

This really needs a PC-with-GPU that is at the very least rather more powerful than say the 2022 Steam Deck (on which it immediately lags and stutters and after 2-5 minutes reliably freezes, even at the lowest-quality setting)! Any iGPU-only machine also very likely just won't do (for long), though on very recent ones you might get by alright with 20-30% for the "Resolution Scale" setting at the lowest Quality Level setting.

For PCs with GPU: even on my RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, 16GB VRAM, 64GB RAM, Intel Core i9, 20 cores, 4k display, Garuda Linux, late-2023 "gaming laptop" MSI machine, I need to set the game's Resolution Scale setting to 80% for the (default) Quality Level 2, or 70% for the next-higher one, for stably smooth framerates. So at least for 4k displays, it's advisable to tweak this setting somewhere like that (under Settings).

Controls:

While the gameplay itself supports Xbox-style controllers (though not as nicely/smoothly as it does keyboard+mouse), the game menu doesn't really — so for the menu you better just use mouse / touchpad / touch screen.