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[Hellfish]

Lonely Mountains: Downhill
A Downhill Mountain Biking Game for PC focusing on responsive and fun controls,
an open level design and an untouched nature in a beautiful low poly style.

You and your bike - take it on a thrilling ride down an unspoiled mountain landscape. Make your way through thick forests, narrow trails and wild rivers. Race, jump, slide and try not to crash - all the way from the peak to the valley!

Features:

• Custom bike physics & simple controls (feels like riding a bike without the difficulties of a hardcore simulation)
• Discover and enjoy an unspoiled nature
• Several mountains - each with it's unique setting & challenges
• Each mountains is divided into small seamlessly connected sections, so you can ride from top to bottom in one go*

   *currently it looks like we can achieve almost non-existing loading times between the levels.

We are Megagon Industries, a small three headed indie game studio from Berlin. We created this DevLog when the game didn't even have a name and the last months were rather quiet, but now we have more time to focus on the project and will update you here as good as possible. Of course you can also find the game on Facebook, Twitter and IndieDB.

Feedback in any form is always welcome!

 Daniel & Jan
  from Megagon Industries

Original post as reference

I'm part of small three people indie game studio called Megagon Industries from Berlin and we're currently working on a prototype for a downhill game (which doesn't even have a name yet).

The game is made with unity and in development for PC/Mac first and Mobile afterwards. We spend most of the last months trying to get the bike physics and controls right. We started with Unity Physics and wheel colliders but that didn't work out so we wrote our own bike physics.







All art assets (except bike&rider) are placeholders although the low poly look is already a good impression of the final style we're aiming for.

Feedback would be much appreciated!

[SimonFelix]

Damn this looks great. I really like the low poly style and particle/dirt effect 
Could you tell a bit more about gameplay?

[JamesRossi]

I'm a total sucker for the low poly design. The animations look really slick too, might be partially the fact the view is pulled back and the low poly assets, but it is totally meshing.

How long has it taken you to get to this point? And will there be a Yeti at the bottom of the hill that eats you?

[Hellfish]

Thanks for the nice words!

I can give some overview of the gameplay as currently designed (still mostly on paper, so it will probably change)

• You can choose between different mountains with different flora/fauna but also different kind of obstacles and ground types.
  
• You can unlock new mountains in the course of the game.
• Every mountain will feature around 20/25 tracks.
• Tracks will be very short, probably around 20 - 90 seconds.
• Tracks will visually be seamless. We want to give you the feeling like you're riding down a mountain from the highest peak to the valley.
• You will crash a lot and we have a fun rag-doll crashing system
• There is no AI, power ups or collectibles, your primary goal is to reach the end of the trail.
  
• We will probably add a bunny hop.
• You can get three medals per track which you can use to upgrade your bikes in various areas. -> 1 for beating the track, ->1 for beating the best-time, ->1 is hidden and can be found on or outside of the track
• We will have leaderboards
• You will also be able to customize your rider
• Tracks will feature a rich environment, animated animals, weather effects, etc.
  
• We also thinking about implementing local multiplayer

That's it for the moment. We're mostly working on the asset pipe line, improving the physics and collision system and polishing the controls. The next step is to build a lot of levels and to test all kinds of grounds like water, mud, ice, snow, etc and various obstacles and level elements.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Daniel

[Hellfish]

@JamesRossi lol, Skiing Yeti Mountain was indeed a huge inspiration for the game. Is it that obvious? I believe Jan is working on it something like 4/5 months now but only part-time, so maybe a few weeks in total. We're all freelancers and I still need to finish our next game (https://www.facebook.com/TwistedLinesGame/ ) before I can join him.

[JamesRossi]

@JamesRossi lol, Skiing Yeti Mountain was indeed a huge inspiration for the game. Is it that obvious?

Oh man, dating myself here. I was thinking of SkiFree, which must have inspired Skiing Yeti Mountain.


Worth checking out real quick if you'd never played it before.
http://ski.ihoc.net/

[Hellfish]

Ohh, you're right! I completely forgot about that game. I played it, but it must be ages ago. Must have been 7 or 8 years old when I played it.

[Cranktrain]

The bike physics look particularly good, a mixture of natural and arcadey. I'd like to hear a bit more about how you approached writing your own system, and anything you learnt along the way.

I'd also love to see some ragdoll gifs, when they're ready!

[DrWDSo]

Hey everybody and thanks for the kind words. I am Jan, also part of Megagon Industries and currently working on this game.

What I found so special about Skiing Yeti Mountain were the super simple controls, which gave you an excelent feeling of control. I tried to implement that, however bikes are more complicated with additional acceleration and braking. After several iterations we now have something which gives you enough control and is equally simple to learn (at least the feedback is good so far). However I will focus on the gamepad/mouse/keyboard controls for now.

I'd like to hear a bit more about how you approached writing your own system, and anything you learnt along the way.

I'd also love to see some ragdoll gifs, when they're ready!

I hope I find some time to start posting some insights on our tumblr blog.
And yes, definitely ragdoll gifs! I'm already looking forward to capture some of the crashes...

[zminusone]

Pretty graphics, at first glance I thought the character was made of wood because of the lighting I guess. I don't know, looks great either way! Following you on twitter.

[jctwood]

I adore an old PS2 title Downhill Domination and this gives me the same vibes so looking forward to seeing more!

[SkullPixel]

This game looks awesome.

So far it seems as if the downhill riding you have in mind is closer to mountain-biking. Will there be any chance of a mountain more like BMX tracks with jumps and berms and all that goodness?

And I do highly recommend Local Multiplayer. It can really be a great addition to a game, especially one like yours here.

[Christian]

Is the prototype available anywhere, or will be? This looks so fun to play

[jaketa]

Cool idea, if you nail the balance between realism and arcade feel on the physics it could be really fun. What I see on these couple of gifs looks very good already. I like the finishing drift animation

[DrWDSo]

This game looks awesome.

So far it seems as if the downhill riding you have in mind is closer to mountain-biking. Will there be any chance of a mountain more like BMX tracks with jumps and berms and all that goodness?

And I do highly recommend Local Multiplayer. It can really be a great addition to a game, especially one like yours here.

Yes, we definitely have downhill riding in mind, but jumps will be a part of it, however no BMX tricks or stunts - at least for now.

Local Multiplayer is not implemented yet, but I keep that in mind during development. We have some ideas for that, especially the short sections we aim for might be fun! I'm really looking forward to that. 

Cool idea, if you nail the balance between realism and arcade feel on the physics it could be really fun. What I see on these couple of gifs looks very good already. I like the finishing drift animation

Thanks! We went for custom physics (so no Unity rigidbodys, wheel colliders, etc) to get this mix between arcade and realism. Also the animations will hopefully give a "real" feeling to it, although if the core physics break some rules every now and then.

Is the prototype available anywhere, or will be? This looks so fun to play

Unfortunately not yet. We will let you guys know!

[Screen Head Media]

Cool concept and really nice graphics.

I like the combination of lowpoly, fluid animations and the wide use of noise and distance blur.
It gives me a somewhat similar feeling like this miniaturized style that was popular for photos some time ago

Looking forward to more images/videos which show the overall gameplay (goals, obstacles etc.).

[brantkings]

I'm loving this so much right now. Looks like those types of games that you have to manage a lot of sensible stuff to get the perfect run.

Want to see what you guys are gonna do with this. Keep this log updated, please!

[DrWDSo]

I like the combination of lowpoly, fluid animations and the wide use of noise and distance blur.
It gives me a somewhat similar feeling like this miniaturized style that was popular for photos some time ago

We are still experimenting with that style, but I'm happy you like the miniature/tiltshift effect too!

Looks like those types of games that you have to manage a lot of sensible stuff to get the perfect run.

What stuff comes to your mind?

[DrWDSo]

A sneek peek into our test labs...

Since crashes will play an important role in our game, we spend some time adding ragdoll physics. Until last week the bike & rider where simply switched off and a generic ragdoll (i.e. our default model) was placed at that position & rotation with matching velocity. For fast crashes that worked OK-ish, because you couldn't really tell the difference between the character poses, but it always had this little arkward jump in the transition.

Another problem was that the bike/rider are now customizable (without much to choose from atm), so we cannot use that generic ragdoll model anymore. Now that generated customized mesh is reused for the ragdoll and the bone positions are transfered. This way there is almost no jump in most cases. However there are some issues when the bike and legs are intersecting and they are rapidly seperated - I haven't found a good solution for that case. Any advice?

[lobstersteve]

I thought it'd be some downhill simulation game when i read the name first, but that looks fun