Flak Jack project: Moving on, thoughts and misc art dump.

So, if anyone was following along, I decided a while ago to let this project go and move onto other things. I dont think I’ve done anything on the project since around early 2023.

Flak Jack was always massively overscoped, and I quietly mapped out a whole bunch of ideas and dreams for what I thought the game could become. In the end it became more of a frame to explore some weird technical ideas. The terrain work I’ve outlined over the years was about as far as I ever got with anything, but with the limited time I had available to work on things it was enough in itself to keep me going and interested.

If for no other reason than to say a final “goodbye“ to the project I’ve decided to gather up and share here a bunch of random WIP images and videos, just stuff I captured at different points over the years. Maybe they are of interest to someone out there.

Cya Jack!

Recorded Jan 17th, 2019

A capture of the substance designer texure, focused on the city of Amiens in France.

Recorded 7th August, 2016! Way back when I was using the Oculus DK2 and Razer Hydra!

Recorded 7th March 2020. Experimenting with Virtual Textures from memory? Shows the size of the map I was trying to create, covering Northern France and the English Channel.

Recorded 13th July 2022. By this point I moved to UE5 and started playing with using Nanite and Lumen. The terrain was entirely geometry based at this point, I totally abandoned the substanced based workflow.

7th October 2019. I think I was trying a curved Earth here? I love the cloud shadows and sun glints on the river

The game was always about 1 man vs the world, doing the impossible your own way.

Messing with vertex painting no mans land battle damage and trees

Quixel Mixer mud craters

Very, very old tests of geometry based clouds. Before using Truesky and then native UE5 volume clouds.

More old clouds, this time imposter sprites

Instanced static mesh buildings. I think the house colors used their world position to look up a gradient ramp for variations?

I spent a long time working on methods of extracting trench lines from real WW1 trench maps and converting them to geometry. It was a nightmare but these maps are facinating.

I was forever testing views like this to try get a sense of the scale