Helicopter Simulator: Innsbruck Edition

My inspiration

Since I was a kid, I was always inspired by the alps. On trips that my family made the scenery of the high mountains fascinated me. Also I am a big fan of flight simulation games. Therefore, when I heard about the Horizon Worlds competition, my idea was to combine both of these passions into one experience.

Creation Process

After some research I found out that the Austrian government provides open source aerial imagery covering the whole country. Unfortunately, having the whole country in the game would take up way to much resources, so I decided to limit my World to the city of Innsbruck. I combined the images with terrain height data and created a high res 3d model of the city and a low res model of the surrounding area in Blender. Then I used the Gen AI 3d model tool to create some helicopters and wrote/modified a script to control these models like a helicopter. After that I placed helipads around the city. The mission elements of the game is kept simple and can be seen as a new take on a incremental simulation game for an immersive 3d world. Every 90 seconds an other helipad gets selected as the target and the users can fly there to earn XP. With these XP points they unlock new helicopters. Besides the missions, the game can also be used just as a place to hang out, meet people and explore the scenery.

Room for improvement

As I had limited time to complete this challenge, there are still features that could be added. For example, a helicopter race feature or different types of challenges than just landing/picking up would be nice. Also, more helicopters and a more sophisticated rewards system would make the World more exiting.

Challenges

Creating this World (my first one) was a new experience and a lot of fun. Still, sometimes the process was a bit challenging for me. For example, the documentation of the Leaderboard System was a bit short, so I had problems implementing it into my World. Maybe the explanations for developers could be more detailed in the future.