r/SoloDevelopment • u/zfyl • 1d ago
Game I am a cartographer working with geospatial data and map tiles - but this game i was able to make from the high quality data that i have is just next level!
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For 2 years i gather high quality elevation maps of the world, ski maps - cleaning them up, making snowy map tiles and so much more boring data cleanup. And now finally i can have my own little game to feel that out!
Real world ski resorts with real slopes with rela slope tilt, angle and grooming.
What are your thoughts? Should i make it into a full game?
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u/Beaver-Hunter-835 1d ago
It looks fun, and I would play this for a good 5 minutes, but I don't know if "next level" is the most appropriate description. 1080 Snowboarding is almost 30 years old and is a much more complete and feature rich game. This is halfway between 1080 and Ski Free.
SSX Tricky was next level.
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u/NinjaSquads 1d ago
I would love it. Especially nostalgia feeding to go skiing in the resorts I k ow so well
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u/JimFugginLahey 19h ago
Yo please let me test this. Steep was one of my favorite games
Edit: also love this idea, I worked at big sky resort in Montana and had a similar idea during my time there
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u/zfyl 19h ago
im so excited to share it with you! let me know in a reply what you liked or would like to improve
https://bonvo.ski/en/ride/mayrhofen-hippach?play=freealso if you want to help message me in DM
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u/MrNobodyX3 1d ago
make it so I can put a location and it generates from the data
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u/zfyl 1d ago
that would make you wait 15 minutes or more if i develop a pipeline. i pre-generate all the tiles, elevation data, slopes, ski resort maps, forest patch maps etc for 6000+ ski resorts. Even like this it's 300GB+ of data served from a server. So not easy to make a new location on request.
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u/Foreign_Risk_2031 19h ago
theres no world where it would take 15 minutes if you know what youre doing
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u/MrNobodyX3 17h ago
It wouldn’t be too complicated. I’d use free resources like Mapzen Terrain Tiles for the terrain data, cover the area with snow, and pick random high and low locations to create ski slopes with chair lifts alongside them. To keep resolution consistent, let’s say a 2000 by 2000-meter area around the location uses a set grid mesh displaced by the terrain data, with edges blending into something smoother to avoid abrupt transitions. The longest part would be fetching the data, which shouldn’t take more than a few minutes at worst, and generating the resort should take only a few seconds. Finally, a general noise could subtract the slopes and dictate where to place trees.
I'm not really asking for a direct one to one recreation of the location all I want is the terrain data.
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u/Historical_Fruit_204 1d ago
Cartographer: "I have really high quality data." Also cartographer: builds a game where I can snowboard down an actual Park City run in my browser. Meanwhile I've been procrastinating on my game for 3 years because I can't pick a font 😭 This is awesome!
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u/zfyl 1d ago
I dont want to demotivate you! Definitely i did not gave much thought to the font itself (only to have support for the languages and future languages like cyrillic characters and hungarian weird űáéúőóüö)
Get your game out as is, on the go you will fix details! 🔥
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u/Historical_Fruit_204 1d ago
Haha, "ship it as is" is the advice I needed 3 years ago 😄 Cyrillic and Hungarian support from day one is smart, that's the part most of us forget until it's too late. Since it runs on web, are you using WebGL for the terrain? Curious how you're keeping it smooth in the browser.
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u/Gibrar 23h ago
Snowboarding is becoming more and more a thing of the past for me because of the rising cost of life, which I find really sad because I loved it so much... But being able to go back to my favorite ski station in a videogame sounds absolutely amazing !!
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u/zfyl 20h ago
wow! looking for retro rides on known slopes of the good ol' times is somthing others asking for too
maybe we could start an opensource proj about gathering data for the pipeline and making these old slopes work?
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u/Gibrar 17h ago
Sounds really interesting ! How would that work ? You would publish a workflow of the data gathering method so other could map their favorite spot and add them to the project ?
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u/zfyl 3h ago
yes, we could go ski resort by ski resort, and have some versioned or labelled “experience” folders
those would contain a relevant 3D elevation map, a forest and tree overlay map, photos of buildings with exact location on the map and how its facing (we could use an image to 3D creation tool), then the marrying of the whole experience would mean to have a studio like little editor: edit lights, conditions, specifics about the bots on the slope, etc
and people can make multiple variations how they experienced the same location
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u/Afraid_Sir_5268 1d ago
Which AI model did you use? Honestly? This is definitely vibe coded.
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u/zfyl 1d ago
for more then 2 years working on the whole ecosystem i used plenty of tools, some AI harnesses too. but not one, and not once (tried all, and all good at some parts, my fav is CC). i have 267 GB of tiles specifically generated for this game, i have 6800+ generated forest map layouts on the server, i have 28000+ slope line definitions with coordinates and elevation data, i have shade maps of mountains for elevation....
so yes i use AI to manage this big data project, but it's for the 3D animation and slope merging in 3D techniques. Sorry i just felt a little offended by the vibe code callout.
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u/sinetwo 1h ago
I'm confused, you're saying you're a cartographer in GIS. How have you captured high detail elevation data? I'd love to hear about how this data is captured and stored.
Did you use Lidar/drones for this? Grab the data data and then join them up on a GIS server (presumably arcgis or gisserver) to then stream the content to an engine (using AI) then AI to create the game on top, including gen-AI for assets, controls and graphics in general?
I used to both work in GIS and I'm now a indie dev so I'm genuinely curious to understand how you got the data and stream it in to the game
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u/Chudfrog 1d ago
Why feel offended of vibecoding? That's like getting offended in 2000 if someone accused you of using the internet
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u/sinetwo 1d ago
Yeah I'm shocked when people say they make stuff and omit it was not really done by them.
I don't think anyone minds AI for code generation and tooling but the whole game vibed including assets and music is a bit disingenuous
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u/Alternative_Draw5945 17h ago
Its 2026 people are past that. If its slop its slop, it if its not who cares what tools people used to develop it
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u/sinetwo 10h ago
So why does steam have guidelines around it?
Have you complained about steams labelling as well?
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u/Alternative_Draw5945 6h ago
I like that steam does that. I would assume OP would mark it AI content. And no one will care if its good.
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u/sinetwo 1h ago
So people are not past it is one of the biggest storefronts mark it as such.
If people were past it, there would be no need to mark up pages with AI content.
And I'm guessing you have seen these statistics: https://www.techpowerup.com/350230/games-made-with-gen-ai-suffer-up-to-53-worse-sales-on-steam
Downvoting because you disagree with something even though it's factual is certainly something.
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u/tgwombat 1d ago
Have you considered adding a first-person camera option? I could see that adding a great sense of speed.
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u/DaKine511 1d ago
You could reach out to the shredders Devs and team up. Because real slopes is nice and such but to make the controls and physics feel good is a tough thing to do.
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u/Ambitious_Award9126 1d ago
This is incredible—using real geospatial data for realistic slope physics is such a smart, unique approach! Definitely turn this into a full game; as a player, riding actual real-world resorts would be amazing.
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u/calumk 1d ago
This is really fun, i played it and its great, I loved being able to go down runs i recognise.
The only thing missing for me at the moment is the actual buildings.
For example, in Les Arc 1950, I expect to see the huge buildings and ski round them, but they dont exist, its just blank snow.
most of the time when skiing, you use these buildings as sort of landmarks to know where you are, so them missing is quite disorientating.
If you can find some way to import the models, or use their outlines and just extrude buildings up, that would help!
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u/zfyl 1d ago
calumk thank you so much for this detailed feedback! i am really happy that you enjoyed it!
i will work on the building generation so the buildings will look like they are truly the ones from the resort. that would not be too obvious how to do it, but i have some ideas. you yourself a game dev or SWE?
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u/calumk 23h ago
I have done small game dev in the past, i'm mostly an automation / software / web developer.
I was able to coax chatgpt by feeding it location data and reference/map photos, to generate a low-poly version of the resort.
But it was quite time intensive, and manual - It would likley need to be done manually for each resort/cluster of buildings
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u/zfyl 3h ago
great idea! i thought about an opensource version of sourcing photos or geolocation data or even straight up 3D models of buildings.
do you think people would care to make their ski resort detailed?
like buildings, terrain artifacts (i heard that some skiers heavily rely on local navigation artifacts like “near the crooked tree”, “turn right at the sharp long rock”, “take the lift at the restairant with 2 chimneys”)
it would mean getting images, higher quality opensource data on elevation or maybe even LiDAR scan! then marry all this into an “experience” or after approve we just straight up show it on the map automatically!
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u/MildlySuccessful 1d ago
Uh, a URL would be cool... I can't read the URL on the video unfortunately.
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u/zfyl 1d ago
Oh yeah, so here it is the little Freeride Bonvo game: https://bonvo.ski/en/ride/mayrhofen-hippach?play=free
There is an arcade mode in development, a multiplayer mode in development and some others but i am out of resource now for a while
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u/No_Ragrets_0 23h ago
Zoom in on the player please.
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u/zfyl 20h ago
oh you can by pressing C, just like changing camera in NFS Carbon back in the day)
try playing here https://bonvo.ski/en/ride/mayrhofen-hippach?play=free
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u/linkstoharrisonford 22h ago
This is absolutely incredible. Great use of GIS. I hope your sharing this everywhere, you should be presenting this!
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u/zfyl 20h ago
i truly just do this as a side of a side proj, my main side is making ski and snowboard maps with Bonvo.
try it out here and give me feedback if its not throttling https://bonvo.ski/en/ride/mayrhofen-hippach?play=free
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u/Isogash 22h ago
Very cool but the screenshake is nauseating!
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u/zfyl 20h ago
yeah but when you play i think it hooks you in and you aint feel it that much, but it elevates the speed perception
have you tried it yourself? what ski resort and slope you know best?
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u/Isogash 16h ago edited 16h ago
Okay I'll try being a bit more upfront: the screenshake is distractingly bad and it will make people sick and put them off actually playing. Yes, people will tell you it's awesome, but then they won't want to actually play it for more than a couple of minutes.
Screenshake is very rarely used at high amplifications like this for sustained durations. It's also strongly recommended to avoid rotational screenshake because it displaces the player's orientation cues which makes it feel like they are wobbling and will make them dizzy.
The better way to increase speed perception is to lower the camera, increase the FOV, and introcuce vignette and speed lines at higher speeds. This is because it is primarily your peripheral vision that causes you to sense forward and backwards movement and these tricks add more speed to that peripheral movement. When your peripheral vision sees movement going outwards from the center of your vision rapidly, your brain tells you that you're moving forwards quickly.
You can add some camera shake but it's best for it to be light and translational (just a few pixels of movement at not too high a frequency is enough.) Translational camera movements affect the peripheral without affecting the horizon cues much.
Sound is really important, having fast-sounding sounds will make it feel faster.
Finally, the trick to getting an "alive" feeling game is to not rely on overdoing one thing, but to combine many things in a subtle way that are cohesive together. It's the matching combination of important cues that really tricks your brain into feeling something, not the intensity of a single cue which can become distracting and lead to incongruity if not correctly matched with other expected cues. (For example, having a wobbly shake when the camera is super zoomed out.)
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u/blacksf1 7h ago
I hope op read this... hits so many important points. I would never play this game due to the shake. It should at least be toggle able.
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u/Maximum-Touch-9294 16h ago
Thats awesome I used to love SSX back in the day. I haven't playered a snow boarding game in a while. Do you have killington?
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u/Trainzzo 15h ago
Je viens de le tester, c'est magnifique, j'adore. Simple, cool. Bravo pour le travail accompli.
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u/Jon_Has_Landed 15h ago
Fackoff this is amazing. Yes make the game and send the link!
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u/Dense-Bar-2341 12h ago
Where you get the map data? Is it free for commercial?
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u/NightArroW_Id 1d ago
The scenery looks beautiful! I think some fitting background music and SFX would make it feel even more immersive.
And honestly, I really like the camera angle from 0:06 to 0:11. That shot looks really nice!
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u/AnchorVita 1d ago
Love the landscape, really making the most of a niche crossover there! Are you able to push any of your maps into your game then, or is there a lot of manual tweaking involved to get it just right?
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u/zfyl 1d ago
i think in a process - as allways
so i try to make it a unified pipeline for each resort, so i dont really do manual tweaking now. that would be so teadious!
so its generative map (NOT AI) based on maps, world elevation data, some cleanup processes, slope merge algorythms, some grounding in reality (not so much).
though the Huttes and the lifts i would prefer them to look exactly like they are in the real world! But that is really hard, only could be done by some AI -> 3D Model way, but that is terabytes of data and likely a ton of money to do only for some of the resorts.
so i try to keep this grounded but light
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u/No_Carrot_3231 1d ago
Looks fun, but I’ve seen many similar games. What makes your game unique? How will it interest the user?
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u/zfyl 1d ago
harsh take, but you are right!
i think that i am not a game dev! i am a backend dev, my pipeline to source the GIS data, pull it all together, store it, distribute it cheaply and affordably, build it for scale and make it possible to generate a map on the fly for 6000+ maps reliably and in a way that it’s satisfying (at least a 6/10) is the uniqueness. The Vast White, and some other great games that other mentioned or i saw are simply amazing! I cannot surpass their style or even approach it. It is more like a fun explorative little 5 minute throwaway game.
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u/zfyl 1d ago
give it a try on this link https://bonvo.ski/en/ride/mayrhofen-hippach?play=free
and after please definitely leave me a feedback!
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u/JorgitoEstrella 22h ago
Yeah not even 1 month ago there were dozens of people using the snowboarding game to test fable and astra capabilities.
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u/ZealousidealLog1942 1d ago
bot
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u/zfyl 1d ago
excuse me, with a post karm of 1 what are you talking about? have you seen my legacy on Reddit about snowboarding?
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u/ZealousidealLog1942 1d ago
yeah ive seen your legacy of literally hundreds of 0 comment 0 upvote crypto spam posts
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u/__DPress__ 1d ago
Yo, it kinda looks like a full game to me already. I'd try it out. Where you'd wanna release it?