Clair de Lune is like Portal but with stealth and combat

Tactic Studios created their own graphics engine and the results look impressive.

Indie developers at Tactic Studios have truly gone an extra mile with their game Clair de Lune. They’ve not only created an interesting mix of a narrative-driven sci-fi adventure, a Portal-like puzzle experience with stealth and combat elements. They’ve also managed to do all of this with their own custom-built graphics engine.

For an indie team, this is no easy feat. Coding a completely new engine to power their game is a very time-consuming task. We’ve seen games like this before, but almost all of them use either Unreal 4 or Unity. In this case, Tactic Studios have taken elements of powerful engines and created their own brew to shape Clair de Lune.

“Our fog is based on Decima’s fog for Death Stranding. We have The Order 1886’s style material painting + blending. We have a GI system that’s like a blend of Battlefront + Enlighten. Our vertex blending and moss + wetness simulation are based on Uncharted’s tech”, disclosed one of Tactic’s team members on Reddit. The Canada-based team is lead by Jesse Attard and it’s coming soon to PC.

The fact that this team was able to develop their own engine from scratch is already impressive, but what we can see in Clair de Lune’s trailer shows that the results are pretty awesome too. I feel something from A Story About My Uncle in this one but a bit darker.

Clair de Lune tells the story of a space smuggler called John and his daughter Clair, who are together on the run and get stranded on an uncharted planet that looks a lot like Earth but with many secrets hiding under the surface. Not only is this world filled with dangerous beasts but there’s something else going on involving a group of humanoids that end up putting Clair in danger and setting John on a hard quest to save her and find out what’s really going on.

“He must use his ingenuity, agility, and a few handy pieces of technology to find Claire, repair his ship, and escape safely. However, as John progresses further, he soon discovers that the planet is much more than it initially seems…”, reads Clair de Lune’s website.

John wields his own Portal-like gun with which he will be able to use the environment to his advantage by creating platforms and moving stuff in order to reach new areas. There are some dark scenes through the trailer in which we can see some grim stuff going on with corpses and somewhat bloody images.

All in all, Clair de Lune looks like a true accomplishment from a small Canadian indie studio that chose to build their own graphics engine from scratch in order to avoid the costly Unreal 4, Really impressive.