The Steam Next Fest October 2026 started yesterday, and I am participating with my game Just Fly. Here is my journey from the initial prototype to a polished demo ready for the event.

Timeline

I had been learning gamedev for a few months while finishing my first game Soma Cube. Then I found an awesome older game, Superflight , and told myself: “I should be able to build something similar in Godot :)”. I wanted more natural-looking worlds, so I settled on sky islands. Here is the day 1 attempt:

Week 1: Procedural sky islands

The first week was mostly about sky island generation. The terrain is built from randomly generated points with a minimum distance between them. Then I construct a Voronoi diagram and extrude the cells based on a heightmap. The heightmap is a blend of two 3D noise textures mixed together with a third, low-frequency 2D noise used as a transition map. This is how the top surface is built even today.

Month 1: Flight feel, audio, and speed VFX

The whole first month was very intensive. I worked 10-14 hours a day and felt very happy :) Now I am working less, no worries; about 8-9 hours a day. After finishing the basic terrain, the plain gray terrain bored me, so I added basic textures, green dummy boxes for grass, and wind sounds. The wind audio combines several long sound samples in real time. An equalizer also filters the sound when flying close to the terrain or through tunnels. Modifying audio dynamically was a great sound effects (SFX) learning experience and avoided the need for separate audio files.

Around Week 2, I tuned the flight camera so the field of view (FOV) changes with speed. You need wider vision the faster you fly, but widening the FOV makes the player character smaller. So I implemented a dolly zoom: the camera moves closer to the character as the FOV widens. This keeps the character the same size on-screen while dynamically expanding the background perspective. I also added slight camera lag and banking when making hard turns. After these tweaks, the flight camera felt very good, just a tad slow.

By the end of the first month, the sky islands looked much nicer, I think :), with scattered grass, sequoia trees, volumetric fog, and a tunnel through the island. I also experimented with flying through volumetric clouds. They looked and felt great, but performance on lower-end devices was very poor, so I abandoned them for now. Hopefully, they will return in the full game.

Other major improvements included the first speed VFX: contrails, radial motion blur, and wind wisps. These solved the feeling of moving too slowly, and it has felt great ever since. I also increased the maximum flight speed for superfast flying :)

I also started learning video editing in DaVinci Resolve to post early prototypes on Reddit.

Month 2: Caves, character animation, and itch.io demo

Month 2 was about making the world more alive and interesting to explore. I slowed down to at most 10 hours a day to prevent burnout, but I was still very happy :).

This was also the month I researched the Steam Next Fest guidelines and decided that I wanted to participate with Just Fly.

The biggest additions were wind turbines with rotating blades and caves beneath the islands. These caves are carved out using a 3D noise texture, which noticeably slowed down both terrain generation and rendering. I spent some time optimizing both to keep the transition between random sky islands fast and smooth.

Another major upgrade was replacing the yellow brick with a free racer character from Mixamo, along with its basic flight animation. The animation was fine in a straight flight, but steering, banking, and pitching made the character look stiff, like a flying statue. I spent nearly a week on procedural animations that blend with the flight skeletal animation, adding body lean, head turns, limb reactions, and a subtle wind wiggle.

Midway through the month, I released the first demo of Just Fly on itch.io . I also set up the game in Steamworks and published the store page to register for Steam Next Fest October 2026.

I also added the first iteration of proximity flight scoring, awarding points for flying close to the terrain, near misses, and averted impacts.

This month was also the start of fun with ragdolls :)

Month 3: Steam demo, Steam Deck, polish, and Steam Next Fest

Month 3 was more relaxed: no more 10-14 hour days, at most 8-9. I focused mostly on adding new biomes and tuning visuals and performance. I also released the first demo build on Steam early so it could complete the review process before the event. That was a good call, because it took a week for the first build to be reviewed. Subsequent updates publish instantly, probably without a manual review. I also updated the web demo to be on par with the Steam build.

While improving performance and tweaking the menus, I pushed multiple web demo updates to collect some feedback. This led to full Xbox controller support and shareable island seed codes. Players can save their favourite islands and share them with others. The Steam demo has an extra biome that won’t be available in the web demo, but codes generated in the web demo load identically in the Steam build.

With the updated demo live on Steam, it was time to make a Steam Next Fest announcement trailer. I am still learning video editing, so it’s a little rough around the edges, like all my videos :).

Shortly before Steam Next Fest began, players online tested the demo on the Steam Deck and confirmed it was playable. I decided to make several last-minute fixes and UI navigation updates, and Just Fly is now fully Steam Deck compatible. The store page doesn’t say so yet, because “Valve is still learning about Just Fly”, but the game runs at 60 FPS on default graphics settings and supports full controller navigation without a mouse.

My final task before the festival demo build was tuning the ragdoll comedy upon crashing. I added a slow-motion camera effect and heavy screen shake on impact, with the camera tracking the tumbling character.

Conclusion

The final week of this three-month journey is the start of the Steam Next Fest (October 2026 edition), so I am taking a short break from active development. I will collect player feedback, push hotfixes if anything breaks, and enjoy playing other developers’ demos :).

Don’t forget to try the demo and wishlist Just Fly if you like it! ;)