Chase the aurora. Learn the science behind it.
NLSim is an open-world business-simulation game where you run an aurora-guiding and astrophotography operation under the Icelandic night sky. Drive clients to the right vantage point at the right hour, read the space-weather forecast, dial in your camera — and absorb real forecasting, photography, and geography as a natural consequence of playing well.
illustrative in-game mockup · forecast HUD over an Icelandic night scene
A game where the fun is the curriculum.
Most "educational" games bolt quizzes onto a game loop. NLSim does the opposite: the genuine skills are the game loop. To turn a profit guiding tourists to the northern lights, the player has to forecast geomagnetic activity, pick locations with clear horizons and low light pollution, time the drive to a window of high Kp, and capture sharp long-exposure photos to keep clients coming back. Get the science right and the business thrives.
The world is a stylized slice of Iceland — coastal roads, highland passes, and dark-sky sites — built at real-world scale so distances, drive times, and the geography of where the aurora is visible all behave believably. Space-weather conditions evolve over the in-game night, so two playthroughs of the same route can demand completely different decisions.
Real skills, taught through consequences.
Space-weather forecasting
The aurora model is driven by a Kp-index forecast that shifts over the night. Players learn to read solar-wind cues, the auroral oval, and cloud cover — then bet a drive on whether the lights will actually appear.
Astrophotography technique
A simulated camera with real exposure parameters — ISO, aperture, shutter, focus — rewards understanding the exposure triangle. A blurred 30-second frame disappoints clients; a clean shot earns reviews.
Iceland geography
Routes, dark-sky sites, and horizon lines are placed at real-world scale. Players build a working mental map of the island: where the roads go, where light pollution hides, and where the sky opens up.
Running the operation
Fuel, vehicle wear, client expectations, and weather risk all factor into each night's plan. The business sim layer turns abstract knowledge into decisions with real trade-offs.
Built to feel like a place, not a level.
Open world at real scale
World Partition streams the island in and out as the player drives, and Large World Coordinates keep positions precise across a map measured in kilometres rather than metres — no origin-rebasing seams mid-journey.
A believable night sky
Lumen handles the soft, dynamic lighting of a moonlit landscape, while the aurora itself is authored as Niagara ribbons whose intensity and shape track the live Kp forecast — the sky reacts to the simulation, not a canned cutscene.
Dense terrain, cheap to render
Nanite carries the highland geometry — lava fields, ridgelines, scree — at high detail without hand-managed LODs, keeping the frame budget free for the atmosphere and VFX that make the scene land.
Vehicles you actually drive
Chaos Vehicles model the guide's van on gravel and ice, so the drive between sites is part of the challenge — and a deterministic SaveGame layer over DataAssets keeps progression, fleet state, and discovered sites persistent across sessions.
Modern UE5, commercial-safe by design.
- Unreal Engine 5.7
- World Partition
- Large World Coordinates
- C++ gameplay
- Lumen (lighting)
- Nanite (geometry)
- Niagara (aurora VFX)
- Chaos Vehicles
- Steam · Windows
- SaveGame / DataAssets
- Permissive deps only
- Fictional brands
Dependencies are screened to permissive, commercial-safe licenses — no GPL/AGPL/SSPL — and all in-world brands are fictional, so the project stays clear of redistribution and trademark issues from the first commit.
Shipped on the same AI-augmented pipeline as our client work.
NLSim is built with the studio's multi-agent, AI-augmented delivery workflow — the same process we run for engagements — letting a solo studio carry a project of this scope with the rigor of a larger team.
A game where the fun
is the curriculum.
NLSim is a studio product in active development — an open-world simulation that teaches real space-weather forecasting, photography, and geography by making them the way you win. Follow the build or ask about it.
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