The Starry Expanse Project

Every year after Mysterium, the team takes a bit of time off as a breath of fresh air after the mad dash to complete our demo in time for August. That brief period of exhalation has been thoroughly enjoyed by each and every one of us, and it is now safe to say that we’re back to work.

After our success with last year’s goal, we have decided to split our team into three distinct groups. The first group, which is the majority of the team, is focusing on finishing up the Village Basin area that we showed off at Mysterium. This includes completing the unfinished assets as well as fixing any remaining glitches and generally fine-tuning the engine.

Meanwhile, two of our artists are off blazing new trails for the project. We’ve discussed our camera matching process in the past, our technique of getting 1:1 geometry based solely on images from the original game. Matt, our expert camera-matching guy, has already begun to apply this technique to the rest of Jungle Island, which is the first stage in expanding our in-game area beyond the Village Basin. In these screenshots, you can see our progress on matching Gehn’s throne and the upper walkway in the forest (the line overlays are our work)

(The image is somewhat high-resolution, may load slowly)

Once areas are fully “matched”, we create very simple stand-in geometry for the area, so in-engine work can begin before the final assets are completed, or even started. The stand-in assets are then replaced, one by one, with final art, until the area is complete. This is the state of the 233rd age currently – it is fully blocked-in, and Kelly, one of our amazing artists, is beginning to create detailed assets, based on the blocking geometry.

Here you can see one of the elements she’s working on, albeit still in an early, unpolished phase:

We’re very happy to be back to work – as nice as a break is every now and then, we all love working on this project, and are excited to be able to show you guys some pretty cool stuff in the weeks and months to come.

The team is finally home, back in the land of stable internet connections. While we do not yet have access to the footage of our actual presentation, we’ve gone ahead and recorded a walkthrough of the area we demonstrated on Saturday, so you all can get a nice, high-resolution view of what was shown there until the actual presentation can be posted.

Also important to note is the fact that this area is still a work in progress. Many textures and objects are placeholders, or missing altogether. That said, work has progressed since Saturday, and there’s actually one or two assets that have been added to the area since then!

Enjoy:

We’ll post the official video of our presentation as soon as we get access to it. Until then, you can watch a capture of the justin.tv stream here!

The Starry Expanse team is now gradually making their way back to their respective parts of the world, and we are beginning to pick up where we left off before Mysterium. We have a video of the content we presented on Saturday at Cyan, and we’re working on getting it uploaded (the hotel internet was simply too slow for an upload to be feasible). It’ll be up before the week is out.

Until then, here are two of our slides from the presentation, which we think make very nice wallpapers. Enjoy!

(Note that these images are based on renders from Maya, not in-game shots!)

We’re at the Mysterium hotel in Spokane, putting the finishing touches on our presentation on Saturday! The URL for the live stream (both for the other presentations as well as our own) is justin.tv/mysteriumcon. Be sure to tune in around 1:30 PM tomorrow (that’s Pacific time!) to catch our demo live. If you can’t watch then, we’ll record it as well for viewing later!

And if you’re here in Spokane with us, come talk to us! Most of us don’t bite!

UPDATE: It looks like we’re running a bit behind schedule, we should be up and running by 2:30. Hopefully. Never can tell with Mysterium, unfortunately!

UPDATE 2: Still waiting, sorry!

We here at 59 Volts are feverishly working day and night to put the finishing touches on our demo for Mysterium next week. Our presentation will be on Saturday, August 2nd, at Cyan Headquarters in Spokane, WA. We’re currently scheduled to start at 1:30 PM, Pacific time.

If you’ll be attending the convention in person, great! We can’t wait to meet you! Our plan is to set up our demo in the con room after our presentation, so that those who make the trek out to Spokane can play around with it a bit.

If you cannot attend Mysterium in person, there will also be a live video stream of our presentation. We’ll post more information about how to access that when we get closer to the day of the presentation.

There’ll be an unprecedented percentage of the team present at this Mysterium (nearly half of us!), and we can’t wait to show you guys what we’ve put together. See you there!

Back when we first announced that we would be switching to Unreal Engine, the first asset we showed you guys was a hut from the Jungle Island village. In the intervening time, we have completed much more of the village. In fact, all of the huts are now detailed and textured, and the walkways connecting them are also coming along nicely.

Here’s a peek at what the village looks like running in Unreal:

These shots only show the village and beginnings of the walkways, with terrain and other assets stripped away. You’ll have to check out our Mysterium presentation on August 2nd to see the complete scene!

Mysterium is being held during the first weekend of August, at Cyan’s offices in Spokane, WA. We hope to see you there!

No new assets to show off this week, but we do have a couple of updates to show you guys. Specifically, a few of our older models are now sporting some beautiful textures!

First up, the submarine exterior has been kitted out with a beautiful battered copper material. We’re still working on perfecting the details, but it is already up and running in Unreal 4. Unreal’s new physically-based material engine is absolutely perfect for surfaces like this, and we’re taking full advantage of it.

Secondly, the awesome wahrk skulls that we posted last time are now made of bone, instead of the shiny gray default material. We think they look much better like this.

As we get closer to Mysterium, we’ll be working hard on fine-tuning our demo. Expect more updates like this in the next few weeks!

A few weeks ago we showed you a preview of the counting toy featured in the village schoolhouse. The toy, however, is only a crude, small-scale model of the full-sized gallows, so this week we’d like to share the genuine article!

Used to punish those deemed disloyal to Gehn, the cone-shaped wahrk gallows features prominently in the Jungle Island village basin.

The gallows is topped with the skulls of Wahrks (five of them), the most powerful creature in Riven – a symbol both of the power of Gehn, and of the gruesome death awaiting those deemed unworthy.

While we pride ourselves on the accuracy of all of our artwork, the skulls in particular were given extreme attention to detail. Here’s a more detailed look at the model itself:

While the wahrk gallows is not yet fully textured, we look forward to the asset being completed and brought into Unreal within the next few weeks. Stay tuned for further updates soon!

We’re about as good with translations as Gehn’s bumbling servant, Cho. If you speak a language other than English, we need your help!

As we mentioned last week, we intend to localize our game, and we cannot do it without your support. The original Riven was localized into a few languages, but not nearly as many as we would like, and those localizations were often sloppy or contained errors. With this in mind, we have turned to GULP to help us crowdsource our own localization effort! Check out our GULP page here.

GULP is an awesome project started by Lewis Johnston (also known as Orange Haired Boy), with the goal of localizing various Myst-related projects into as many languages as possible. It’s all free, you just need to set up an account and get translating! You can either submit new translations, or vote on translations that have already been submitted.

With your help, we’ll hopefully be able to include many languages beyond just English in our final release of the game.

Update: there were a few issues with signing up, they have since been worked out. Everything should be working smoothly now! Thanks again to OHB for working so tirelessly on the site.

We here at 59 Volts pride ourselves on the accuracy of our art assets. Every part of our game is painstakingly created from scratch, using the original game as reference – and we don’t stop tweaking our art until it is spot-on.

While this is probably obvious for the models and textures we’ve shown in the past, it extends beyond them, too. Today, we’d like to direct your attention to another aspect of our attention to detail – the handwriting fonts used in the journals throughout the game.

This is a more complicated task than it might initially seem. We aim to support more languages than the original Riven did (more on that soon!), meaning we need full glyph support in our fonts. The original, English version of the game does not cover all letters (accented characters, in particular, are totally absent), so we’ve had to go on the hunt for other localizations. We’ve drawn from the French and German versions of the game, to name a few, plus a number of promotional images from outside of the game itself. On top of that, we’ve had to deal with low-resolution images, font inconsistencies, and all of the other issues that we usually encounter when re-creating Riven assets.

That said, we’re happy to announce that our Atrus font is nearing completion! Here’s a sneak peek at what we’ve come up with so far:

Because this is a vector-based font, it can be scaled to huge sizes, with no loss of quality. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of our font, with a page from the original game (click to enlarge):

It’s worth noting that the page pictured here is simply a mock-up, that this is not a final texture, nor has it been applied to an in-game model yet. This is simply the easiest way to display the font.

Now that the Atrus font is nearly complete, work has begun on a font for Gehn, which is proving to be an even more difficult task.

Stay tuned for further updates as these in-game fonts are developed. The ending has not yet been, heh, written.