[WIP] A Star Falls - Pandagon Studios Inc

Pandagon Studios Inc.

PandagonLogoSmall.jpg

PandagonLogoSmall.jpg

Pandagon Studios Inc. is a small dedicated indie dev team consisting of 7 employees. Due to their passion for video games and game development, these employees are working on the studio’s first title code-named A Star Falls. From the beginning our mission was to make the most of design and functionality, to give players of our games the best experience possible.

Our website http://www.PandagonStudios.net

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A Star Falls is set in Atlanta Georgia. It is a first person sci-fi horror game that focuses on stealth, puzzle solving and melee style combat.

Backstory

A meteor has fallen and the city is now in complete chaos. You play as Johnathan Albright, who has just woken from a coma in the hospital. John has no clue what has happened, only possessing the desperate need to find his daughter. Players will be tasked with guiding through the horrifying city, surviving whatever that crosses his path, not knowing what lurks around the corner or if the people you meet are friend or foe. Hidden messages and files will offer clues fleshing out events that have unfolded around you, and background on the corpses littered around the city.

Development

The game is in the currently nearing the end of the prototype phase of development. We already have most of the game mechanics ironed out, but still in need of testers to receive feedback.

A Star falls is being developed first on PC but depending on funding, either through Kickstarter or by way of a publisher, we would like to distribute the game digitally on other platforms. Our main focus right now is to develop a demo that will show off the majority of the game’s design before we begin the crowdfunding phase.

**Zachary Bracker: President/ Game Director **
Years of experience: 6

Daniel Beaty - Vice President/ Lead Level Designer
​Years of experience: 4

Laura Stuart – Lead Concept Artist
Years of experience: 8

Tim Clague - Game Writer
Years of experience: 15

Jaime Marcello - Sound Designer/ Composer
Years of experience: 4

Jennifer Green - 3D Environment Artist
​Years of experience: 3

Matthew Gillmeister - Character Artist
Years of experience: 4

**Open Positions **
[1x] Blueprint/ C++ Programmer
[2x] 3d Artist

You can find out more about the open positions and apply on our website, http://www.pandagonstudios.net/jobs/

Hospital Hallway 1

Recovery Room 1

Break Room 1

We Are Hiring 2x Environment Artists/ 3D artists, and a Lead Blueprint/ C++ Programmer. "A Star Falls" - Pandagon Studios Inc. - Job Offerings - Unreal Engine Forums

Fantastic concept art, cant wait to see it come alive…

Aaron Tofani - Antisocial Games

I really like your logo, haha. Panda + Polygon = Pandagon :smiley:

Intense art! I hope the game is that atmospheric! :smiley:

Haha thanks

Thnaks, yes we plan on it! The things that we love about classic horror games was the physiological effects that it had on the player. Were focusing less on jump scare tactics, with our main focus on sound design and artwork/ environments, to create fear.

Howdy Panda256,

Fantastic Concept Art! This game is going to be very intense just by looking at the few pieces that you are showing. I am very excited to see how this project progresses. Be sure to keep us updated as you do! Have a great day and keep up the great work!

Thanks. Really appreciate what everyone has said so far. We will tray to update weekly as best as possible.

new concept art.

Well this certinly will help me sleep tonight :expressionless:

Hello Unreal Community,

 It’s been a while since our last update in our WIP page, so we felt like we needed to keep you all updated on the development of the game. The team is currently working on the prototyping and testing phases of the game, involving gameplay mechanics and AI.  We also have a few teaser trailers in the works. There not ready to be shown off yet but hopefully we can soon. We are just a small team of people working together on our spare time as we all already have full time jobs. This being one of the hardest parts of development we want to make sure that we have nailed down many of the game mechanics before moving on. 


 During the last 2 months we been giving out prototypes of the game to many of you in the unreal community, and so far we have received great feedback. If you would like to help us shape the game for the future we are opening up our applications to even more people. Please fill of a form if you wish to play. 

https://www.pandagonstudios.net/playtest.html (still working on website)

Sadly we can’t show off gameplay yet, but we do have more concept art for you all.

Hallway 2 (WM) small.jpg

Waiting Room 1 (WM) small.jpg

Hallway 3 Gate No Blood (WM) small.jpg

Lighter (WM) small.jpg

Thanks,

from the Pandagon Studios team

Nice. I love the concept art … can’t wait to see what you have planned and watch it come to live. 8-}

Thanks! We cant wait to show it off.

We are hiring for these positions:

1x Lead Environment Artist/ 3D Artist
1x Blueprint/ C++ Programmer
1x Audio Engineer/ Sound Designer

Hello Unreal Community,

We have been pretty quiet lately, so we wanted to give everyone a update on the game. The team is hard at work at implementing and prototyping new and improved gameplay mechanics along with advanced procedural A.I. We have also converted our 3d modeling pipeline to include photogrammetry based assets and fully physical rendered materials. So this switch took us back a few steps by learning this new workflow but overall we have great results.

You can learn more about the game on our projects page of our website, http://www.pandagonstudios.net/projects/ .

The team would like to thank you for the great support and feedback we have received from the unreal community. We are still needing the help of additional people to test and give feedback on the updated game mechanics and A.I. If you are interested please fill out a application on our website, http://www.pandagonstudios.net/playtest/

We still are not ready to show off any gameplay publicly, but we can tease some of the early character art.

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UE4 Male Scrub Test 1 (WM) small.jpg

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UE4 Male Scrub Test 3 (WM) small.jpg

Thank you for your support.

From the Pandagon Studios Team

I was wondering how far the projects modeling has come, like if anyone could see a little bit more then have then in the past few months to give us enlightenment that this project isn’t dead. I’m very curious as it is kind of bothering that there hasn’t been any recent update on the development and I see a lot of members posting around to work for others.

As we are finishing up prototyping and playtesting, we have been very quiet about the game. I can assure you that everything is still on track and progressing greatly. We are preparing to show off some in game work soon along with a few trailers. So please stand by.

We know it has been many months since our last official update, and would like to apologize that we should be more active on the forums, then we have in the past. We would like to let the community know that we are still actively developing A Star Falls. Furthermore, we will begin posting frequently to update the community about the game’s development, starting with this post.

 Since our last update, we have hired a few talented people into the studio such as, Matthew Mangini. Matthew was hired as our Lead 3D Artist. He last worked for SOE, working on Planetside 2 as an environment artist. He has been able to dramatically increase production of 3D art assets. We will share one of those assets today and plenty more in the coming weeks and months. As with all game content we share, we are open to constructive feedback on the art asset.

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Lastly, we are currently in the process of restructuring the studio, and as a result of this process, we now have 5 open positions. You can find out more about the open positions and apply on our website, http://www.pandagonstudios.net/jobs/.

Open positions:

[1x] Blueprint/ C++ Programmer
[1x] Character Artist
[2x] 3d Artist

We wanted to start out this week’s post highlighting another staff member, Jaime Marcelo, our Sound Designer/ Composer. Jaime is a performer, composer and audio engineer living in New York City. Last year, he performed at Lollapalooza, playing guitar for the band Atarah Valentine. Before that he was performing in Off-Broadway productions on violin and guitar.

Today we would like to share two pieces of content. The first being a music track created by Jaime. You can listen to the track in its entirety on soundcloud. The second being a textured render of a hospital bed, created by our Lead 3d Artist Matthew Mangini, who will explain a little bit about the creation of the bed shown below.

***My hospital bed represents a classic 90s design, and is set where our story begins, inside an empty patient room. I began with several photo references and sketches of a 90’s style hospital bed. Using Maya, I modeled the high poly meshes for all hard surfaces and the base mesh for fabrics. The meshes were then moved to Zbrush for cloth sculpting and final details. The textures and baked bitmaps were created with Substance Painter and Substance Designer, then imported into Unreal 4 for the final results.

The Physically Based pipeline is somewhat new to me, as it’s my first time using the new set of software, from Allgorithmic Substance Suite. I’m still exploring new territory within the Substance Suite and have been especially impressed with its powerful set of features allowing for greater flexibility during projects. I’ve been challenged to quickly learn and foster these new skills and continue to look onto to other artists for more inspiration. - Matthew Mangini***

This week has been a very busy one for us. We started working on prototyping our newly re-envisioned Multi-Action Interface mechanic, that we hope to be a better fit for on the fly quick interaction with objects. This also means that we are beginning to look for more playtesters for our next round of playtesting. The playtest doesn’t have a set date yet, but we hope to have it in the hands of our playtesters in the coming weeks. If you’re interested in playtesting A Star Falls, you can visit our playtest webpage to apply. We will post more info about the playtest when it is available in this thread, on Twitter, and our Facebook page.