This week will be a quick update. First off, we just brought on board an award winning BAFTA writer to help us flesh out the game’s story and characters. We are very excited to have him on the team and look forward to sharing more info about him and his works in the future. Next, our lead 3D artist Matt would like to show off a WIP couch model he is working on. As usual your constructive feedback is always welcomed.
The prototype has made steady progress this week, and we are on track to having the Action Interface mechanic completely prototyped this week. However, the Action Interface’s development hasn’t been completely smooth. Below, Daniel Beaty our lead Level Designer, will briefly discuss a problem he had during the mechanic’s development and how he overcame it.
One element of the Action Interface blueprint is the Text Render Component. As I’ve found out, the text component can be quite buggy, especially when it comes to updating properly in the viewport (map and blueprint viewport). For example, I would change the text but this change would not be reflected in the viewport, as you would expect. Meaning the text being rendered in the viewport is not the same as the text in the details window. Thanks to the help of AnswerHub, I discovered you can get the text to update properly in the viewport by renaming the text component or duplicating the actor it is attached to. Another bug I have encountered is the Get Text World Size function will not output the correct size in the construction graph when you change the text. This is very important as I’m using the text world size to wrap the collision box around the text. I’ve got around this bug by just wrapping the collision around the text during runtime instead of the construction graph. - Daniel Beaty
This week we would like to highlight our newest staff Tim Clague. Tim is a BAFTA nominated scriptwriter and an advocate for greater emotional depth in games. Tim also has accreditations as being a judge on the BAFTA Games Awards Panel. He has worked on a variety of interactive projects, from small web-based games up to being Senior Creative Designer for the large scale action MMO, “APB”. He has also created narrative based trailers for Lego, Chaos Reborn and Creative Assembly. Tim also works in ‘old media’ with his most recent feature film being the children’s mystery movie; “Who Killed Nelson Nutmeg?”.
Next, to keep up with our weekly updates, here is a finished update to the couch model we showed off last week, modeled by our Lead 3d Artist Matthew Mangini. As usual your constructive feedback is always welcomed.
This week has been a busy one for us. Our game writer, Tim Clague, has been hard at work branching out the story of “A Star Falls”, along with creating a new narrative design document, (NDD). This document outlines all the elements that influence and affect the story of “A Star Falls”, including the plot, characters and themes.
In this week’s post we wanted to show off something a little different. Our lead artist Matthew Mangini, has been working on some materials this week for the hospital level of the game and would like to show a few off. Both materials were created in substance designer/ painter.
Progress on the playtest has been steady. We finished creating all of the mechanics that will be in the playtest. Most of these mechanics revolve around how the player interacts with the world. Now all that is left to do is to create the level and implement all of the interactions we will be testing.
If you’re interested in participating in the playtest, you can fill out an application on our playtest page.
This week we have been heavily working on the playtest. Currently, we are blocking out the level and figuring out ways to test out the interaction mechanics.
We want to keep up the weekly art updates, from our lead artist Matthew Mangini, with a untextured model of a dresser on wheels that will be used in the playtest and in the patient rooms of the hospital. Constructive feedback is always welcomed.
This week we have made great strides to both the art assets and the playtest. To keep up with the increasing need for pushing out art assets we opened up a Shader and Texture Artist position for the studio. This person will be responsible for creating and optimizing PBR shaders and textures within the project. To learn more about the position or to apply please visit our jobs page on our website.
Next, to keep up with our weekly updates here is a finished update to the dresser model we showed off last week, modeled by our Lead 3d Artist Matt. As usual your constructive feedback is always welcomed.
The past few weeks we have been working hard to finish the playtest, and we are happy to announce that we expect to roll out the next playtest within the coming week. With that said, we still could use a few more playtesters, so if you are interested in becoming a playtester for us, please fill out an application on our website. Once the playtest is ready, we will send out an email to all of our playtesters with instructions on how to download and perform the playtest.
We would like to thank everyone who completed the playtest so far. The second round of invites have been sent out today. If you are interested in becoming a playtester, please fill out an application on our website. If you are selected, will send out an email to you with instructions on how to download and perform the playtest.
We would like to thank everyone once again for your playtest responses and feedback. The feedback we received has helped us to improve the feel of the interaction system.
Over the last month and a half things have progressed quite nicely. We welcomed two new staff onto the team, Joshua England as our Jr 3D Artist and Matthew Gillmeister as our 3D Character Artist. The studio has also been experimenting with photogrammetry using Agisoft Photoscan, and we look forward to showing off what we have been able to produce using photogrammetry, in the near future.
In this update we wanted to showcase one of our new employees Joshua England. Joshua is currently an Environment Artist at Funcom helping to create content for “The Secret World”. Joshua will be providing his talents to help create the mood and atmosphere of “A Star Falls”. One of the first assets he completed was the lighter that will be used by the main player.
No, we have been very busy the last few months working on the game.
Over the past few months, all of our departments have made great progress on the game, which we hope to share with you in the future, but today we would like to show off a few screenshots of 3D meshes that our recently constructed photogrammetry studio has been able to produce. All screenshots were taken within UE4. Also, we are proud to announce that we have begun development on a demo, so if you’re interested in playtesting our game, you can go ahead and apply to become a playtester on our website.
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