Mysterium 2015 Recap
This year at Mysterium (the annual gathering of Myst fans), we gave a presentation demoing our latest work – most notably, Gehn’s 233rd age. We had a lot of fun, and while the age is not completely finished, we’re really proud of our work so far. You can watch the presentation in its entirety here:
We had a lot of fun working on the demo at Mysterium. We have a tradition of continuing to polish our presentations right up until the minute we go on stage. We’re never satisfied!
The area is definitely still a work in progress – for example, in the demo above we had not yet added the textures for Gehn’s desk. We have since added those in, and you can see them in the screenshots below, rendered in beautiful 4K for your viewing pleasure:
(We’re also aware that there are some weird glitches happening in the water, these are an artifact of the rendering process we used to make the screenshots and won’t be visible in the final game)
We set up the demo for Mysterium-goers to try hands-on, and everyone had a good time.
We think it was a really successful Mysterium, and a great year for the project. Here’s looking forward to 2016! Stay tuned as we put the finishing touches on 233, and begin work on our next area.
August 12th, 2015 at 2:52 pm
Truly you are doing Yahvo’s work.
August 12th, 2015 at 4:32 pm
OMG!! It’s gorgeous!!! I wish I was there.
August 12th, 2015 at 5:38 pm
Looks great, well done!
August 12th, 2015 at 6:48 pm
Four Kay!
Great job guys; you can just lick those leather covered books.
August 12th, 2015 at 11:10 pm
“age of gehn†→ “ilaisâ€
August 13th, 2015 at 4:20 pm
At the time that I was making the book textures I wasn’t sure what it said so I used “Age of Gehn” as a placeholder. Philip told me that it was supposed to read “ilias” which is supposed be D’ni for “unpowered” or something along those lines. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make the changes in time for the Mysterium demo though 🙁
August 16th, 2015 at 5:25 pm
Make sure to use the right D’ni “a”, though. It’s not “ilahis”. By the way, there’s a D’ni typo on the canopy of Gehn’s desk as well. In your screenshots, the sentence starts with “khenet”, but it should be “kenet” (we are). I hope you’ll be able to fix some of those D’ni text errors, even if they were in the original. (Those little fixes won’t make it a Star Wars Special Edition, I promise!)
Anyway, fantastic work!
August 13th, 2015 at 2:05 am
Great job guys. It was great to see it motoring along so well!
August 13th, 2015 at 5:05 am
It was awesome to see. You have made such great progress. Can hardly wait.
August 13th, 2015 at 5:47 am
Amazing work! It looks just so real! I would play this game a million times, just for it’s beauty!
Someone said earlier that there would me no eclipses in Riven as it would cause panic among new players, but Myst V has eclipses in Laki’ahn, and they’re not very scary…
You could always give some warnings when first playing the game so people know what could happen, like eclipses and Riven by night, and they can be turned on and off in the game settings.
Also a re-rendered version, like the original Riven, or 360-degree-images, like Myst III and IV, could be handy for old and slow computers which can’t cope with the high-detail awesomeness of the game.
These are just some ideas, but it would really be awesome!
August 13th, 2015 at 6:45 am
Are traffic cones going to be the replacement for water in the village? Fair enough, you need to make at least one anomaly in the finished product like that to really piss people off and troll us fans. Good on you, stick to your guns on this no matter how disgruntled anyone gets.
August 13th, 2015 at 3:27 pm
The work and progress on 233 looks great. Can’t wait to see what it looks like once it’s been completed and polished up. Thanks for your continued hard work and dedication. 🙂
I have a question regarding the video demo. Have you put any thought into doing a separate demo walkthrough similar to the follow-up from last year’s Mysterium presentation? It would be great to get a better visual quality walkthrough of 233.
August 13th, 2015 at 4:18 pm
Those renders are amazing. I hope you use them to promote the project, because they are gold
August 13th, 2015 at 4:26 pm
Good work on the textures!
I cant wait to try this demo! 🙂
August 13th, 2015 at 11:00 pm
That book texture is like graphics porn. The leathery bumps are sooo real.
August 13th, 2015 at 11:04 pm
Fun fact: all of our books are individually-textured. No repeated leather patterns to be found here, each book is unique 🙂
August 14th, 2015 at 1:37 am
Thankyou Substance Painter for making my job so much easier!
August 14th, 2015 at 1:18 am
Amazing graphics! When it comes to the live – action parts with Atrus, Gehn and Catherine (and the lesser sequences), will you use the original sequences and enhance them, or will you make new live – action sequences?
August 14th, 2015 at 4:33 pm
Neither, actually! Our intention is to recreate these sequences using realtime cg animations. We feel this is really the only way to successfully incorporate characters into a real-time cg world.
August 19th, 2015 at 9:23 am
First of all: really good work, and thanks a lot for doing this!
About extra areas: would it really make the game that much harder? Maybe by 1 percent, unless you add areas with difficult puzzles.
Making the East path for example, would be 10000 percent awesome to us hardcore fans, but only 1 percent more difficult to others. 😀
Please think about it!
August 28th, 2015 at 1:54 pm
Very cool 🙂
September 10th, 2015 at 11:31 am
Any updates you’d like to share? It’s been a month!
October 23rd, 2015 at 3:53 pm
I almost cried :’)
That is great! It remembered me when I played Riven for the first time!