The Starry Expanse

Just a reminder, registration for Mysterium 2011 is now open. As with last year, there will be a live demonstration and status update for the project. Hope to see you there!

It’s been a while since we’ve written a post updating everyone with the goings-on in the Starry Expanse Project. Too long, says I. Read on, and discover what’s been going on behind the closed doors of the Starry Expanse Project.

 
59 Volt Entertainment

First of all, our group now has a real name! No longer are we simply “the Starry Expanse Project team”. Henceforth, we will be known as “59 Volt Entertainment”, or just “59 Volts”. If you’ve played Myst and have a mind for remembering details, you’ll probably know the significance of the name. Otherwise, go replay Myst! The project itself is still known as The Starry Expanse Project.

Logo

To go with our snazzy new name, we’ve whipped ourselves up a snazzy new logo. You may have seen it already, in the corner of our April Fool’s Images. Well, here it is in its full glory.
 

New Members

We’ve assimilated (as the Borg do) some great talent recently; check out the Team Roster for bios of all of our members, past and present.

Donations

We are once again accepting donations to help fund The Starry Expanse Project. If you’re interested in helping us on the road to completing an awesome game, please click the ‘Donate’ button below or on the sidebar of this page. Oh, by the way, anybody who donates will have their name put in the credits! For more details, check out the sidebar to the right, or shoot us an e-mail.

New Engine

“But Cho!” you may exclaim. “Why does 59 Volts need money? I thought Blender Game Engine was free… surely they aren’t going to be pocketing my money!” Rest assured — no, we aren’t taking your money for ourselves. While the Blender Game Engine is free, we are, in fact, no longer using Blender Game Engine to develop The Starry Expanse. Nay, we have moved on to bigger and better engines— namely, Unity!

Unity is awesome. It’s fast, powerful, and compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360! It’s really spectacular. If you want an idea of how much better it is than the BGE, remember that at Mysterium last year, the demo Zib showed stuttered along at 10 frames per second (and we were lucky). In Unity, we have yet to see anything shy of 50fps for similarly detailed scenes… yeah.

There are only two big downsides to Unity.

1. No Linux/OpenBSD/Solaris/HURD/etc. support. We’re looking into work-arounds for this, such as Cider-style wrappers, or simple WINE compatibility, similar to how MOUL became Mac-compatible. If you’re interested in helping us research these possibilities, please contact us.
2. It ain’t free. Unity costs $1500 for a Pro license. We’ve been developing under an Indie license for a few months now, but we’re going to need the Pro license in order to make the best game possible. Trust us, it’s going to be amazing with those Pro features.

Apart from these two, Unity has bested BGE in every way that we have thought to compare the two. It has full compatibility with .blend files as well as a few other modeling programs, so we can all work in the environments we’re most accustomed to. This also means that very little work was needed to convert the existing resources into Unity-compatible ones. That said, we are currently re-working many of the existing assets to make them higher quality, more accurate, and more efficient.

The Future

So that’s where we are now. We’ve got a real name, a logo, new members, and a new engine. Our game is starting to take shape, albeit much more slowly than we would like. We still are not ready to start beta-testing, but rest assured that we are preparing for the day when we will be. If you have expressed an interest to us in beta testing, we still have your name — don’t worry.

Zib (and possibly other members of 59 Volt Entertainment) will be at Mysterium again this year. (He ought to be, as he’s helping to plan it.) If you want to find out more about The Starry Expanse Project, Mysterium 2011 is the place to be. Join us in early August, somewhere in the Boston area, for a weekend of awesome Myst-related activities. Keep an eye on the Mysterium Boston 2011 site for further details.

Edit: Yes, this was an April Fool’s joke. Starry Expanse is still in production, and the two games described below are not. That being said, if you want to work on Riven: The Board Game, send Zib and e-mail at zib@starryexpanse.com

We’ve been spending a lot of time discussing our little project, and we’ve come to the conclusion that re-making Riven in 3D just isn’t what we want to be spending our time on. There doesn’t seem to be enough support from the Myst community in general for the project to be worth it. So we’re officially canceling The Starry Expanse Project.

That being said, we’d like to announce two projects that are, at this point, well under-way and nearing the beta testing stage! We hope you’ll have as much fun playing them as we’ve had putting them together.

The first is a game born from a brainstorming session about how to broaden the appeal of Riven, and make it more palatable to the general public. 59 Volt Entertainment presents the first-ever screenshot from Riven: Stranger’s Wrath:

You can play as the Moiety, or as Gehn’s supporters (pictured). There will be the usual assortment of guns, knives, and grenades, as well as traditional Rivenese weapons, and Gehn’s poison dart rifle. We plan on having some really great competitive online gameplay, via Xbox Live. The great part about this game is that we can actually continue to use the assets we’ve already produced, and just port them all over to Source!

The other project is a bit riskier, but we think that it will be a big hit as well. Say hello to Riven: The Board Game:

Also check out the really big version.

After spending the past few months designing the boards, writing up the rules (we managed to trim it down to about 550 pages), and extensive playtesting, I can tell you that this is a seriously fun game. If you liked the Myst board game, you’re going to love this one. The average game lasts between six to twenty hours, and is playable by up to 25 people! The final game is going to be printed on this really high-quality glossy cardboard, but for beta testing we’ll just put up pdfs for you to print out.

Check back here over the next few weeks for more updates on these two!

The Starry Expanse team has an odd request. We are looking for someone who looks extremely similar to this guy.

The reason we’re asking for this is that we don’t have good enough reference material to reliably recreate the character (“Cho”), so we’re searching for a lookalike. Many hours at Google Image Search have yielded nothing, and so we turn to our readers. Have you seen this man? If so, shoot us an email at cho102997@gmail.com.

The Starry Expanse Project not only aims to rebuild Riven but to open the reconstructions to the public. The public consists of many people speaking many languages, so the Starry Expanse Project will be making use of the URU Localization Project‘s user-contributed translations of Riven.

What does that mean? It means YOU can help translate Riven so that others can follow along when playing. To get started, just go to the ULP’s website (http://rel.to/ulp) and click “Get an Account”. Thanks for helping out! Here’s a bonus screenshot for your trouble.

Are you any good with Blender/Maya/3DS/Other 3D Modeling Program? Do you have experience in programming, particularly in Python, particularly in Blender? Do you pride yourself on your texture-creation abilities? Do you have a deep and undying love for Riven? Then we want your help!

We are (as always) seeking out new souls to join our little project. If you’re interested, send an email to cho102997@gmail.com and let us know what you’re good at.

Here are some skills we’re looking for in particular:

• Scripter
  • Python (bonus points for Blender, Twisted or wxPython)
  • PHP
  • C coder (we’ve got one project for ya!)
• Character artist
• Character animator
• Blender artist
• Graphical artist (icons, logos, etc.)
• Sound expert
• Audio asset tracker (lots of spreadsheet work and  going through riven, recognizing sounds)

Please note that we are looking for passionate, dedicated people. You may not have all the time in the world, but you can make the time that you do have worthwhile. Please don’t apply if you aren’t serious about this.

- Cho

(Note: “beta tester” isn’t a team member position, don’t even think about it!)

As you probably know by now, we publicly unveiled the project to Mysterium. If you were unable to attend Mysterium, you can watch the presentation here:

The presentation slides can be seen here:

And the video I played:

Enjoy!

Well, we kind of hoped that allowing beta signups to go through only for a limited time would raise hype and that people would sign up for beta like, as soon as they could.

Turns out that wasn’t the case. Despite our weirdly gigantic spikes in unique visitor counts each time we posted something containing the word “beta,” we only got around ten beta testing applications.

So! We’ve decided to re-open the beta test signup process until we get more beta signups than we know what to do with (note: this doesn’t mean we won’t be checking for quality in your application). At our previous rate of beta signup, that would’ve happened around year 2121, so let’s hope we get some more signups quicker this time. Beta is officially open again!

Here is the signup page. If you find out who we are (not that hard) please don’t tell anyone. Thanks!

We will be closing beta signup this Friday, January 8th, 2009 at 11:59 PM EST. If you haven’t signed up yet, now is the time! We are most certainly not anywhere near being maxed out, so tell your friends too! For quick reference, here is a link to the signup post.

Become a beta tester!

Now you can sign up to be a beta tester for the Starry Expanse project!

Signup is a simple process, but we will invite people to test on a first-come-first-serve basis. If you’re the first to sign up, you’ll be the first to test, in other words. To get started, choose your platform from the options below: