Mysterium 2011 has begun, and Zib will be presenting a project update tomorrow at 10 AM, Boston time. If you’re unable to be there, you can experience the presentation for yourself at the LiveStream channel.
Update!
The presentation is over and done with now, but if you missed it, you can watch it here:
The Mysterium Boston site has posted the tentative schedule for this year’s Mysterium. If you check it out, you can see that we’ll be presenting bright and early on Friday, starting around 10 AM. There will be a Q&A session after the presentation, and we’ll try to address any questions that are sent in before then during this time. Feel free to use the comments section here to ask questions before the presentation, or else post them to CyanChat or the Ustream chat during the presentation, and hope that somebody there is nice enough to ask for you.
First of all, thanks once again to everybody who’s donated so far. We’ve gotten donations ranging from $1, all the way up to over $100 from a few awesome contributors. Remember, every little bit helps, and every little bit will get your name in the credits!
Unfortunately, we’ve had a bit of a nasty realization about the nature of Unity Pro licensing, and it turns out that we’re going to need about $500 more than we originally thought, bringing our funding goal up to $2000. Still, we’re already more than halfway there, so keep those donations flowing!
It’s not all bad news, though! Primary modeling and texturing for the Mysterium presentation is now nearly complete. The engine is progressing nicely, and we’ve found a couple of great shader artists. The project advances every day, and as a bit of proof, here’s a video of the updated (entirely remodeled) K’veer, completed just last week:
We got a request for some Starry Expanse wallpapers last week, and decided that it would be a nice way to celebrate passing the $1000 (now $1200) mark on our journey towards fully-funded-ness. Here are a few, more to follow:
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!
We wanted to post this (or something along the same lines) with the last update, in exchange for you guys donating enough to push us past the halfway point in our funding, but the artist insisted it look better before we put it up. He holds us to a very high standard of quality, which we suppose is a good thing 😀
Anyways, enjoy:
Wow! Since our last post, we’ve received enough donations to pass our halfway point towards being able to buy our Unity Pro license. You guys rock! Help us keep the dream going, and give that Donate button over on the sidebar a tap! Remember, a donation of any amount gets your name in the credits of our game, but the more you give, the higher your name will be!
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.
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.
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!
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 😀
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