The Starry Expanse Project

The team is finally home, back in the land of stable internet connections. While we do not yet have access to the footage of our actual presentation, we’ve gone ahead and recorded a walkthrough of the area we demonstrated on Saturday, so you all can get a nice, high-resolution view of what was shown there until the actual presentation can be posted.

Also important to note is the fact that this area is still a work in progress. Many textures and objects are placeholders, or missing altogether. That said, work has progressed since Saturday, and there’s actually one or two assets that have been added to the area since then!

Enjoy:

We’ll post the official video of our presentation as soon as we get access to it. Until then, you can watch a capture of the justin.tv stream here!

The Starry Expanse team is now gradually making their way back to their respective parts of the world, and we are beginning to pick up where we left off before Mysterium. We have a video of the content we presented on Saturday at Cyan, and we’re working on getting it uploaded (the hotel internet was simply too slow for an upload to be feasible). It’ll be up before the week is out.

Until then, here are two of our slides from the presentation, which we think make very nice wallpapers. Enjoy!

(Note that these images are based on renders from Maya, not in-game shots!)

Back when we first announced that we would be switching to Unreal Engine, the first asset we showed you guys was a hut from the Jungle Island village. In the intervening time, we have completed much more of the village. In fact, all of the huts are now detailed and textured, and the walkways connecting them are also coming along nicely.

Here’s a peek at what the village looks like running in Unreal:

These shots only show the village and beginnings of the walkways, with terrain and other assets stripped away. You’ll have to check out our Mysterium presentation on August 2nd to see the complete scene!

Mysterium is being held during the first weekend of August, at Cyan’s offices in Spokane, WA. We hope to see you there!

A few weeks ago we showed you a preview of the counting toy featured in the village schoolhouse. The toy, however, is only a crude, small-scale model of the full-sized gallows, so this week we’d like to share the genuine article!

Used to punish those deemed disloyal to Gehn, the cone-shaped wahrk gallows features prominently in the Jungle Island village basin.

The gallows is topped with the skulls of Wahrks (five of them), the most powerful creature in Riven – a symbol both of the power of Gehn, and of the gruesome death awaiting those deemed unworthy.

While we pride ourselves on the accuracy of all of our artwork, the skulls in particular were given extreme attention to detail. Here’s a more detailed look at the model itself:

While the wahrk gallows is not yet fully textured, we look forward to the asset being completed and brought into Unreal within the next few weeks. Stay tuned for further updates soon!

We here at 59 Volts pride ourselves on the accuracy of our art assets. Every part of our game is painstakingly created from scratch, using the original game as reference – and we don’t stop tweaking our art until it is spot-on.

While this is probably obvious for the models and textures we’ve shown in the past, it extends beyond them, too. Today, we’d like to direct your attention to another aspect of our attention to detail – the handwriting fonts used in the journals throughout the game.

This is a more complicated task than it might initially seem. We aim to support more languages than the original Riven did (more on that soon!), meaning we need full glyph support in our fonts. The original, English version of the game does not cover all letters (accented characters, in particular, are totally absent), so we’ve had to go on the hunt for other localizations. We’ve drawn from the French and German versions of the game, to name a few, plus a number of promotional images from outside of the game itself. On top of that, we’ve had to deal with low-resolution images, font inconsistencies, and all of the other issues that we usually encounter when re-creating Riven assets.

That said, we’re happy to announce that our Atrus font is nearing completion! Here’s a sneak peek at what we’ve come up with so far:

Because this is a vector-based font, it can be scaled to huge sizes, with no loss of quality. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of our font, with a page from the original game (click to enlarge):

It’s worth noting that the page pictured here is simply a mock-up, that this is not a final texture, nor has it been applied to an in-game model yet. This is simply the easiest way to display the font.

Now that the Atrus font is nearly complete, work has begun on a font for Gehn, which is proving to be an even more difficult task.

Stay tuned for further updates as these in-game fonts are developed. The ending has not yet been, heh, written.

It’s back-to-school season here at the Starry Expanse Project! Do you remember the rules of Gehn? If not, pull up a bench and we’ll teach you a thing or two.

First, our lord and master Gehn will address the class, via his special holograph pedestal.

Next, we’ll learn to count in the manner of our lord Gehn.

Feeling hungry? Maybe it’s time for a lunch break.

We don’t know about you, but we sure learned a lot today.

It’s worth mentioning that clearly, the village schoolhouse is a work in progress. These are screenshots taken from within Maya (not Unreal), and are in no way representative of final graphics. We’re pretty excited about how it’s coming along, though!

We’d like to share with you another object that we are currently developing – the village submarine, one of the most iconic elements in Riven. Because the textures for the object are not complete, we don’t have it set up in UDK quite yet – these are work-in-progress renders from Maya.

The interior of the sub highlights one of the more interesting challenges inherent in the project – what do the areas that are never seen in the original game, but will see in our game, look like? In this case, the area inside the submarine behind the seat has been imagined by a member our hard-working art team, as it is impossible to turn around in the original game. You can see his work in this cutaway shot:

As work steadily progresses on the Jungle Island village, we thought we’d share a very pretty shot of the area.

Keeping the Jungle Island content train rolling along, here’s the next area we’re ready to show off – the prison catwalk.

This is the pathway that leads to and from the prison cell in the Jungle Island village, right next to the gallows. Here’s a couple of views of the model overlaid on top of the original images it was based on.

Meanwhile, another artist has been working on the doorway and interior of the prison itself. While we won’t have the two pieces put together until they’re both complete, we can show you a work-in-progress demonstration of the door opening.

 
We’ll keep you updated as this area progresses.

While we continue to work on the Village Basin of Jungle Island, we thought we’d share a wallpaper that we put together to celebrate our work so far. We made this one at 4K, so it should be able to scale down to most resolutions gracefully.

Click the image to preview it, or click here to download the full size!

Enjoy!