Yorke | Stars Die

Here are some recent screenshots I’ve already posted there:

As always progress has been going non-stop, slowly but steadily and aside from many dialogues, which are still being reworked and rewritten, only a few minor models, sounds and animations are left. All other crucial elements have been finished.

A creeping sense of guilt for not posting anything in a while made me realize that, for a dialogue-based game like Stars Die is, I haven’t actually shown any ingame dialogues yet. Brilliant.

This short video is the very beginning of the game, that replaces the typical main menu. All the options are available through contextual objects. Sleeping on the bed will quit the game, interacting with the mirror will let you set a custom name for your character or change game settings and the boat’s wheel will start the game. This way, the game teaches you the very simple mechanics right from the start while also serving as a brief introduction before the main game begins.

As you can see, the dialogue system is pretty standard, similar to that found in CRPGs, particularly Planescape: Torment, which was the main reference for this. I experimented with some less conventional dialogue mechanics, but I couldn’t really design anything that felt right for this game. It already has a certain old-school feel to it overall that I can use as an excuse for the lack of experimentation, so it doesn’t bother me too much (it does literally keep me awake at night though).

This is just one example of a conversation the player character, Dybowski, is having with one of the main characters, Dr. Miyazawa, also modelled by @wabbaboy, with the character art made by my good friend Javier Benítez, like all the others. The room right now looks too empty and bland, but it’s still very much wip. The image below is a slightly closer to how the interiors will look in terms of density.

Nothing amazing but fucked lighting aside, it looks kind of cozy.

The rest of the game is relatively close to completion, around 70% according to my omniscient progress excel, with the only exception of music, which I’ve been trying to compose and produce myself as part of the challenge and learning process, but so far it’s been an utter disaster. Hopefully I’ll get there eventually. Or maybe I’ll just rip off Ulver. 

Apparently, 2 weeks ago made one year since I started developing Stars Die, so here’s a short video and some more info about the game, to celebrate I work so slow.

The visuals haven’t changed much compared to my previous post, since most of my recent work has been kind of back-end stuff, but at least all the programming is pretty much fully implemented, so now “only” writing, character models and sound design remain.

Story:

A woman has been guided towards a disturbing place. Others are already there, threatened and protected by an unseen will, bringing unrelenting change.

Stars Die is a choice-driven science fiction game that explores the role of mankind and its future in the universe.

Did that sound pretentious enough? Good. Here are some of the game’s main features:

Converse with people and explore the island freely to advance the story and find additional information.

Multiple parallel storylines, each with many different ramifications, that are affected by your actions, whether you’re aware or not.

You are in control of your story, you decide which narrative paths you explore and when, or even which ones you skip completely. The game doesn’t force you to do anything, your outcome is entirely up to you.

The player however, is not the center of the narrative. Each character has its own agenda and perspective on the events, and they will try to act accordingly.

Think carefully who you side with (if you want to side with anyone at all), others may not be too happy about it and the consequences could be irreversible.

Your choices are not about moral dilemmas, but ideological ones. There’s no black and white, not even gray areas, it’s all about what you believe in.

You decide how much you want to know, have long debates about all sorts of topics, or cut to the chase.

I expect to finish the game between summer and autumn. I may release a small demo before that, where you can at least play the first chapter, which is around 80% done already, to show a brief introduction to the game and hopefully get some feedback and extremely destructive criticism.

Visually, I’m trying (with help from @wabbaboy​) to go for a look a bit reminiscent of late 90s 3D, but also blending it with current techniques like slightly higher polycount, real-time reflections and a few subtle post-processing effects (no chromatic aberration, I promise). 

Hi, I made the enemy boss P-33 “Beepy” from the videogame Nier.

The model has 5700 tris and just regular Albedo, Metallic and Normal maps at 2048.

I used Blender for the modelling, then switched to 3DS Max for editing normals, unwrapping and making a simple rig. Finally I let Substance Painter do its magic and did some final adjustments on Photoshop. The render is real-time with Unity5.

You can also see it in Sketchfab:

This is Santa’s factory for the videogame Present Catcher™. 

The first two screens are just the factory in Unity5. The other 3 are from the game itself, which was done in UE4 in collaboration with @jackwabba, who mostly worked on the gameplay, interface and overall project while I worked on most of the 3D models.

This game was made in around a week for a winter-themed Gamejam in our spare time. 

You can download it here:

A lamp I did a few months ago to test the new real-time reflections in Unity 5. Only the skybox is a texture, everything else are reflections directly through geometry.

It’s pretty dense in tris -around 48k- but it wasn’t really intended as low-poly anyway.

The last pic is the real lamp I used as reference.

Here’s a link to see it on Sketchfab:

An overview of the level of the third person shooter horror game ‘Blackshard’ for PC.

This was a student project I did last year in 7 months using Unity 4.6

Around 90% of the art and programming was done by me.