Monthly Archives: March 2014

Dev Update – SplinterMites…

28th March 2014

Hello again from the quaint countryside offices of Flix!

We’re currently showing the pre-alpha demo at EGX Rezzed in Birmingham, and will be until Sunday, so if you’re in the area, why not come over for a look, and chat with some of the devs! It’s a great event, and we’re all very impressed at the quality and creativity of the other Indie games on display. There’s a huge variety of cool ideas, so we encourage everyone who can to check them out in this vibrant showroom setting! It’s an experience you can’t really recreate at home.

The SplinterMite

You may remember this post from a while ago when we revealed the concept art for our first ground-based enemy, the SplinterMite. Since then, we’ve been doing a lot of other work on the game, but we certainly haven’t neglected our ugly little friend! The model and textures have been polished up to final game level, and the animations have been developed ready for the AI to be implemented. Right now, they’ve barely got any AI controlling them, but it’s great fun to see them running around the level, and even more fun to blast them and throw them around the landscape!

We’ll be revealing footage of the SpliterMite in-world and scurrying around soon, so stay tuned for more!

The SplinterMite will be able to burrow into the soft earth, and tunnel undetected, unless you force them to surface again. Your structures will be built on sturdy foundations, which the Splintermite cannot burrow through, so the design of your base will help protect yourself from these pack-hunters!

Though SplinterMites are small (about the size of a Labrador, if a Labrador had chitinous armour plates, stabbing blades for legs, and a powerful beak ), they tend to be found moving in packs, and can have unpredictable aggressive behavior.

Stay tuned for further news!

GDC and EGX Rezzed announcement

21st March 2014

Greetings!

We’re announcing today that we’ll be showing at EGX Rezzed at the NEC arena, Birmingham from the 28th to 30th March! If you’re around, come along and play the Pre-alpha demo, and let us sign your forehead / sign our foreheads!

GDC 2014

I’m sure that a lot of you reading this have been massively excited by all the news coming from GDC 2014 in San Francisco! Those of us back in the UK are loving reading about all this cool stuff as it comes out, while busily working on Eden Star!

John (CEO) and Matt (Art Director) are actually at GDC now, hard at work showing our Pre-Alpha demo and talking to other developers, technology experts, journalists, and game tech enthusiasts. Ironically, because they’re so busy at the stand, those of us in the UK are probably more up-to-date with GDC news than they are! Poor Matt and John.

So what’s been happening at GDC?

We were pleased to see Virtual Reality being a strong theme, and were impressed by Oculus’ new Rift devkit, and Sony’s Morpheus HMD! There are many more hopefuls in the VR space, and this will hopefully keep the market competitive, and drive the development of better, cheaper VR hardware, and a greater number of game titles developed for VR!

Unreal 4 was released to the public! We have had a great time seeing what it’s capable of over the last few months, and give our sincere thanks to Epic for their amazing support and for developing such an amazing Engine.

An honourable mention must be made for Unity 5! The improvements in lighting, shading, UI and sound mastering look truly amazing. It’s an exciting time to be in the Games industry!

Microsoft and Xbox One have stepped up again, and are showing their support for Indie teams by releasing 25 more Indie titles via the Xbox One Marketplace.

And Matt and John have also been lucky enough to attend the première of Valves new documentary movie Free to Play, now available on YouTube!

And here’s a shot of the theatre it was presented in. Very nice.

EGX Rezzed

EGX Rezzed is brought to you by the team behind EGX London (formerly Eurogamer Expo). The show floor will be rammed with all manner of playable games and other game related features and attractions. In previous years the event has had a distinctly PC & indie game flavour, however, for 2014 the show has been expanded to include next gen consoles.

We will be at Stand #11 on the show floor, and will be giving attendees a hands-on demonstration of the Eden Star Pre-alpha Tech Demo. We may even have a cheeky surprise in store for everyone who comes to see us at the stand! As this is our home event we felt we should treat the people of our hometown to a little something special.

One more thing! Last week we posted a PFX blog, and we had a few replies asking for a video or gif! Marcin has very kindly obliged!

Stay tuned for further news!

Playing With Fire

14th March 2014

Hello again!

We’re excited to announce that a couple of our team are flying out to San Francisco next week to show our Pre-Alpha Tech Demo at GDC!

If you’re going there too, it’d be great to meet you!

Playing with Fire

Tonight, our PFX Artist, Marcin has volunteered to show you a few of his fancy particles!

Please be aware that everything you see in the images below is at a very early stage, and all props, PFX, and environments are block-out versions only!

Hello Everybody,

It’s Marcin again with quick, but very exciting news. Recently I’ve had a chance to explore a bit more of what the Unreal Engine 4 has to offer in the world of dynamic particles and I am very happy to tell you that in Eden Star you will be able to interact with the world in some ways you may not have thought of. What I am working on at the moment should allow players to use the MATA-Tool not only to push around solid blocks, rocks, and enemies, but also to affect other more dynamic phenomena, such as fire, fog, snow, photon cannon rays of doom… erm …I get carried away. For more realistic example I want to show you how the Pioneer can play with fire, literally.

There are many different moves that you can perform with your MATA-Tool, some of which you probably already know from the Combat Tech Demo. You can push and pull things, throw them around, destroy them, etc. and I want you to be able to see these actions reflected in the reactions of the world around you. On the images here you can see the Pioneer pushing the fire embers away with a quick, forceful blast, attracting them, and even blasting a hole in the wall of flame with the laser.

Those mechanics are not very game-changing, I realise that, but what I am really hoping to create here is a whole other level of immersion, and let’s face it, what are visual effects for, if not the immersion. After all, we probably can’t make it so the embers you blow away can set things on fire…hmm? What do you think? Nah… we probably can’t… or can we?

Edit: Marcin’s been kind enough to render out a video for you!

I hope you are as excited as I am about this. Thanks for reading and see you next time.

-Marcin Dudkowski

P.S. Be careful with fire.

Thanks for reading!

Eden Star

Welcome Pioneer…