Hello all!

Tonight we’re pleased to show you the first public unveiling of Eden Star development in Unreal 4! Our game world is being designed to be expansive, fun to explore, home to rich and diverse environments, opportunities for random encounters, and to be fun to destroy!

Before you see the following images, please be aware that everything you see is a work-in-progress!

As a starting point for the first iteration, and as an environment test, the crater concept was designed. The bowl of the crater provides room to build a base, and provides a sharp contrast to the rough, jagged alien terrain beyond. Of course, this was just a design for the terrain itself, and is completely unpopulated, making it look far more barren than the final area would be.

Most of the assets such as the spikes and shelf rocks are placeholders.

Bear in mind that these are actual in-Engine screenshots with no Photoshop tinkering at all.

Adding vegetation, special areas and features, boulders and other detail came after this.

You can see in these pictures how our level designer and 3d Artists progressed from concept to rough blockout, to the last, filled in and beautiful version. The sky is filled with volumetric clouds, which pick up the light from the sun and moons, adding some beautiful shifting colours as it transitions from day to night.

You may recognise this area from another concept piece we released a while ago. That piece was actually a paint-over of one of these sceenshots!

The map itself is 3km² (1.82 miles²), with the crater being about 80m² (262ft²) wide. We will be looking at larger areas in future, but for the purposes of testing, this is a good size to work with!

Although the crater looks fantastic, from a level-design perspective, the crater bowl lacked features. We want the player to have a challenging, intriguing, and fun environment from the start, so it was proposed that the crater could be an oasis of sorts. It may come as a surprise to those of you that have followed Eden Star for a while, but we are actually looking at creating forested areas, and other non-desert environment types! We hope this comes as a relief to those of you that have expressed concern that the environments in the pre-alpha lacked diversity.

Please bear in mind that we are still experimenting with the layout and appearance of our environments, so everything you see here is subject to change!

I hope you like what you see, and are looking forward to seeing more tasty Unreal 4 content!

Thanks, and we’ll see you again soon!