Wednesday, January 9, 2013

WPG: November - Gameplay Trailer & Guest Lecture...


In November the Harbor area was finished completely and this time it was 100% complete. It had gameplay,  music, sound effects and narrative flow, the deadline was hit for the gameplay trailer. Below are some high quality renders taken of the environment.











Check out the Gameplay Trailer Below, when we first uploaded it to youtube we had some compression issues so there are 2 versions of the video up, here the HD version. In total the videos have pulled in around 17,000 views. 



Featured Websites

This time around we had a lot more exposure and because we released a gameplay trailer, we received a lot of feedback from the gaming community, this helped us understand what we need to do to improve the game The links below will take you to some of the articles written about Ether One. .

www.destructoid.com     www.indiestatik.com     www.rockpapershotgun.com

www.gamespy.com     www.gamershell.com     www.indiegames.com

www.gamespot.com     www.gameboomers.com     www.creepygaming.net

www.dcaguild.enjin.com    www.ripten.com      www.fistfullofpotions.com

www.videogamesinteractive.com     www.fizmarble.com     www.gamingcentrum.com


Here are a few quotes I took from two sites that featured Ether One. www.mweb.co.za


'Ether One reminds me of an enchanted painting taken from a C.S.Lewis Narnia Chronicle; I expect to be swept away into the picturesque fantasy world by just looking at it on my screen.' 


Han Cilliers



www.britishindie.com



'upon witnessing the four minute gameplay insight as you will below we were left touched and confident that Ether One is bound not only for great things, but for areas that games rarely touch – our hearts and minds.'


Chris Priestman





www.n4g.com

'Indie game 'Ether' mixes Dishonored's visual style with Amnesia's atmosphere, first gameplay footage'


John Papadopoulos


It was wonderful to see journalists understand our game and enjoying the direction we were taking with the project. It was especially great to have Ether compared to Amnesia's atmosphere and Dishonored's visual style as these games are both successful products. I took a lot of inspiration from Amnesia as they created tension well; but I had not heard of Dishonored whilst developing the visual style for ether so that was a pleasant surprise.


Texture Work

Below are some texture sheets I created for the finished Harbor  they are not yet complete as they need line work and some overlay textures.






Creating an Important Area

After the release of the gameplay trailer I got to work on a new environment, it was a 1950/60s Science Fiction living quarters. The shots below she me using existing textures and assets to create an initial pass. The wall textures and furnishings would soon be changed.






Putting Back in the Pot

I was invited by Ken Lau head of Futureworks in Manchester to give a guest lecture to his 2nd year degree students. He wanted me to give a small presentation followed by a tutorial of how i create my hand painted textures for Ether.




The image above shows me in the presentation explaining my learning process of hand painting textures. I then moved on to paint an important model that is going to be used in Ether, i thought it would be interesting for them if they could watch me paint an asset that would be a focal point in Ether.

 I textured the Ether Chair for the class, showing all of my processes and steps to creating the Ether style. Below you can see the finished chair on the Steam Greenlight icon, a Reference image sheet and the texture sheet.







After my demonstration the students where able paint the texture for the Axe and Shield that I created in January 2012. 


Here is a shot of me pointing suggestively at a screen.

The Texture Sheets below where created by the students at Future Works. They where kind enough to email me their texture sheets, special thanks goes to those who took the time to finish the textures. Thank you to Nial Tailor, Beckie Heaton, Alan Taylor, Robert Whitehurst, Liam Roberts, Joe Grainger, Josh Moran and Sean Barron.










2 comments:

  1. Hey OJ!
    I'm following your blog for quite a while, and your progress and learning curve is amazing. You create beautiful environments and Ether looks fantastic! Its really inspiring seeing how you developed from the first post.
    I am getting into the world of environment creation and hand painted textures, but it seems that I'm stuck for a very long time. I wanted to ask, what do you think is the best way to practice? What kind of focused studies should I do and how should I approach them? I am doing a lot of texturing and painting, but I feel that I lack some sort of a lead to push me up.
    Thanks again for posting all of these great stuff!

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  2. Great Work!!! you did great job... your skill is so good. Keep goin. I am also training myself on "Hand painting texture". I am a newbie and your works are inspiring me....

    ReplyDelete