Ether One – a UDK to UE4 update.

Hey all,

Apologies about the gap between updates. We had 2 pretty big shows one after the other so a lot of time was spent travelling to the shows to showcase. We were nominated as Finalists at Indiecade in California which was amazing! We were also showcasing Ether One for the first time on the Unreal Engine booth at EGX and we also had the first ever playable on the PS4 in the Sony Playstation section. So lots going on! Photos from the event can be found on our Facebook page here. It would be awesome if you could like the page for us too!

So back to Ether One – Art-wise we’re in a pretty good place as you can see from the screenshots below. Everything still very much WIP but we have most of the game lit to a base standard now in all the main areas – Harbour, Mines, Industrial and Village. We’ve not really touched the set piece story parts of the game in the middle and the end since they’re more gameplay heavy so we’ll probably tackle those when everything else is in place. We didn’t want to spend too much time focusing on refining the lighting since myself and Dave are still busy trying to get all the gameplay in so it makes sense for us to have access to all the levels when we need them. It also frees up OJ and James to work on other art things non-Ether related rather than distracting them all the time!

A few more of the gameplay shaders have been implemented also. We’re mainly adding them as and when we need them. For example if Dave is scripting the Ribbons in the game and needs some of the shaders finishing, James will set them up. It feels like a smooth workflow and it keeps our content nicely organised too.

I’m feeling pretty confident that we can get the first half the of the game to a good standard down for the end of October. Our main goal after that would be getting play testers in to start trying to break the game. I’m not sure if this will be the case but it feels like there are a lot fewer bugs in the game from first implementation in UDK. I think this is because that we have everything already fully designed and the variables don’t change. This means that Dave knows the result of how the class/blueprint is going to work and can script it accordingly. I think most bugs are created from designs changing and code being added to existing classes.

An issue which I STILL haven’t addressed is how to get all of our volumes over from UDK into UE3. I’ve tried a few tools but most of them are for BSP and not volumes. Blocking, reverb and stair volumes are a huge part of Ether One so ideally I’d like the process to be as easy as possible. And since we have the UDK build pretty watertight it would prevent a lot of collision issues we might get later on.

Most of the scripting that we needed such as the Ribbons, puzzle item interactions and core memories (Camera) are in now for the first half. A lot of what’s left is custom scripting for certain puzzle elements which we can’t use across the entire game.

The plan once all the scripting for the first half of the game is done is to move onto VR. It’s something we really want to spend a lot of focus on since we only implemented the Rift towards the last 1/3 of development and although we got lots of positive feedback from it, there are a few gameplay mechanics that still felt a little awkward with the HMD on.

I think that’s over for now. I’ll be sure to get a few more videos of some cool gameplay stuff for the next post!