ETHER ONE DECEMBER UE4 UPDATE!

Hey all!

So, good news! We’re at the stage of polishing the main parts of the game so that we can start heavily play testing and showing it to people for demo’s and the impending release! This is definitely the hardest (and most time consuming) part of development where you can never tell how long small tweaks will take to get right. We also had the amazing opportunity to take Ether One to Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago to showcase at the Playstation Experience with a few other independent developers so we had to get our demo polished up for that which was an awesome experience! 

For the last 3-4 weeks we’ve been pretty much doing all the ‘under to hood’ stuff which is mostly being implemented in C++. Dave is working on the save game system currently. It’s something that we really wanted to get right this time around as we had a few issues on release with save game bugs. We got the majority of the bugs fixed pretty quickly after release however save game bugs are also hard to find & fix since we need to grab each persons save game data to repro & fix it – definitely a big learning curve in game development for us! The idea this time round is to have a bulletproof save system (isn’t everyone’s!) which takes some time to implement and get right, learning from previous mistakes as we go. Hopefully the additional invested time will also allow us to stream a lot more content in and out of the levels – pretty much all of our gameplay in UDK stayed on the persistent level to try and avoid those issues so this time around it should be much more optimised.

On the editor end, OJ has been polishing the lighting in the game. Lighting is something we’ve found to be a long process. Not because of the engine but just game development in general. It took us a while to get a feel for the new lighting system and get Ether to the point where we could re-create the tone that UDK Ether had. We’re still not entirely happy with the lighting, we want to recreate that ‘sharp’ lighting UDK Ether had so we’re not quite there yet. Keeping the tone of the game is really important to us, we don’t want it to feel like a different game so that’s something that’s been quite challenging. I think it will definitely be an ongoing element that we’ll tweak right up until release.

Gameplay wise, not too much has changed. There are 20 puzzles in the entire game. I would say around 13 of them are fully implemented with the dialogue in. Maybe 5 are in but with small gameplay specific things missing, and the remaining haven’t been implemented because they still require certain scripted classes to be created that will be done under the hood. I’m not too worried about those at the moment since Blueprints make it speedy to implement gameplay & once I have all the classes created I can finish the remaining puzzles in a day or so. The main rush here is that we want to start fully playtesting soon so hopefully once the save game stuff is done we can get all those classes implemented.

Something we used a lot of in Ether is Scaleform. We mostly used it on the central big map board in The Case where you could play back puzzle audio in areas and also use it as a fast travel mechanic. We also have a writing mechanic in the game where you can input text with your keyboard or gamepad to solve puzzles. With the UE4 implementation, we’re looking into using UMG (Unreal Motion Graphics). Since it’s a relatively new feature, when we wanted to start working on it, UMG wasn’t in a good enough place for a shipping/console game. Now that it is in a good enough place, we’re busy with the save system. So it’s definitely challenging working in a new engine with constantly improving features but it’s also really exciting to get those features and great when things do come together so we can’t complain! Whilst we’re waiting on certain features to get implemented we’ve been working on ideas for our new game so it’s not like we’re left with nothing to do.

Overall we’re pretty satisfied with the speed that things are coming together. If I remember correctly, this time last year, I was still building the industrial area during the Christmas break so we’re definitely further into development than a similar time last year. We’re going to keep working through Christmas and in the new year so that we can hopefully begin the conversation about releasing with the different platform distributors. Something that we’re hoping to do is give the UE4 version of Ether One away for free for people that already own Ether so that you don’t have to pay for it twice! We’ve spoken with the people in charge of licencing and distribution and it seems to be a viable thing so hopefully we can confirm that in the new year. 

As always, let us know if you have any questions! A few people have already approached us about making the transition from UDK to UE4. We’re always happy to share any information or tips we have that you might find valuable!