Hey all,

Just a quick update this week. We’re focusing on getting the first 40/50 minutes of Ether gameplay & visual complete. It should give us a good idea about how long the rest of the game will take to complete in UE4. The screenshot above is still very WiP and doesn’t represent ‘final’ lighting but it definitely demonstrates the fast progress. Visually, the first 40 minutes of the game is all there and we’re currently in the process of getting our pickup item system working. I’m going to try and get a quite video of that to post here to show you something moving in the game which would be nice! The particles and more complex shaders (water, rock etc) are all implemented in the ‘demo’ now with all the Matinees we needed hooked up. 

The systems other than pickups that are needed for us to become gameplay complete are dialogue, the player ‘pull’ system along with a camera seize. Pickups seem to have been relatively smooth to get in so we have a lot of confidence we can get the other systems implemented in and playable in a short space of time (He says).

As some of you may have seen, Ether One was announced for PS4 on UE4 at Gamescom this week. Getting the first section of the game allows us to start thinking about demoing the game at shows so that’s another reason why it’s become a big focus for us.

It’s been really interesting starting the game from scratch because we’ve found a load of old things we left in the UE3 version which we now know to do much better now. We’ve also found lots of places we can optimise so it’s a continous process to get as much out of Ether as we can. Since we’re not just releasing the UE4 version on PS4 we’re optimising as much as possible as we go without compromising quality. That way when we can to specific platforms it will (hopefully) be a smoother process.

I think that’s all for now – I’ll try and get a video of the pickups in the game at some point next week!