Well it’s been a while since my last update, but be reassured I have not been idling during my absence! Today I can finally show you what I have been toiling over this past month, starting with Dear Esther. During the past month or so I’ve been hard at work striving to hit my first milestone, to bring the first level up to a high standard that will be ready for polishing later on, and which will also serve as a visual benchmark for the remaining levels. Basically what this means is that now I have established the style of DE and have a large set of high quality pre-made assets, such as textures models and lighting, I’m hoping to proceed on the remaining levels at a much faster pace now that I need spend less time creating assets and such… Well that’s the theory anyway! Next week will be a good test as to how good my theory is, I’m at least hoping there will be some improvement over the 4 months it’s taken me to complete the first level otherwise I will be severely behind schedule (I’m hoping to get it out the door 6-7 months from now – but we’ll see).

Anyways! So now the first level is at an alpha stage and ready for polish I think it’s time to let you see the fruits of my labour:
 

And as a special treat, some high res shots for your desktop! (click to view larger, or rightclick>save as)

It’s been quite taxing this month to be honest, I reached a point recently after 4 months of non-stop DE and started to feel a bit burned out, luckily I recognised the warning signs and took some time away from DE to work on something completely different…

This is a WIP image for Game Artisan’s and Polycount’s “Unearthly 2009” competition. The objective is to create a real-time environment that portrays the words “End Game”. I chose a Viking funeral as my subject using the Unreal 3 Engine to create it in. Let me know your thoughts and feedback as I’m going to continue to improve it up until the deadline of the 17th so it would be most welcomed! Click here to follow my progress.

Other than that I’ve also been faced with a dilemma over my choice of Engine in the past couple of weeks. Initially Source seemed like the ideal choice, it would be free for anyone owning a valve game to d/l and play DE (using OB sdk base), free for myself to use the editing tools, and also have an engine which caters to my most basic requirements out of the box (FPS movement). However on the other hand I knew creating a highly detailed outdoor environment in Source would be a never ending battle with visuals vs performance using Source’s outdated rendering engine, but at the time there’s wasn’t much choice so I bit the bullet and got stuck in. Flash forward to three weeks ago: Firstly with the announcement of the awesome Unity engine becoming free for all PC developers, and then Epic’s announcement of the Unreal Developers Kit. I deeply wish this had happened months ago as either of these would much more suitable for me to develop DE on, however at this point in the project I think I have crossed the point of no return, mainly due to having limited finances to fund the project full time, and partly the motivation to start again in a new engine. Anyway so at this point I think I’m going to have to press on with source and hope for the best! Just please don’t announce any more free new awesome engines before I’m finished Mr Games Industry thank you!