Robert Briscoe - Environment Artist and Indie Game Developer

A Retrospective/Post-mortem on Dear Esther

Robert — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 20:35:55 +0000

So it’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to update my blog. The last time I posted on here, the game was just mere months away from release and I was pretty damn petrified. Since then things have been a blur, so much has happened in the last 12 months that I’ve really not had time to reflect on it all, but now I have a bit more free time on my hands I’ve decided to step back and take a closer look at the game’s development, its humble beginnings and the amazing, scary and emotional ride that I’ve been on for the past 3 years.

To start off with, I should probably go back to where things all began and how I ended up as a game artist in the first place so that you can get a better idea of how I ended up working on Dear Esther.

Humble Beginnings

I really began dabbling in game art back in 2004 when the Half-Life 2’s SDK came out. I’d always been fascinated by game art, but seeing what Valve were doing with Source Read More...

This Beta be good…

Robert — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:23:11 +0000

First of all, let me apologise for the lack of updates over the past few months, things have been rather insane here lately to say the least. Back in October, whilst still battling through a mountain of bugs, I decided it would be a good idea for us to enter DE into next year’s IGF. Up until this point Jack and I had been mostly fixing up the game to get it looking and functioning as it did in our Orange Box engine alpha, and although we were through the worst of it, I had yet to do any polish and hadn’t even begun the process of stripping out all of the portal 2 content, not to mention that we didn’t even have a functional UI!

With the IGF submission deadline just under a month away, I stocked up on food and barricaded myself into my apartment and put myself on permanent crunch in order to get something presentable for the IGF submission deadline. Over the course of the next few weeks I probably slept a total of 10 hours and had Hammer’s interface permanently burned into my retinas, but the overall result was Read More...

Porting…

Robert — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 16:55:15 +0000

So I haven’t posted any updates for a while as things have been rather chaotic here over the past few weeks since we finally got access to the latest Source Engine Code and started the process of porting everything over. Originally I thought it would be a fairly straightforward task since DE’s code was minimal and the content being pretty much done. However, after some initial issues just getting the P2 Engine code to compile, it quickly became obvious once we had a build up and running that things were going to be far from straightforward…

Ouch!

Missing and broken shaders, broken sprites, colour correction, overlays, NPCs and a whole bunch of other stuff which had been changed or phased out during the Source Engine’s evolution from 2007’s Orange Box Engine; quite frankly DE was a broken mess! Originally the plan was to port the code from the mod and spend a few weeks improving it and adding some nice new features, but the situation being as it is, development has quickly shifted from porting the original code (which was done in just few days) to sifting through a mountain of Read More...

Back on Track

Robert — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:19:00 +0000

Well, a lot has been happening since I last posted here, some of it bad and some of it good…Whilst development on DE has been going relatively smoothly over the past few months, we were unfortunately hit with a rather large setback relating to the University who was originally backing our Indie Endeavour.Due to various convoluted legal reasons regarding liability issues, insurance and a whole bag of other things a cant begin to comprehend, the University decided to pull out of the project just before the final bits of paperwork were due to be signed, and we were to get access to the retail Source code.

This meant that not only had we lost our backers, but obviously our funding also, putting us into a state of limbo until we could gather our thoughts and figure out what to do next.

Fortunately Dan had a backup plan; free the Dear Esther IP from the Uni and make TheChineseRoom into a fully fledged company so we could pursue backing on our own as legit Indie Developers. Meanwhile, Dan had also already been in talks with a company called IndieFund about funding another Read More...

Rollercoaster

Robert — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 01:25:43 +0000

Hello again! Firstly allow me to apologise for the lack of updates here on my Devblog during recent events. As many of you probably already know by now, an announcement was made over the weekend that Dear Esther was going ‘commercial’(-I prefer the term ‘Independent’). Originally, a press release was sent out last Thursday and was supposed to be embargoed until the 19th of Feb. Unfortunately one site decided to release last Friday, over a week early! Within hours the news was everywhere – cue panic!!

I was completely unprepared for it; I wanted that week to get the official website up and running and prepare some kind of teaser trailer/media to sweeten the deal. I’d also planned to write up a bit more of a personal and in depth post on the announcement here and ModDB for those of you who have been following my progress since the Project first formed. Needless to say it all went to hell last Friday, and have since been working like a mad man to get the official website and forums up (might be a bit rough, it was built Read More...