Hello all!
Tonight we’re pleased to show you the first public unveiling of Eden Star development in Unreal 4! Our game world is being designed to be expansive, fun to explore, home to rich and diverse environments, opportunities for random encounters, and to be fun to destroy!
Before you see the following images, please be aware that everything you see is a work-in-progress!
As a starting point for the first iteration, and as an environment test, the crater concept was designed. The bowl of the crater provides room to build a base, and provides a sharp contrast to the rough, jagged alien terrain beyond. Of course, this was just a design for the terrain itself, and is completely unpopulated, making it look far more barren than the final area would be.
Most of the assets such as the spikes and shelf rocks are placeholders.
Bear in mind that these are actual in-Engine screenshots with no Photoshop tinkering at all.
Adding vegetation, special areas and features, boulders and other detail came after this.
You can see in these pictures how our level designer and 3d Artists progressed from concept to rough blockout, to the last, filled in and beautiful version. The sky is filled with volumetric clouds, which pick up the light from the sun and moons, adding some beautiful shifting colours as it transitions from day to night.
You may recognise this area from another concept piece we released a while ago. That piece was actually a paint-over of one of these sceenshots!
The map itself is 3km2 (1.82 miles2), with the crater being about 80m2 (262ft2) wide. We will be looking at larger areas in future, but for the purposes of testing, this is a good size to work with!
Although the crater looks fantastic, from a level-design perspective, the crater bowl lacked features. We want the player to have a challenging, intriguing, and fun environment from the start, so it was proposed that the crater could be an oasis of sorts.
It may come as a surprise to those of you that have followed Eden Star for a while, but we are actually looking at creating forested areas, and other non-desert environment types! We hope this comes as a relief to those of you that have expressed concern that the environments in the pre-alpha lacked diversity.
Please bear in mind that we are still experimenting with the layout and appearance of our environments, so everything you see here is subject to change!
I hope you like what you see, and are looking forward to seeing more tasty Unreal 4 content!
Thanks, and we’ll see you again soon!
For further details, keep checking the blog and jump into the forums to ask your questions!
As always, if you haven’t already, you can play the Pre-alpha Combat Tech Demo now by pre-ordering Eden Star here!
Only $15 gets you the UE3 Tech Demo and full access to the UE4 based Alpha and beyond!
This game looks super pretty, i like the concept pics compared to the ingame WIPs.
This is fantastic, truly beautiful. Great work!
This is indeed beautiful!
Beautiful, the way you went from concept to ingame, is almost spot on, great work, looking alot forward to this game :)
This is amazing, cant wait to play the game an explore this.
Thank you for the comments!
We should clarify that these are early screens and definitely a work in progress, the engine we are working with is capable of beautiful things :) We're excited to show you more but want to make sure that the new mechanics and some of the more requested features are in there before we do...
Thanks again for your support and keep watching for more updates!
Looking nice so far!
How did you make the screens go into that lightbox mode when clicked ? Is that custom or can you do that with normal indiedb tools ?
more speed art videos plz :D
Looking very pretty.
I do have one question though - the comparison to other survival/creation games implies that the environments are procedurally generated. How does that mesh (accidental 3D modelling pun!) with these very pretty hand made environments?
Hey Orac,
We are currently finalizing the way we generate world environments. The core vision for Eden Star and certain of the mechanics that make up the backbone of the game require a pool of components that are very different in comparison to other survival creation games. Therefore, although we are looking into elements of procedural world generation, we are not prioritizing this as a dedicated core feature for the game.
I suppose you can probably procedurally assemble pre-built environments, or something along those lines.
Anyway, best of luck - this is one of those pitches that I would really like to see done well. :D