Dionysus and Diligence.

Hello all.  Welcome back. Today we are going to discuss new updates:

First off is badass concept art again by Leandro.  This is Lady Lynn's son Dionysus (and looking quite dapper):

If you look closely you'll see something on him that is super special.  I'll give you a moment to look.

Times up.

On his coat there is a logo of sorts.  This, which will have a larger picture soon, is the family crest for lady lynn and her entire family.  (Lady Lynn's drawing will be updated soon with that crest as well.)

Next up is the main street itself.  I've been working a lot on getting the town set up and making it feel like people could live there.  Here's the interior of the night time fishing shop "Luna Tuna."

This is where you will probably buy and sell items as well as maybe craft a weapon to use against your attackers.  Everything in Rain is a weapon.

Here is the Crimson Castle.  A bar next to Luna Tuna where you can sit and enjoy a drink while listening to whispers of people plotting to rob you:

The city is slowly growing life and soon every nook and cranny will be filled with fun areas to explore, hide and gather information.

In addition to this, we also have a new video of a ladder system we created for the game as well as a fishing boat with sails.  Take a look and let us know what you think! (No, seriously, no one ever comments.  Be the first.)

Lady Lynn and Lag.

Hello one and all.  Sorry for the delay in updates but to be honest, we've all taken a light break at the beginning of the year, regrouped, reassessed and are now back on track working harder than ever.

Lets start off with concept art, since it's pretty amazing.  We have a new character concepted out and they are kinda a big deal.  This character literally owns the entire city in which our story takes place and they were one of the very first character I came up with while writing the story.  I'm proud to introduce, Lady Lynn:

Some interesting facts about her are she's a widow and one of the richest people in the world.  Her wealth is everlasting and her late husband and her decided they wanted to build a Utopian like city where people could live in peace.  After her husbands untimely accident, she became grief stricken and locked herself away in her mansion, abandoning the city to gamblers, druggies, prostitutes, murders, hackers, etc.  

I'm excited to see her come to life as well as so many of the other characters.  Which brings me to me next topic: the city coming to life.

Here is the latest screen grab from out game.  I've recently started adding props into the world and it's scary how much it grows as the world begins to come together.  Check it out:

If you can't tell, I've added barrels, sconces, a sign and a lot of fishing net around this quaint little fishing shop.

Here I've added a small fishing dock and lantern.  I'll add more fishing nets, rope, boats next.  (this was just added a few minutes ago.)

The other additions that might go even more unnoticed is the lighting.  Recently Cryengine has updated their lighting engine which meant all the work I had done making the world look pretty had changed and looked terrible.  I had to go in and pretty much start from scratch finding out that reflections such as the rain on the ground being my most hardest to light.  If not done correctly, the lighting looked really bad.  I'm happy with the new outcome and can't wait to show you more as I add more along.

Hope this small post was worth the wait.  Check back in with us soon for some more music, concept art, and additions!

Models, Music and Mischief.

Hello and welcome back....wait....we're back...not you.  Welcome back us!

Lots to talk about so let's jump right in:

Models:
We're trying something new here at Skyride Studios.....more videos,  That's right, you read correctly unless you can't read then obviously you didn't.  We are going to start adding more videos of behind the scenes stuff just for you.

Up first is this timelapse we'd like to share.  After we model our buildings, we then go and add textures to the buildings, add collision proxies so that you can't run through the walls and then apply it in-game and tweak the textures until they look like whatever we set out to make them look like, I.E. concrete, glass, wood,etc.

 To do these last two steps it took us a hour and a half for just one building (City of Rain has something like 90-100 buildings) and in a attempt to keep you from watching the whole 90 minutes, we sped up the footage to 2 mins and 30 seconds. (You're welcome).  We also added a new unheard track to the timelapse so you can enjoy some music while it goes.  So here's that:




In the future expect to see these types of videos from our composer Luis and our concept artist Leandro.  These talented SOB's are still working on those videos for you as we speak...or type...or whatever.

In addition to exteriors we are also working on interiors.  Here's a screenshot of reference art and the final in-game art:

There will be final tweaks later on but the first run looks pretty good we have to admit.


In other news, I don't know how many of you went/knew about it/missed it but the amazing Los Angeles GameSoundCon happened this week and Skyride Studios sent Luis to attend.  Crazy enough the event sold out this year.  Over 300 composers/sound designers attended and Luis came back with mountains of knowledge and smiles.  Here are a few pictures he took of the event:

If anything the experience has made us want to work even harder on the game and we can't wait to attend next year.  If you end up attending the next one, hit us up at: will@skyridestudios.com and let us know.  We'd love to meet up and hang out.

As a final note, I wanted to share some of Leandro's concept art (still a work in progress).  After we completed Willow we moved on to Willows counterpart Winter.   Winter is the brains to Willow's brawn.  We first started with a few variations.

We then move on to a rough, refined draft:

And then finally the detailed finalized version we then give to our character modeler:

This time around we even gave a detailed version of his gadgets and toys:

After Winter was complete we started work on our first female character (Lielah).  Lielah is Epios's sister and the whole reason Epios goes to Rain is to look for her. (She's been kidnapped and it's your job to find out where and by who).  We chose #3, #4 and #6 as different costumes she'll have on throughout the game depending on what's happening within the story.

Just the other day Leandro sent me the rough draft of #6 Lielah:

Probably by the end of the month or so this character's concept will be completed and we will move on to the next which I'm hoping will be Metis.  Metis is one of my personal favorites and here's a little sneak peak at his description:

  

Hope that was worth the wait.  Hopefully we will be updating more frequently as we get closer to the end of the year.  Thanks for everyone's kind words and support.  It means a lot to us and please spread the word if you like what you see.  Talk care, talk soon.

An Irrational Blizzard

Wow! What a crazy couple of weeks for Skyride Studios!  We have a lot to share, so let's get started!

Firstly, we'd like to welcome our first outside hire, Rico Cilliers to our team:

Apart from being a kick butt Character Designer, Rico is working with us all the way from South Africa and we here at Skyride Studios couldn't be happier. Here are some still shots of his amazing work:

You can check out more of his work on his blog here:  http://rico-computer-art.blogspot.com/

We've also received some great offers from some friends of mine in the video game industry.  One has reached out to a programmer who worked for the company Irrational Games (creators of Bioshock and Bioshock Infinity) in hopes of getting them or someone they know on board our game to help out.  

And if it couldn't get any better, a close friend of mine who works at Blizzard (creators of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, etc) has offered additional assistance in the search for crew members.  

This not only completely humbles my composer and I, but makes us work extra hard at continuing onward.  As of right now, we are still searching for programmers or additional people interested in helping with the game.  You can work from anywhere in the world and at a pace that you feel fits best.  If you are interested, email me at will@skyridestudios.com and I'll make sure to get back to you one way or another.  

In closing, I'll leave you with a screen shot of some building I just added lighting and bumpmaps to.  Later Screen Slavers.