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!

Halloween Treat.

Here's a small Halloween treat for you all.  Progress continuies with the texturing of all the buildings.  I believe half the city buildings are textured and by the new year my goal is to have the other half finished as well.  Here's a few sneak peeks:

The Blue Wolf will be a night club where the main character goes when he first enters the city.  The inside is already modeled with a long hallway and elevator that drops down into the basement where the nightclub is.   

Here is some experimentation with flares and lights.  I needed a break from texturing and played around for a few minutes.  Can't wait to get a whole street lit.


In other news Leandro has finished three concepts for Lielah.

Lielah plays your sister in the game and is the object in which the whole story is taking place.  She is your kidnapped sister that you must find and rescue from her captor.  At different stages of the story she will be wearing each of these outfits with the one on the right being the last one she wears.


Well, hope you've enjoyed this treat and keep an eye out for more next month!

Concept Artist part 2!

Hello and welcome again!  What a busy month it's been!  So many new hires and wouldn't you know, we got one last one to share with you.  This is Leandro Furlanetto, our newest concept artist:

After a decade working in the advertising industry in Brazil for companies such as Young & Rubicam, one of the largest advertising firms in the country, he became a self-taught artist who works both in the traditional and digital media formats. His unique style and use of color, contrast and composition stood him out from the rest and we here at Skyride Studios couldn't be more happy to have him work on the video game: City of Rain.

Here are a few examples of Leandro's work:

To see more of his work, you can follow him on deviant art at:

http://slipled.deviantart.com/

In other news, we've been creating some cool props to place around the city.  Newest to show is a little food cart where you'll be able to buy fruits/meats and foods unique only in the world of City of Rain.   You'll be able to refuel your character, trade food for information or use it to place distractions.  These carts will be mostly located on main street but there will be other shops around the city scattered about:

Hope you've enjoyed this little update and keep an eye out for some more info about the game soon.  Until then.

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.

Quick update

As the title states, this is just a quick update on the progress of the city I've been modeling for the game.  Take a peek:

I've completed 4 streets of buildings and have about 2 more streets to complete.  The main street branches off into many alleyways with twists and turns and slowly bottlenecks as you get further to the outskirts leaving only certain openings for passage.  Since most of the exploring will probably take place around the main street, I fully plan on allowing the player to go anywhere in the city they want.  Only certain buildings will have explore-able interiors but there will be plenty to explore on the outside of the buildings as well.

I'm very excited to continue on and once I get a playable Alpha version of the game up and running, I'll have sign ups on the skyride studios website so people can enter to play and test out the alpha for me, giving feedback and so on.

Well, that's all for now.

Street of dispair

Finally finished modeling half the street and the main park area for the run down side of town.  This was a pain cause of the fine detail's I had to incorporate into the modeling.  Take a look:

Once textured, this should start looking pretty sweet.  Hope you enjoy.

Shop til you drop!

So today my goal was to create a rough draft version of a store for my video game (along with my ongoing mission of completing my collision proxies for my buildings.)

So without further ado, I present to you:

The Garden of Weeden.  Haha!!!

Just wanted to play around more with the lighting and see how it all looked together.  Obviously the store still looks a bit empty so I'll have to keep playing around with it, but you get the general idea.

Well, until next time!

-Will
www.skyridestudios.com

Dark city alleyway

So I've been playing around with some props lately, trying to put detail into the city and get it ready for characters.  The first area I decided to play around with was one of the alleyways between two buildings.  After some fun production design and lighting, here's a first pass on what it looks like:

Obviously there is still a lot of work to do but I am pretty happy with the result.  Next I will decorate a shop in one of the buildings and see how that turns out.

Later crazies.

City Complete

So yesterday I just finished texturing my last building for the main road.  Here are pics of the 13 remaining buildings:

I can't begin to describe how awesome it is to have my default character run around town.  All the small squares in the front of the buildings will be shops along with street vendors, shoppers, gangs, strip clubs, casinos, etc.

My next step is to start adding props and people into the city, so first I will start laying down roads, trees, streetlights, vendor carts, etc.  Then after that, I'll take a small break to learn Autodesk Mudbox so I can start creating my own people to inhabit into the city.

In total there are 25 buildings that I made from scratch and textured.  I total, from learning the programs til now, this has taken me ~3 months to achieve.  (5 if you include the time I had to take off to pay the bills)

I'm expecting characters to take me another 2-3 to complete with props taking about 1-2 months in addition.

That leaves me with 4 months to complete animation and recording of the video for release in November to be pitched at the American Film Market.

So far I'm on track as long as my day job doesn't eat up too much free time this year.

4 down. 13 to go.

Hey.  So I've been slaving away working on these buildings still.  I found a new better way to texture them using UVW Unwrap which allows me to put the textures into photoshop and add multiple ones over others to help blend them better instead of just looking like a repeating pattern.  Downside is, it takes a lot longer to do so my process hasn't sped up like I'd hoped.  As a treat, here are the new 4 buildings I've done:

I'm still gonna try to finish them all by then end of the month, but I might be a week off because of work.  Still going strong though and can't wait to be done with these and onto bigger and better learning experiences.

My novel got published!

Hey everyone, my novel, "Oblivion Girl" got published as a eBook.  If you have a ipad, kindle, nook, sony reader or even just a computer, you can download it and take a read!  Coming soon it will be available also at the Apple bookstore, Amazon store and more!  Visit here to download now:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/275799

Building Buildings

Hello again.  I thought I'd take a small break and show some pictures of the buildings I've done so far along with close up shots of the detains that I've been putting into them.  I found with all the detail I am trying to add, each building takes a day to texture.  Also I've been slacking a little on the texturing because in a few days, I'm going to be publishing a book I wrote and had to go back through it again to make sure it's all ready to go.  Once it's online, I'll make a post about it here, even though it's not game related.  It will be published for Apple ipads and iphones, Amazon Kindles and PDF form for computers.

But enough about that for right now, on to the good stuff.  Here is wide shot of each building with a close up shot of the texturing it below:

So, there you have it, the first 7 buildings.

Keep an eye out for my book post coming soon!