Did you read last news Oct 4th ? Sooo. today we lift the curtain - Cedric Danneels is back and today he gets directly to you with the promised next "behind the scene" info... ALSO: everyone should now get The Haunted: Hells Reach to play the upcoming DLC, we have reduced the price to 8.99 and will also make special offers. Quite close is the next special sale simply watch our steam store each weekend!!
Hello everyone, Cedric talking here... Back in the days, I made the Museum level for THE HAUNTED: HELLS REACH. As announced earlier, some of you may also know me for making in DARK SOULS 3 Irithyll of the Boreal Valley and a part of the Lothric castle. I took over the realisation of upcoming DLC recently and decided to remake things. It may be longer to do things that way, but even if I took my distances with THE HAUNTED: HELLS REACH after the THQ insolvency post-release debacle, I still have some pride and certainly want the players to get a proper product, so that's why I'm here now - to lift the quality step by step until state of the art.
Since there was a comment about it, I’m tempted to show you the reason between what appears to be a day lighting - but I feel it's better to keep that part secret until the end since it's the main feature of the level. So - no pretty screenshots today, that will be for the next update... Today is going to be a small “making of” an asset where I’ll explain a part of my designing process.
It all starts with this… …a small set of very simple meshes. Those meshes will be used to block out the rough shapes of the level, get a sense of scale and also test the gameplay very early on. As you can see, they follow strict size guidelines, this is meant to make sure that the assets will assemble properly without gap. When using random sizes, everything will need to be adjusted later on, potentially causing new problems in other areas. This step is for me the easiest part but also the most important, if you mess up here, you can easily double or triple your production time. I always keep my set of meshes as small as possible, a wall, a door or two, some pillars and slopes and you're good to go. No need to juggle between a hundred of different assets and spend time wondering if Wall002 would be better than Wall015, simplicity is efficiency. At this point of the production, making changes is extremely easy so I make sure to test the gameplay a lot to make it as fluid as possible. There may still be some changes later on but unless there was a major oversight on my side, the gameplay should be close to final and any change should be minor. The later the change, the harder it is, the longer it takes to fix, taking away some precious time that could be used to polish the level. — So now let's take one of those meshes, for example the pillar and let's proceed to the next step. For every mesh, I gather some references and do some research about the architecture that I want to recreate and then start refining my meshes and diversifying them. The meshes should have enough details to be recognizable but still basic enough to be easily modifiable. Once done, i can start replacing the block meshes by their refined version and see if they fit well. Things like pillars become much thinner when going from a 8sides cylinder to something more refined like on this picture, which may look wrong. Once again, since the meshes are very simple, adjusting the proportions is still very quick and easy at this point so it's better to make sure that the architecture is well balanced rather than having to do fixes later. — Once every mesh has been modeled, placed in the level and adjusted to look correct, it's start to move to the third phase; making the final mesh with all of its details. Well, here it is… …and you may notice 2 things: 1.) The shape of the base changed compared to the previous version. The reason is that in the previous version, it was easy for the player to get stuck while back-walking. This is a part of the work that players don't realize very often but when making an asset, we have not only to care about how it looks - we also have to make sure that it doesn't hinder the player's movements. When a game advertises itself as "utra realistic", it actually means "ultra believable". The reality is always slightly altered to help the gameplay because even if we know that graphic make a game sell, we also know that players forgive more easily bad graphics than they forgive bad gameplay. 2.) There are some weird shadows and the mesh looks a bit blobby. What should be flat surfaces appear to be slightly convex. There are two main ways to fix that. First way is, we could make a high poly asset then "bake" a normal map that will correct the surface. This way allows us to make very high quality assets, however it takes a very long time (more than a day for a pillar like this), time that i don't have. Second way is to fix the geometry itself by modifying what we call the vertex normals. This process only takes a few minutes and will also allow me to make the texture without needing a high poly bake. And here is our pillar with its geometry edited. It looks much better than the previous version and has the same memory weight: A little peak at the wireframe: I kept the geometry relatively light compared to nowaday's standards. Nowaday's graphic cards can digest millions of polygons per frame at 60fps but since the DLC is for a game that was released five years ago, a part of our playersbase may still have a low end computer so I keep the things a bit more simple and light. — We are getting close to the end now. What is left to do now is to make the texture for our asset - and have a look at how nice our pillar mesh looks combined with its texture: And then place it in the game… Well, that’s from Cedric for today. Now its your turn to say: what would you like to see in the next update ?
...and please remember - get your own copy of THE HAUNTED: HELLS REACH for as low as 8,99 or the four pack or watch special sales !!!
2016 is, like announced in january, an exciting year and we are happy not only to found the base for Haunted 2, we also found solutions for the DLC...The Haunted:Hells Reach was made with UE3 and as we all know that is not state of the art - but we need to make the DLC with UE3 to fit that in the original game. Sooo: Step 3 of the level work is done and we are now improving the DLC1 to bring on those more impressive visuals. Today we show a bit from "behind the scene" with two " before / after " shots to give an idea where we go...direction high quality assets! You´ve checked out our last announcement from Sep 1st ??? http://steamcommunity.com/games/43190/announcements/detail/803152542812095166 The images from Dark Souls 3 made by that former Haunted Team member ? Well, that one joined also back - and since we are now in the final phase of the DLC we are going to inform more often about the ongoing things at The Hauntedgames. Stay tuned - next "behind the scene" info friday, oct 21st 2016 !!
PRICE LOWERED like promised !!! It´s time to get your copy of Haunted 1: Hells Reach now to be prepared for the DLC to come! Trading cards will follow soon! All meetings on GAMESCOM in Germany some days ago also brought light and good results for future work and publishing on Haunted 2: Back to Hell...and another project!!! AND by the way - are you familiar with the area of these 6 images below? You´re right - this is IRITHYLL of the Boreal Valley from DARK SOULS 3 !!! But did you know also that it was actually made by one of the "The Haunted Team Members"?
Hello to everybody… We have given us an overview of the fan-wishes and thank you all for constructive postings and your eMails !!! We want to take that all into account as far as possible. :-) The first wish we are going to fullfill now is the question for DLC…the DLC-work began (see first preview Jun 24) while we are setting up a new team for Haunted 2 (Back to Hell). Then we will see a price reduction for the full game. Thirdly…trading cards. Okay so far…and do not buy the game from any other place than from STEAM (please read announcement from Jan 3, 2016 carefully !!!) we DID NOT authorize any other sale and Cosmi Valusoft do not have any rights to sell our game, not digital like a steam key and not one physical product. Finally, as anybody should know, the development of a game like Haunted usually costs from a million bucks upward - THQ went bankruptcy - we never saw the money that was put into the game and in lawyers, although the game was successful, while THQ sold. We are Indies, lost a lot of money and are right now paying again for new dev. - sooo the DLC’s to come can’t be sold for nothing, but also not expensive…for the new start we want you all to buy it ! :-) Thank you and have fun !!!
Hello to everybody… We have given us an overview of the fan-wishes and thank you all for constructive postings and your eMails !!! We want to take that all into account as far as possible. :-) The first wish we are going to fullfill now is the question for DLC…the DLC-work began (see first preview Jun 24) while we are setting up a new team for Haunted 2 (Back to Hell). Then we will see a price reduction for the full game. Thirdly…trading cards. Okay so far…and do not buy the game from any other place than from STEAM (please read announcement from Jan 3, 2016 carefully !!!) we DID NOT authorize any other sale and Cosmi Valusoft do not have any rights to sell our game, not digital like a steam key and not one physical product. Finally, as anybody should know, the development of a game like Haunted usually costs from a million bucks upward - THQ went bankruptcy - we never saw the money that was put into the game and in lawyers, although the game was successful, while THQ sold. We are Indies, lost a lot of money and are right now paying again for new dev. - sooo the DLC’s to come can’t be sold for nothing, but also not expensive…for the new start we want you all to buy it ! :-) Thank you and have fun !!!
SyA salutes all friends of "The Haunted: Hells Reach" and wishes a successful and healthy 2016!!! Here are the news:
Like everyone knows, was "The Haunted: Hells Reach" 2012 a victim of the insolvency of THQ. The console versions could not be completed and the license to sell the PC version has been, as well as the distribution rights of many other videogames, acquired by Cosmi on the purchase of THQ subsidiary Valusoft (Press Release Apr 25, 2012).
Needless to say that the video game marketing ran then absolutely differently than planned between THQ and SyA.
On November 4/5, 2013, the companies SyA - Signo y Arte (Licensor) and Cosmi Valusoft (Licensee) signed a contract for the premature termination of their Publishing and Distribution Agreement by end of the day March 31, 2014. For this purpose, the following public statement was agreed and issued on Nov 11, 2013: "Cosmi Valusoft and the Licensor of “The Haunted: Hell’s Reach” Signo y Arte, S.L., have reached an agreement under which all rights to “The Haunted: Hell’s Reach”, have reverted to Licensor, and Licensor is free to bring the game to market."
About two months after the last permitted sales by Cosmi Valusoft the game was relaunched by SyA. Unfortunately we had to take note of the fact (immediately after the relaunch and our last report in the community Dec 2014) that we were not the only ones, and still are, which sell "The Haunted: Hells Reach" - even though we have NOT assigned rights to distribute/sell the game to others. This led to unexpected legal considerations and SyA again could not act as it was desired. In other words, we now also have to bear the additional costs of Investigation, criminal charges and damages actions in the different countries in addition to our extremely high losses due to the insolvency of THQ.
The GOOD news - due to the criminal investigations we saw that there are more friends of Haunted, as we thought because of what we saw until then. Also the market appraisal of SyA and THQ were correct - quite contrary to other opinions. That's why SyA will reactivate the plans for "THE HAUNTED: BACK TO HELL" from October, 2011.
In addition, and in the meantime we think about the completion of DLC/Add-on for "The Haunted: Hells Reach" for all legally acquired games.
