Hi everyone! October is over. Autumn is in full swing! However long and dark these autumn nights might seem, however scary the end of this month could be during Halloween, the development still goes on.
Development of The Uncertain: Light at the End is at the final stages. We’re polishing details, perfecting levels and models, and just like any other development studio, redesigning some things from scratch. You must have read the interview with our 3D specialist Anton Stepanov: he mentioned that Emily’s model has undergone several rounds of changes. We were beginning to think that we have finalized her—and now we have to redesign her model once again! We’re sure you’re going to like her new appearance.
We’re filling in the levels, adding new props to the Sewers and the TV Studio. One of the Sewers rooms was fully overhauled: now it’s even more breathtaking.
We added new minigame covers, threw in over a dozen new models, finalized the Sewers, changed Brian’s haircut, and polished our characters’ appearance.
Enough chit chat! Slides speak louder than words.
Check this out: new minigames! More minigames!
What else could keep busy a human in the deserted world of the future?
Sewers reworked. We’re keen to share it with you.
Players will go through a lot in this somber maze.
Details are important for the game’s atmosphere. We need more gold props!
Lockers? System units? What object from the future do you think this is?
This is what a level concept looks like. Sometimes the simplest visualization method is the easiest to understand.
That’s be all for now. Stay tuned, add the game to your wishlist, and remember: your comments are our best reward at this stage.
Hugs, СomonGames Studio
Developers Diaries. September
Hi! Everyone's busy heating up their homes and unpacking autumn clothes, while we continue to work, warming ourselves at our system units. We've been sweating away, so no amusing stories this month! Here's some content we created in September.
Some props to fill the levels. You might even have something like this at home :)
Can you tell which is real, and which is the work of the 3D modeller? ;) Tell us if you can, because we have no idea! :D
Automated unmanned trucks. Keep working even without people around.
We were told that we shouldn't walk alone in the dark... but we no longer have a choice.
Need. More. Interfaces.
Models of devices to fill the levels.
Law enforcement: we serve and protect. A parking violator!
Animations: when characters come alive.
That's all for today. We're in the process of creation. Thank you for following us! See you soon! :)
Developers Diaries. August
Hi all! Summer has passed in a blink of an eye. We worked hard while many were enjoying their summer break. Today we’d like to share some good news before revealing latest screenshots and arts.
Firstly, we have found a publisher! We will reveal its name in the upcoming news.
Secondly, we got to recording Russian voice-over. Those who follow us on social media, might have heard Emily’s voice record made by Tatiana Shietova, widely known as Alice Yandex’s voice. English voice-overs are on the way: we’re translating texts and finding good voices.
So much for the big news :) The rest is going smoothly. Here’s a bunch of latest images!
Nightmarish screenshot.
Alex and his wife Claire. Their models are almost finalized.
Gamepads from the future: content for the levels
Communication terminal
Fashion poster from the fashion future
Retro tape recorders. They’re old-timers even for us.
Drones and various equipment
We need more props!
That would be all for today! We have much more for you in store. See you soon!
The Uncertain Team: Anton Stepanov
Anton's career in game development began in ComonGames studio. Before joining our team, he was a freelancer on various tasks with a lot of clients. One of the most interesting practical cases in his history was participation in a waterfall scene for the Attraction movie (Russia, 2017). He also enjoyed working on the Ice movie a year later. Anton's job was to create a stadium markup by matching 13 thousand polygons with the object, based on the stadium pictures from all angles. This very markup was later used to create a crowd in Houdini software. Anton told us that while working on movies, Blender software was enough to satisfy his needs. He has been involved with all kinds of 3D development in his life: animations, rigs, characters.
A physicist by education, Anton Stepanov has dreamed of becoming a scientist since childhood. He took up 3D modelling as a hobby as early as in 2007, during his second year in the institute. He wanted to make videos, but Kemerovo city couldn't offer the high-speed Internet (or barely any Internet access at all). He borrowed a CD with Adobe After Effects from a friend. Along with Adobe software, he found a whole bunch of useful stuff on the CD: Maya, 3D Max, Rhinoceros 3D, Softimage, Adobe Premiere. He studied After Effects for a while, then randomly opened a 3D Max manual... and now he's working with us. Well, in fact, it was a longer story. The CD contained some lessons that gave him an insight into 3D Max, which was "kind of interesting". A bottle opener, built to the lesson from the CD, was his first 3D model ever. Anton fell in love with this field. He was really impressed by Warcraft: Legion of Chaos, Frozen Throne videos back then. He spent a couple of months studying the software and decided that this was it! The door, which will take him to videos like this. There's a widespread conception. 3D rookies often think that they will become cool modelers quite soon, either to develop an amazing game of their own together with a team of enthusiasts or to film a breathtaking video. Anton was inspired by the videos. But then again, there was no home Internet access whatsoever. He visited a computer club after classes and spent hours, searching for lessons online No video lessons existed back then. He downloaded text-based tutorials on his flash drive and tried to figure them out at home. Anton was a regular visitor of such websites as render.ru, 3dmir.ru, demiart.ru. All of them have been up and running till today!
A while later he had to give all his attention to education in the institute. He continued to study and create 3D models, although he couldn't invest as much effort as before. All his time and attention were given to the education, a graduate paper first, postgraduate studies later. Taking up science has been his own deliberate choice since childhood. The postgraduate course cooled him off a bit, though. The poor state of science and the (rather low) potential income were really discouraging. The sum total of these factors had an adverse impact on Anton's decision to abandon science for good. The real situation didn't correspond with his big dream.
He returned to 3D graphics in 2011. He upgraded his hardware, gave up on 3D Max, and proceeded to Autodesk Maya and ZBrush. While learning his tools, Anton created various models. There was a period when he posted timelapses of characters, created in ZBrush, on Youtube. Unfortunately, these works have been deleted. A year later Anton discovered Blender. He was amazed at how cool and complete this software was and began to actively study it. Finally, 3D graphics began to bear fruit—Anton earned his first money in 2015. It was a rotating golden globe for a client's website. Anton remembers that this was thrilling and exciting. He did the job in only two days in Blender software. He was paid 1500 rubles (about 20 EUR), but received something way more important: the sense of accomplishment and the desire to go on with 3D graphics. This is how his freelancing career started that eventually brought Anton to ComonGames.
While looking for job, Anton contacted Alexey Surkov, who used to work together with him. Alexey told him he was working on a game—and hiring. Anton had already known Artem Netyagin. He also knew The Uncertain, part one, but wasn't aware that this was the development of part two. At that time, the team was trying to hire a 3D modeler to make hairdos for our characters. What a lucky coincidence it was to find a woman's wonderful haircut model in Anton's portfolio! Anton and Artem got in touch, talked, and decided to give it a try.
It turned out, modeling hair for Unity was a complex and fascinating process. There isn't much on the Internet. Finding the limited information is like gathering bread crumbs. There's absolutely nothing related to Unity, though. All video games hair models featured on Artstation were created either in Marmoset or Unreal Engine.
Our experience has proven that it wasn't because no one has ever been up to the challenge. The real reason is that Unity can't properly handle opacity, a very important parameter that could make hair look natural. It took us a while to solve this problem. A hairdo texture that looked great in Marmoset or Blenter began to rip apart and lose whole chunks on Unity. We used a special hair shader, improved by Andrey Trunov. However, only Unity developers can completely eliminate this problem by redesigning all shaders to process opacity correctly. There's a professional joke that comes up whenever a Unity demo trailer is published, "How did you solve the hair problem?—There is no hair!"
This is how Anton's career in ComonGames began, with hair and Unity peculiarities. One day, the team raised an issue of the current quality of the characters. Their quality level was too low compared to the other graphics in the game. Overall quality has been growing the whole time, leaving the characters far behind. Eventually, they began to look worse than everything else. Artem Netyagin decided to redesign the characters and improve their quality. Thankfully, Anton had some experience—especially with hair! He decided to give it a try, and he's been on the characters to this day. However, it hasn't been without some difficulties. While creating a character, Anton checked it out on Marmoset. No matter how cool a character looked on Marmoset, uploaded to Unity it was a sorry sight. It took us a long time to understand why. At first, Anton was certain it was something that he did wrong, and he had to remodel Emily for several times. The experience has proven that characters must be created directly on Unity. We had to start over for a few times. We weren't the first or the last developers to fall into that trap, though. The game development history has seen numerous cases like ours. Our characters, for one thing, looked foreign to the environment.
You've had the chance to see Anton's work. He renders the characters in our posts. This isn't as easy as it looks. All characters are pre-final on Unity. To show you a good render, Anton has to rebuild them on Marmoset. By the way, he hasn't finished them all. We'd like to give the projecting technology a try (applying skin tones from real photographs instead of creating it manually). We've already purchased special photo references, now we're developing the process to improve the characters even further.
They're about 80% ready. The hairdos are still a huge issue. Each character took about a month of Anton's time, and he dedicated most of it to the characters. Unity applies certain restrictions. Billboards must be positioned precisely over one another without overlapping. Unreal Engine has a special parameter that describes depth. It's used for anti-aliasing purposes: the overlapping sections become intangible, and billboards look like real hair. Our Unity has no such parameters right now. We optimized the development process and moved the hair issue to "the last to go" category. The characters have stayed bald for a while, and now... that's right, Anton is making hair for them. Only Alex and Claire remain bald now. As soon as Anton is done with their hairdos, he'll proceed to polishing all characters, finalizing details, and improving their overall looks. He wants to create perfect models, worthy of our project.
Stay tuned, share this post, and don't forget to add The Uncertain: Light at the End to your wishlist on Steam!
No only the game release is coming! Ahead are tons of fascinating stories about the game world, our team, and journeys that brought all these talented people to the game development industry.
Developers Diaries. July
Hi all! Thank you for being with us and following our news! July has gone by very fast. We're going through a rough patch, trying to hire new people to speed up some processes, figuring out how much work it’ll take, and preparing ourselves for the final leap. We're finalizing all narrative that was in draft; localization has been started. We'll zero in on sounds and sound effects any day now! (the game is starting to feel 50% more real! It's a game now, not a tech demo!)
The upcoming months are going to be busy and stressful more than ever. But crunches are a natural thing that every game studio has to face even if it's AAA. Sleepless nights, energy drinks, fatigue, nervous breakdowns, falling behind schedule, critical bugs... all this is painfully familiar to everyone, who prepared a game release for once in their lives. Keep your fingers crossed for us :)
We'd like to share the latest screenshots and features, like we always do:
Semi-final characters: Matthew and Olga. Have you read about them in our blog?
Emily's family framed photo. A story can be told not only in words ;)
Testing shaders and various color schemes on items
An outside view of the TV Station: we only need to set up the lighting and place outdoor objects
XII century stroller, familiar and futuristic
Ad banner featuring an augmented girl
The aerocar is almost ready. It will be shown in close-up, so we've taken our time to carefully work out the details.
Another holographic banner to spice up the streets and give them the cyberpunk flavor
VR helmets post
That's all for now! Stay tuned :)
Developers Diaries. June
Hi, y'all! We went away for a while and fell behind on our publications, but now we're back, and here's a little something that June brought us. We visited StarCon, the festival of science fiction, fantasy, movie, and science, where we showcased our game.
But before we reveal the latest arts and screenshots, I'd like to point out a new thing that we've discovered. We've been working on The Uncertain for four years now. The closer we get to the release date, the more complex the relations within the team. Curiously enough, we never had any such issues before releasing part one. We always try to maintain a healthy friendly climate, but people might occasionally snap under a lot of pressure and say some terribly wrong things or even have a fight. It's difficult to measure a creative person's work effort, but believe us, it's a lot bigger than it might seem. A great deal of tedious work, falling behind schedule, technical issues—all this brings you to a nervous breakdown over the years. But against all odds, we keep the good spirit and remain positive to give you a great game that will make us all proud!
Us visiting StarCon. Regardless all technical issues we had to face, we made it happen: the audience really enjoyed the game.
A selection of cool customizable bags to add a splash of life to the world, abandoned by humanity.
Aerocar's interior. A futuristic yet familiar look.
A huge independently functioning fish tank that was left behind but continues to live even without a human touch.
Some more downloadable mini games for Emily's smart watch. You can find them on different levels.
These models are almost ready.
The characters are about done; we've been saving the best for last, so they're kind of bald right now :D
That's all for now! Stay tuned, share your opinion in the comment section, and tell us what you like or dislike about the screenshots and arts that we shared today—there's still time to change things! We'll see you again very soon :)
Developers Diaries. May
Hi all! May has flown by, and it was a rather short month because of the national holidays. Nevertheless, we scratched together some entertaining stuff for you. The final stages of development suggest that most of the content is finalized. Now we can make room in our schedule to fine-tune some petty things, such as video ads, news, notes, journals, magazines. They're minor league, but they invest into a better understanding of the game world.
Again, the content is nearly finished. Now we're on game builds, game logic and patterns, documents, diagrams, soundtracks, voiceover, and animations. These components go hand-in-hand and create one big, whole, and living game world for you to immerse into and experience the story along with the protagonists. It means, we still have a long way to go and a lot to focus on :)
News footage. People are protesting against unemployment, caused by robots.
Devices for a hi-tech room. Sorry, we can't reveal more just yet :)
Same devices in 3D
TechnoShop hologram revives the environment.
Power panel. Can you guess who stands behind this, an artist or a modeler? :)
VR headset concepts. We couldn't go without it.
Our characters finally become animated.
Claire's character is almost ready. All we need to add now is basic textures.
Plasma cutter. That's right, Arti had the same.
Developers Diaries. April
Hi! April has gone by, and now it's time to give you what we've achieved. The past month wasn't easy on the team. Some of us came down with cold, someone's got jet-lagged, and the seasonal allergies have been kicking in. Despite all burdens of spring, despite the runny noses and itchy eyes, we're moving forward to one of the best projects in our lives.
Sometimes the desire to do everything to our best brings us back and makes us change things, polish them, bring to perfection. We do this to character models, props, and puzzles, mainly. A model can undergo more than two or three iterations before we decide that we like it. This is often the case with the screenplay and the dialogues. I once had to go back a few levels and better define several characters to reveal them to the player. I thought they could use an additional opening dialogue, so I added it to one of the scenes we considered logically complete. All this doesn't speed up the development process, but we really hope we aren't doing it in vain. You'll see for yourselves how much work we put into every stage of the game.
Items necessary to complete the TechnoShop and the prize machine (lower right-hand pic)
Makeshift taser, finalized models of the arts you've seen above, the boiler room in the Shelter, retextured train from part one of the game
TechnoShop security post
New puzzles are coming: cracking the safety locker, decoding robot's memory unit
Cute classic stickers
Finalized model of the prize machine; cute aerocar key
Claire's character is almost ready. We only need the low poly, textures, and the skeletal animations
All The Uncertain minigames are pixel art
Developers Diaries. March
Hi everyone! Here's our traditional monthly report. March brought us a great deal of amazing stuff. We're working on levels 2 (Shelter), 3 (Parking lot), 9 (Sewers), and 11 (Subway). We also shot several scenes using mockups and designed a lot of new puzzles and minigames. You'll get to see them after they're fully finalized. The rest of it is going as smoothly as it can. Alright, less talking, more action!
Now you can find cool graffiti in the game. Take their screenshots to unlock a special achievement.
New holograms for the SNBC television studio.
New character models: Matthew and Olga. Read more about them in our upcoming articles.
Working on props for all levels.
Adjusting new levels and their logic.
Watch the Subway come to life.
That's all for today. Stay tuned for more breathtaking news!
Thank you for your support!
Dear friends, we'll be honest. We've been feeling very jittery since last night. Delaying the launch was a tough call. We were ready to take your rage. We prepared to explain our decision time and again, and to face your discouragement. We held our breath and followed your comments on social media and Steam. We were on pins and needles even before the first comment arrived. We got even more excited as we received more of them. Your support made us so happy. There were no rejection or denial, and it was so amazing to see!
And today we would like to thank each and every one of you. Those of you who expressed their support. Those of you who liked and shared our post. And those of you who left bitter comments! We were ready for the fury but received your encouragement and appreciation! We acknowledge even your silent support. Your unspoken presence makes a difference!
Our team, consisting mainly of tough bearded men, forwarded each other messages in our online workspace: "What a wonderful supportive community we have! It brings tears to my eyes!", "I've read the comments, tears came to my eyes, too!", "Isn't it nice to have such an acceptance!" We are forever grateful for your encouragement and approval.
You're the best. Your kind support truly warms our hearts!
