Whiteside
Some Big news
First of all we have been working very hard on porting our game over to the Unreal Engine 5, this has forced us to stop developing for a few months so we can fix some bugs and ingame issues and also re-compile and change some of our code in order to get it over to the Unreal Engine 5 this has been a lot of work but it should be well worth it for the game and its performance and also for the end user.
Also we have managed to find a good way to make facial animations such as lip syncing and facial expression this has also been a very time consuming and costly part of the project as we needed something that will give good results fast but also be compatable with importing these animations straight to the unreal enegine 5.
Now that these big hurdles have been completed there should be any technical hurdles in the way in order to get this game out and finished, We have also changed the games release date to a done when its done state but hope to give a more realistic realise date in the near future. we wish you all the best.
Monthly update 1st of June 2021
This Month we have been working very hard on the beginning of the game and now we are in the final art stage of the Level, we have some images we would like to show you, this has been a lot of work as we have no levels in the game that are set in the day time, so we had to create a new skybox and then tweak with the lighting and the fog in order to get the right feel, we are now in a place where we feel happy with it but some of this could change later on so don’t take this as absolute.
Unexpectedly EPIC have released an early version of their new engine (Unreal Engine 5), and we also have an option to move our game over to Unreal engine 5, however this isn’t going to be as straight forward as clicking a button then making the switch, we need to ensure we can do this and the plugins we are using are also going to work in the engine if they don’t then we will have to make a hard decision do we re-write our plugins again and make the switch or do we stay in Unreal engine 4. Hopefully in a month or two we will know if it’s worth the change as Unreal engine 5 does have some amazing tech that we really could use for optimization.
On a personal note I am currently in the process of moving house so this will mean that development might be slow for the next 2-3 weeks but once I am all fully moved in then we should be up and running and will finally get this game finished and in your hands!
Monthly update 1st of May 2021
Hi guys another monthly update, we have made a lot of progress this month and are happy to share what we have got done and what is still in progress.
Beginning scenes: We have made a lot of progress on our beginning scene but we think this will take longer than expected mainly because we want to make sure we have the scenes perfect and fits in with the story. We are also debating whether the scenes should be set in the day/night/dusk so we are testing out a few things with lighting and fog.
Engine: We have now been able to upgrade to 4.26 we had a blocker with a plugin but this has now been fixed and we can now utilize the new version. This includes more realistic water and landscapes and also this will improve optimization and performance for the game.
Hopefully next month we will have something goo to show you please stay tuned!
Frosty Studios Monthly Update
We have managed to get a lot of things done mainly level design, you have probably seen some images of a cave, we have finally finished out the main layout of the cave and it is now in its final detail phase then it will go into optimization, then polishing! We expect this to be done in 1-2 weeks.
We take a lot of pride with our level design we want every area to feel unique for the player and this takes time.
Destruction: That’s right! We have added some destructible meshes for the cave, we don’t want to give away a spoiler but take our word for it there is a really intense section in the cave level! A lot of work was done to get this to work and be optimised but it does still need a little more work in the optimization part.
What’s next?
We will start to work on the beginning of the game this needs re doing as we have learnt so much and we know we could do better so the whole beginning of the game will be getting a massive rework.
Facial animation: We will also be putting a focus on facial animation so our NPC’s have good reactive facial expression and also they we need to add in mouth syncing for the voice acting this could take a lot of time and we have started doing research into this we expect this may take some time as we need to create a system that can do this automatically as doing it by hand will take too long.
Once the above has been done we will be working on level tweaking we know we have two more levels to start and finish which will bring the games total of levels to around 35, some are these levels are sub levels for main levels for examples the sewers have 4 sub levels. Then we will work on sub levels for other levels that need to be completed and then last we just need to optimize everything and then do final polishing then all our levels will be completed. We are hoping the game will take our developers around 2 hours to run through which by our estimations will make the game be around a 6-10 hour game depending on the player. Please stay tuned
Whiteside trailer
Hi guys we finally have a trailer for Whiteside
Check it out here or on the store page!