Bottleneck...

Still waiting for the renders to end...
I knew that the final renders will took up most of the time in this project but I really didn't expect it to take that much time.

So I keep working on somethings here and there but definitely have almost nothing to show up because all the work is been done under the hood.
However it seems that this "waiting" is giving me time to reconsider some things, like the menu screen for example.
The first attempt was this:

ok not really, the very first was a disaster with some shitty shinny looking font copping the font style from Riven...
Leaving the font aside this render here is... way too busy. All this rocks and grass and shit... really when you got a lot of tools you just want to use them all in one shot.
Just look at the buttons, all photoshop effects are in use... (ok not all).
After doing some yoga to find my inner graphic designer and some negative criticism from my girlfriend for how cheap and out of space the first title (well there was the font I mentioned and... many many effects...) I realized what I did and brought back in my mind the golden rule.
Less, is more! (But don't overdid it, ok?)

So renewed and bored to death from waiting the renders I came up with this:

Also I made an info screen:

And visualized some other ideas I had. I know more artists when they are to show some idea they draw it in hand or with markers etc, but hell I just find it easier to make it directly in Vue and then make changes here and there, or even rework the whole scene to fix things that went terrible wrong.

So here is a bridge I did and I hope to use later in the game:

And here is some other ideas for the stage 3:
The floating islands:

And this is some short of altar, which will go on the final and bigger floating island, it will be something like the final "portal" to end stage 3.

Still here!

I have to post an update for some time now, but I'm not idle. I finished the first stage, but I'm in front of a great bottleneck here.

Final renders. This is a big pain for me, because I calculated that the final renders for stage 1 will take about 2 months of render time. So far I have finished only the first 3 scenes, and there are match more.
I wanted to add animation here and there, for example when the door opens, but this is gonna take years!
It was to be expected with my low end computer, but really didn't expected to be that much. All these trees and grasses around the stage 1 are increasing the time it takes to render for good.

Anyway I work on the project by day and I leave the computer open at nights to do the final renderings, I try to save some moneys to get a 6 core phenom, but this is hard to do since I don't have a job.

So I have started to put things together in flash with low resolution images, I made the main music theme and I work on the next stage of the game.

I have made a new demo reel to show the progress so far, the music is the main them I mentioned above, enjoy:




Youtube messed the video somehow and it restart 2 times till it go as it was supposed to go, after the first minute.

Also here is a picture from the starting area of stage 2 (it will be 3, but the real stage 2 is really very short to count it).