DVDs by wemmm
This is the proof of the game DVD as sent by the printing company. It’s going to be thermal printed onto the disk so hopefully it’ll look professional and not smudge or scuff etc.! They’re (hopefully) arriving tomorrow.
Morior itself is now largely into bug-testing. Watch this space!
Exebury Gardens by wemmm
Another trip I failed to make a timely update for- Exebury Gardens. Once again things gravitate to the New Forest. These photos were taken with a different camera due to massive incompetence on my part (left the entire camera at home and only realised this fact about three-quarters of the way to the destination) but I think they came out very well. In fact, they’re some of my favourite photos thus far! These will be serving as the latter half of the Arcadia world, what with Wisley being an utter bust and all that.
Much though I’ve been tweaking these photos to quite a major extent, the place itself was really staggeringly pretty. Tonemapping usually makes most things look that little bit more surreal though, so naturally I’ve been doing that. The penultimate photo is probably my favourite non-ossuary photo in the entire project, it’s just so intriguingly strange!
Finally, Updates! by wemmm
It’s been quite a while! I’ve been a bit snowed under with other projects with slightly more pressing deadlines (lookin’ at you, batch production and portfolio/website units) but I’ve been cracking on with Morior business too. As of right now there’s a completed hub area which I think is very effective (demo to come? It’s getting way to big to post here) and a journal/hint system, which manages to be artsy, cryptic and faintly informative all at once.
Other than visiting ossuaries, it’s mostly been rather dull bugfixing and asset production and blah blah blah. Ossuaries, however, are fascinating, especially the one at St. Leonard’s Church in Ashford:
A bird nest in a skull!
You're likely to see a lot of this one, it's the main hub photo now.
Send help, I am drowning in femurs.
The skulls were stacked up to the ceiling!
This is apparently one of only two such ossuaries in the entire UK! And on top of that, also the largest! It was really an amazing experience to see so much skeletal matter- I’m not sure if I’ve actually seen a real human skull with my own eyes before. The trip was strangely uplifting- I had concerns (mild concerns) that it would be unsettling but it was actually very humbling and equalising. Memento Mori!
More Music! by wemmm
This one took an awfully long time- I got kind of music-blocked about halfway through and didn’t know what to do with it. After struggling with loops (freesound.org <3) I finally produced a nice piece of music for the Arcadia section but it’s about 0.4mb too big to upload here. It’s hopefully going to end up in the largest demo yet (hub goes to three worlds! yay!) which I’ll link here when it happens.
Finally, Wisley! by wemmm
It was a long time coming but I finally have some photographs from Wisley! Not as many as I’d hoped for but I think they’re pretty nice. The above have been gratuitously messed about with in Photoshop and have a very saturated prettiness about them.
Being a horticultural gardens, an awful lot of plant labels had to be edited out to preserve the natural-ness of the place. It was way too crowded though! Between the huge crowds and the horticultural trappings, it was hard to get photos at all. I have also learned a great deal about Photoshop in my valiant attempts to remove labels/plates/shadows/entire houses from the shots.
There’s also a bit of new music! ‘Memento‘, the title screen theme. Which leads me to more news: there’s now a title screen mock-up well as several placeholders that reflect the rough structure of a ‘hub’ area.
I think that’s all for now! Next thrilling photography trip will be the Isle of Wight, omg!!!!11
Etchings by wemmm
Look. Look at this.
Finally dragged my etchings back to my cave for scanning! I also found out how to use my scanner, so they are quite nice scans. I was thinking of using this (and the others, watch this space) for box and disk art. These ones are done in very small editions (none higher than six) so I’ll doubtlessly be making more, just in case horribly morbid mottos come into vogue or something, I don’t know.
Look What Turned Up Today by wemmm
It’s so beautiful :| And totally research, when I can dig through enough of it to find that part about the harpies and the suicide forest. Even the table of contents is too big to find anything in! The whole thing is 700 pages and largely terrifying. This version has the etchings by Gustave Dore illustrating the text. He is the best etcher. <3
An Historic Castle Is Visited by wemmm
Today was a day for Portchester Castle! It is an old castle that I can’t be bothered to look up. There’s a central courtyard with a church inside, and fortifications all around it. Then there is sea and hills and stuff. It’s also gloriously weird in places- lots of locked doors, gates, windows that go nowhere, trenches and such. So naturally, photos were taken, signs were recklessly disregarded and tripods dipped into muddy water.
More to follow as and when I clean them up and make them pretty! And also under 4MB, I do not care for these upload limits. In other news, Wisley on Thursday?
Wisley by wemmm
Has been rained off :( We would have gotten utterly soaked, as it does seem to be raining quite heavily there, not to mention photographing would have been difficult at best, and a waterlogged camera at worst. Having actually consulted the BBC’s fine weather predictions, we will be able to go either Monday or Thursday (odds are on Thursday) so watch this space!
Today’s Tutorial by wemmm
…went surprisingly well! I was worried I would be met with universal hate and misunderstanding but then I am incredibly negative about these things.
Now let me try and make something useful of this post :/
I’m going to take some of the law books that have been sitting in the studios so as to construct some illustrative/bookish puzzles. Some of the spines are actually so old they’re illegible so they have a really interesting look to them! It’s a pity there’s not any more ‘relevant’ books but perhaps I could flip or deface the pages and render them unreadable. I have some experience in hollowing out book-safes so that might be something to work on.
Also, wandering the internet, I found this. (WARNING: ACTUAL CORPSES but not horribly gross corpses or anything). Being such a morbid foresty location, it naturally appealed to my interests. It would have been amazing to have any shots from there at all (not necessarily grim corpsy ones) but sadly Japan is a little too far away to be considered feasible. Oh well! I may print the article off for research anyway.
Adventure Photos by wemmm
Today was a bit of an adventure, with cliff-climbery and get-lostery in abundance! Also, many fine photos were taken. Thankyou Steve for coming along, and thankyou Kevin for driving!
All of these photos have been tweaked (to varying extents) largely to give you an idea of what can be done with them. If anyone would like to see all the raw photos, either come to my house or get me to burn them to a CD, as there’s rather a lot of them and they are all huge- around 4mb minimum, and tonemapped ones are 17mb(!).
Quite normal. A lovely shot!
Rather surreal and tonemapped.
I love this one, it looks so strange and unreal.
Up in the branches.
A rather grotesque experiment in making things oddly green.
More to come hopefully! These all do take quite a while to process. There will also be (hilarious?) photos of the fabulous production team messing about on unsafe cliffs, chilling out on benches, indulging in thermos times and erecting a totem to the forest gods. It was an odd day.
Tonemapping Experiment by wemmm
So here’s a little tonemapping comparison! It’s very easy to do and provides some rather surreal results. I’ll stick in a comparison; what do you think?
No tonemapping (or any editing I believe, this one is a unretouched photo).
Tonemapped! Not very well, but tonemapped!
Today’s Photos by wemmm
I’m so tired now! But I think we have a good set of photographs from today. Here’s a few of my favourites:
Also available in light-off mode!
I love the slight glare in this one.
~so mysterious~
A thought: is there anything we can do to water (in most of today’s photos, the sea) to make it a bit less static?
Music by wemmm
The music in the little tech demo down there is my fault, as I’ve been fiddling with Apple’s GarageBand software. It’s just some messing about with ambient loops but I think it came out okay for a first attempt! More credit should probably go to Apple’s software loop library than me though.
I don’t think it goes 100% with the scenery in the demo, but it might work for a title screen. Anyway, I can at least add ambience to the game, but I really hope my brother has some time to contribute something as he’s far more musical than I am.
Jenny’s Amateurish Ambient Music <—- have a listen if you’d like!
And I’m at it again. Ambient is pretty much the easiest music! This one I tried to do using noises collected from freesound.org (which is amazing) as opposed to Apple’s loops. It’s… mostly droning, but hopefully useful droning:
Peter Gabriel’s ‘Eve’ and ‘Xplora’ by wemmm
Xplora just arrived today so here’s a post about the boxes and materials that come packaged with both of Peter Gabriel’s rather strange attempts at computer games. Much though the large boxes and included books etc. are very typical of older PC games, these ones are quite exceptional in their artistic design, and stand out even by modern standards.
Here’s Xplora:
Xplora is described on its packaging as being ‘digital video on CD-i’ rather than a game. I actually have yet to play it (it’s not easy to run on modern operating systems!) but I think it’s more of an interactive music puzzle game rather than an actual narrative adventure.
The books packaged with both games are very thick and high-quality with interviews, hints, creative writing and behind-the-scenes accounts of the creation of the games. I’m very interested in creating some kind of accompaniment for Project Morior as well, although I’m not yet sure what form this will take.
Computer Game Packaging by wemmm
Not a vital concern compared to actually making the game, but at some point I’ll have to make some kind of call on how this thing is ultimately meant to be packaged. Ideally I’d prefer to finish the game first but as the deadline is early April, it’s probably going to be developed simultaneously. Along with the whole ’90s homage thing we have going on, I’m mostly looking at replicating those enormous cardboard boxes that computer games tended to be packaged in. Wikipedia has something interesting to say on the subject:
In the late 80s and early 90s, computer games became significantly more complex, and the market for them expanded enormously. Possibly in an effort to occupy more shelf-space than their rivals, and attract attention with their cover art, games began to be sold in large cardboard boxes. There was no standard size, but most were around 20 cm x 15 cm x 5 cm (around 8in x 6in x 2in). The greatly increasing box sizes may have been justified in some cases. Games such as flight simulators came with extremely large, thick manuals. Others came with elaborate copy-protection systems such as Zool‘s circular code wheel, or even a hardware dongle (although these were generally more common on expensive non-game software).
So this gives me some kind of rough sizing to work at, as well as some historical context for precisely why all my old PC games came in stupidly massive boxes. I don’t actually have many- looking around, I’ve noticed that even my fairly large game boxes are all variations on DVD case dimensions, and even my very retro PC games like Monkey Island and Baldur’s Gate were actually reissues sold in jewel and DVD cases. I’m clearly too young for this! Do any of you have any proper old PC game boxes? I have a few large console boxes, but those are mostly practical concerns- my copy of Bioshock 2 needs to be big enough to fit the LP it comes with, and I also have more than one game packaged in an enormous novelty book-style box.
Peter Gabriel’s Eve (and his other venture into PC gaming, ‘Xplora’, which should arrive soon) is in a fairly large format box but it doesn’t look like any other game packaging I’ve ever seen. I’ll update this post with some photos soon, and hopefully some of my initial sketches of box designs.
Messing Around With Photos by wemmm
One of the fort photos, edited to show a portcullis to the sea.
A close up of the bricks. I've put a hideous grainy high contrast thing over one of them to indicate that it moves.
And now without the brick over it, a compartmenty thing is revealed.
A bit of preliminary fiddling. I even have a brick scraping sound effect for when the user clicks the brick. It occurs to me we’re going to need some fairly dedicated props/prop photography- time to look for something interesting to hide behind the brick! Perhaps something to open the gate to the sea?
Wisley Gardens by wemmm
Here’s some photographs of Wisley, from the Royal Horticultural Society’s website. We probably won’t have snow but the look of the place seems just about perfect! I hope we can go here soon! I’ll be phoning the RHS tomorrow to check the logistics of taking photos.
Today’s photo-getting down in Old Portsmouth was a massive disaster, on account of me forgetting the SD card and the camera having no internal memory to speak of. We’re going to have to seriously consider our timing in Old Portsmouth, as during days with decent weather, there seems to be quite an active bunch of fishermen. It would be very rude to ask them all to get off that platform jutting out to sea, so we’ll just have to wait ’til it’s free.
In the studios today, I proved that storyboarding is probably not my calling in life in these quick ink drawings. An attempt to communicate going through one room and zooming in on loose bricks, with thrilling colour change effects provided by Quink. Quink is a strange thing.
Flash Bits by cmantito
We’ve been playing around with flash a little bit to try and decide how we want to approach actual development. Initially we started playing with SWiSH Max 4, but I’m not as impressed with SWiSH these days as I used to be. (To be fair, that was 5 years ago, I guess.) Still, we got a scrolly panorama … thing … working, although it’s hardly complete and it’ll only loop a couple time before it gives up :P
But all things considered, I think we’re really leaning towards a decision to go with a HTML5/JavaScript solution for this project. Actually, I’m quite keen to try Adobe’s Edge Preview for it, so you’ll probably see some trial bits posted from that soon with any luck!
Photography wise, we’re trying to work out a shooting schedule, we’ll probably get some done tomorrow afternoon sometime. I’ve also got time before 2 on Tuesday, after 4 on Wednesday, after 1 on Thursday and before 1 on Friday, so we might get some done those days too. With any luck, the weather will be better this time! :D
Locations by wemmm
Brainstormed list of possible photography locations.
Here’s a (bad) photo of possible locations we can take the tripod and camera and go photographing. Monday is good weather-wise, Tuesday and Wednesday look to be rainy again. Thursday seems clear, as does Friday. The New Forest, on the other hand, seems to have acceptable weather on both Tuesday and Wednesday.
The gardens I mentioned- Wisley- are actually open, and are definitely worth looking at. It’s a huge area, and whilst some of it is a bit touristy, quite a lot of it is rather surreal and quite easy to get lost in. Here’s the website: http://www.rhs.org.uk/Gardens/Wisley/About-Wisley
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