Spanish game wants to build a bridge between interactive entertainment and art.
Uprising Studios is a small studio from Spain. Right now these developers are working hard on an amazing looking 3d project Scarf: Walking with Souls. It’s a difficult game to describe. Thing Journey with more natural environments and some flying.
The protagonist Hyke is equipped with a fancy polyformic scarf, which helps him to explore the world around him, solve puzzles and overcome difficult challenges. This scarf can be transform into different objects (parachute, wings, rocket engine), which sort of plays a central part in the gameplay. The design of the world is worth to talk about as well. The artists use a lot of open areas and optimistic bright colors. It looks a lot like a Lost Ember, but has its own original twist. There are different landscapes in the game, we’ve just seen a part of them so far.
The game is being created with the help of UE4. The development team is just 6 people, with 2 programmers, 1 sound guy and 3 artists. The developers actually have a very interesting development blog.
As we said in our first post the demo is set in Grassland, in what we call The Meadow.
The meadow’s scene design has been gradually changed and improved. We are talking about an extensive area with big plains and a wide variety of lush, an area were an ancient civilization was settled and from which only some old ruins remain in this world. The biggest challenge we had to face was to embody the pictorial artistic style of the original concept art to the 3D, keeping the expressiveness and coloring that the drawings have.
Starting from the original concept art, we worked on the form of terrain, testing with different compositions with BSP in UE4, always trying to remain true to the map design we worked on previously.
Once we had our skeleton done, we kept working improving this. The next step was to build the island and define its final design, for which we worked with the 3D artists, testing different level constructions.
At this point, and with the terrain design completely established, blocking got started by placing each element from the modeling. As we were not only looking for an eye-catching design, but also to ease some aspects of the gameplay programming, many tests, and level variations were done, changing some areas and substituting some elements.
The placed items were not definitive but were very helpful for us to have a rough idea of how the meadow should look and how to obtain that feeling of overwhelming fantastical nature. The 3D team started working on the details of the scene.
Finally, we could end up with an enhanced version of our assets (more define textures, more materials, a more polished nature) and with its execution we have moved very much closer to the final result we are seeking.
We have included many new elements, from new lush green vegetation and architectonical elements, to new floating island or giant roots, trying always to improve the looks.
Some music samples:
You can follow Scarf: Walking with Souls here. And here’s the official trailer.