Hello Neyyah adventurers!
Now I am working a lot more in Visionaire Studio 5, as well as working hard on modelling the rest of the Neyyah world, I have been setting up, rendering and implementing various animations into Neyyah. Neyyah has a lot of FMV sequences. These range from buttons being pressed, levers being pulled ... very small tiny animations ... to much bigger animations. Of course, there are also the enormous amount of animated water sequences which will be present in the Neyyah world - and which can be disabled in the options of the game, if you find the game is running slow for you. There's a lot of water in Neyyah. That's a lot of animations. I will like to touch upon this in another update soon!
However, going back to those big animations ... One option the player can enable within Neyyah is 'Journey Mode'. While Neyyah runs as a screen to screen point n click adventure game, experienced through first person, I had taken inspiration from other games outside of Myst and Riven such as Schizm: Mysterious Journey and Dragon Lore II: Heart of the Dragon Man. These games used fmv sequences between the player transitioning from node to node. It's a beautiful addition to believability and immersion within a prerendered game, but incredibly costly on the render times ...
Neyyah is going to be a BIG game with a lot to explore, and although it would be so cool to add animated movement between the positions the player moves within the game, it would take forever to render out such scenes. Plus, I observed some downsides to the other games, in which small movements forward felt quite jarring when animated. They seemed to work better for traversing long distances, and then in doing so, you miss some of the environment ... Thus, I decided to keep to screen to screen for the main navigation, as seen in the original Myst and Riven games, and add animated fmv sequences to when the player climbs up or down ladders, walks up or down stairwells, or enters particular areas of the environment. It does add a nice immersive 3D quality to the game. Call it 2.5D, maybe ...
In this following devlog, I will be exploring this very mechanic within the game ...
Definitely subscribe to my channel for more upcoming content where I'll be sharing more of Neyyah's development progress, from engine work through to artwork and eventually sound and music too, plus much, much more!
Thanks!
- Aaron Gwynaire / Defy Reality Entertainment