Happy new year, Neyyah adventurers!
This year has seen some amazing developments in the upcoming world of Neyyah! In May, one of the highlights was having Neyyah announced by Microprose! I look forward to the journey ahead, with many awesome highlists already scheduled for the coming year of 2023!
The start of the year saw the finalisation of a lot of Neyyah's interior locations:
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Further work involved the development of other exterior locations, including character backdrops for the upcoming live action character sequences. It was wonderful jumping into other areas of Neyyah's world that still needed to be brought over to Blender!
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For a majority of the last quarter of 2022, I have been busy at work in building up the world of Neyyah within Visionaire Studio 5 - linking more of the prerendered graphics together, setting up various animations and 'journey modes' within the game / rendering these out, or alternatively, building out open gl 'fill-in' animations from Blender to get the animations constructed and ready to go in the game engine, plus creating a variety of interactive elements that push the puzzle elements further, and this includes the inventory system, game mechanics such as skipping animations, faster travel (renaming Quick Travel) and much, much more!
Check out a couple of this year's dev logs here:
Visionaire work:
Cornwall trip - adventures and inspirations!
Water animations in Neyyah:
Starting a new scene in Blender:
I've also had some amazing opportunities to discuss Neyyah with other Youtubers!
My interview with Thomas Brush:
My interview with Adventure Game Geek:
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So what's in store for 2023? I want to keep a few things under wraps, but I can definitely say that 2023 is going to be a VERY busy year for the development of game.
Start of the year, I'll be planning a trip to Western Australia to work alongside my wife Nanci, her children and a crew of amazingly talented people to bring to life the characters of Neyyah through live action acting sessions! This is definitely a call back to those old 90s FMV games, but primarily a shout out to Myst and Riven, which incorporated real life actors in their games. This is going to be a magical moment in the game development, where BTS material will be shot, recorded and shared throughout the year.
In February, I'll be focussing on sound design and starting to piece together tracks / ideas for Neyyah's musical score! This is going to be breath of fresh air for me as a developer. It's delving into a completely different field of design, and this aspect of Neyyah's pipeline will be so important in bringing this world to life in so many ways. I look forward to sharing this progress more along the way.
Sound design has already been touched upon in test build footage, such as the ones below, but February's work will be a lot more focussed on getting finalised sounds into the game.
Test build 2021 :
Test build 2019 :
I'm really excited to start progressing further with music for Neyyah too! I am going to be using a Yamaha Keyboard as my main instrument to produce Neyyah's sound, but will definitely delve further into this process, as well as touching upon my background as a performing musician and music production experience, too! Keep an out here and also my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/AaronGwynaireGameDev.
Over the last while leading up to the end of the year, I have also been working alongside my wife Nanci with the scripts for the characters, but this has lead to some really insightful and productive sessions, which have enhanced not only the scripts themselves, but also the characters and ultimately the game's narrative too. It's been a huge learning curve, and I very much look forward to working with Nanci a lot more in the future. Nanci will also be putting together the costumes for the characters too, going off concept art I have created, while she will also be tweaking things to best suit the world of Neyyah!
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So, yeah! Let's get on board with 2023! Neyyah has a lot of work ahead, with some amazing things to share along the way, and I just want to say a MASSIVE thank you for following the game here on Steam, and having wishlisted Neyyah! I look forward to sharing its mysterious and complex world with you :D
Happy New Year!
- Aaron Gwynaire / Defy Reality Entertainment
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