Hej Víkingar!
Welcome to our first Production Department update! Take a look behind the scenes with our Production department as they share insight into the evolution of the game.
From in-depth mechanic showcases revealing key gameplay to an exclusive chat with the dev team on the future plans of Skye: The Misty Isle!
Early Access World Showcase
We revealed a flythrough of the breathtaking landscapes of Morsvikbotn, Norway, and explored the vibrant towns nestled within its majestic embrace! Our starting map in Skye: The Misty Isle features the fictional town of Ravndal as its bustling hub, where adventure awaits around every corner.
For our final day, we revealed a flythrough of Norway's breathtaking, hyper-realistic landscapes, and explored the vibrant towns nestled within its majestic embrace! Our starting location in Skye: The Misty Isle features the fictional town of Ravndal, a charming settlement nestled amidst the rugged terrain of Mørsvikbotn. Perched on the world's edge, it boasts unparalleled views of the vast Nordfolda fjord.
Click the links to read more!
Early Access Feature Showcase 1
Kicking off the week with our first of three mechanic showcases, we demonstrate in-game footage of our dev testing area, displaying mechanics such as foraging, forestry, mining ores, farming, collectables, and fishing!
Foraging
Explore diverse biomes and map-specific locations to uncover essential resources crucial for crafting and sustenance in the wild.
Forestry
Venture into dense forests, harvesting wood for crafting while facing challenges like confrontations with wolves. Utilise tools like knives to enhance resource-gathering efficiency.
Mining
Delve into underground mines to unearth a wealth of ores, including coal, copper, and iron. Refine your findings at blacksmiths or trade them for profit amidst threats like bandits.
Farming
Cultivate crops in customisable plots, engage in trading at bustling markets, and harvest your yield for sustenance or cooking, influencing the landscape of survival.
Collectables
Discover over 200 unique items scattered throughout the world, crafting them into essential components and advanced gear to shape the narrative of your journey.
Fishing
Cast your line in serene wilderness spots or bustling piers, reel in a variety of fish, and savour the fruits of your labour with a hearty meal, enhancing your survival experience.
Click the links to read more!
Early Access Feature Showcase 2
Our second mechanics showcase covered our primitive to advanced crafting system using workbenches, trading with our 14 specialised vendors, cooking gathered ingredients, building from our modular build parts, and customising your builds with decorations and melee and ranged combat.
Crafting
Hone your crafting skills, starting with primitive items and expanding your abilities with various workbenches. Forge higher-tier components to thrive in the wilderness and overcome challenges.
Workbenches
Explore a variety of 20 different workstations scattered across the land.
Traders
Interact with 14 specialised vendors to acquire or craft 211 essential items crucial for your journey's success.
Cooking
Gather ingredients through foraging, hunting, and farming endeavours. Utilise fire or cooking workbenches to prepare nourishing meals, sustaining yourself amidst the wilderness's rigours.
Building
Unleash your creativity with modular build parts crafted from wood or stone. Construct a permanent home or shelter, establishing your presence in the vast and ever-changing world.
Decorations
Customise your surroundings with an array of workbenches, usable items such as beds, and decorative elements, including shelves, fur rugs, and tables. Make your space truly your own.
Combat
Craft melee and ranged weapons to defend yourself against threats ranging from bandits to wild animals. Engage in thrilling battles, securing your survival and dominance in the challenging landscape.
Click the links to read more!
Early Access Feature Showcase 3
Our third and final mechanic showcase showed traversal through vaulting and climbing, horse-riding and sailing. We also revealed our day-to-night cycles and dynamic weather, such as fog, rain and snow.
Traversal
Navigate the terrain with agility using vaulting, climbing, and nimble dodge and roll techniques. Embrace excitement with exhilarating zipline rides across the wilderness.
Riding
Embark on epic journeys by hiring horses from stables, utilising their speed and strength for travel across the expansive world. Harness their power in combat when necessary, ensuring your dominance.
Time and Weather
Witness the ever-changing dynamics of day and night, accompanied by dynamic weather phenomena such as fog, rain, and snow. Utilise the real-world night sky for navigation beneath the stars.
Sailing
Explore vast lakes and oceans, freely swimming or commanding large longships to conquer the seas. Let the call of the waves guide your journey across the waters, unlocking new horizons and adventures.
Click the links to read more!
Procedural Content Showcase
We revealed a behind the scenes look at Unreal Engine’s PCG technology that is powering our procedural towns and forests. From settlements and NPCs to decorations and foliage, enjoy in-engine images revealing the inner workings of the game’s environments.
Mesh Scatter
We've begun using new Procedural Scattering on static meshes. Here, you can see how clustered static meshes adapt to concave surfaces, creating organic plant growth. This method allows for natural-looking procedural content with customisable parameters, giving us greater creative control over the final product.
Towns and NPCs
Procedural technology helps us bring structures, roads, and environmental elements to life, creating immersive locations for players to explore. Our NPC and Enemy placement, largely driven by data tables, dictates spawn points and emergent behaviours to make the world feel truly alive.
Forests and Foliage
We use a blend of Unreal Engine 5’s technologies to shape our environmental design. From the strategic placement and lush growth of foliage, guided by procedural rules and datasets, to the use of Nanite technology, we've amplified density and realism in our environments like never before.
Fences and Decorations
We've also started exploring the use of Procedural Content Generation tools for our fences, decorating our world with grass, foliage, and rocks that spawn along the edges of splines, creating a natural and overgrown aesthetic.
Environmental Effects
We also use a more traditional approach to procedural content, randomisation for natural environmental effects. Utilising 'weighted' points, depicted by the grey boxes, along with randomised scaling and rotation, helps us break up the monotony of flat surfaces. This method enables us to scatter ground elements like rocks, stones, leaves, and debris, bypassing the constraints of traditional grass layers in landscape design.
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Click the links to read more!
Early Access Dev Diary
We also introduced our third developmental recap. Join our Marketing Director and Creative Director as they discuss the exciting things we are working on, and what’s next for Skye as we look to move into phase 0.3, Muspelheim!
Be sure to watch our other videos covering our work so far on Helheim, 0.1, and Svartalfheim, 0.2!
Click the links to read more!
Department Update
Our Production Department provided an update on what they have been working on recently, from rolling out over 500 updates since April to diving deep into the intricacies of a full map overall and MetaHuman integration.
Expand or click the links to read more!
Show details
What We’re Working On Over the past few months, we have been busier than ever. Since April, we’ve rolled out over 500 updates to our game’s internal branch! It’s been a real team effort, with everyone helping out with fixes, changes and improvements. We’ve been hard at work overhauling our artificial intelligence systems, implementing our MetaHumans, redesigning the user interface and maps, and, of course, handling all the bugs and technical issues that follow. Our Favourite Project Our most interesting focus was integrating MetaHumans. It's been a pretty big task and needed hard work from everyone on the team, but seeing these characters come to life with their quirky expressions and subtle, true-to-life, movements has been so rewarding. As we continue to explore the possibilities in Unreal Engine 5, we're really excited about the potential to enhance the game, and each step forward brings us closer to our goals of hyper-realism and immersion. Our Biggest Challenge One of our biggest challenges has been redesigning the user interface. There’s such a delicate balance of minimalism, functionality and artistic theme, and it has been a tough process for all of us, across every department. We’re so happy with the progress we’ve made, despite the steep learning curve! We’re excited for players to see what we’ve made and to get their insights into other improvements we can make as we continue. What We’ve Learnt Optimisation has also been a major hurdle for us, mainly with our maps. We recently scaled down our 8k heightmaps to tackle the performance issues caused by a landscape made of over 64 million polygons! We dropped the resolution to 2k, which gave us huge framerate improvements but, unfortunately, resulted in a landscape of jagged edges and navigation issues. So, after all that work, we had to scale the resolution back up to 4k, giving us a landscape with only 16 million polygons - a 4x reduction from the original! This gave us the stable framerate we needed while allowing us a clean slate to completely redesign both maps with higher-quality textures, and better environmental design. We've been fighting a constant, uphill battle to balance visual fidelity and stable performance throughout development but, finally, we seem to be winning. Latest Technology The constant challenge of working with cutting-edge technology has been an interesting process. We began work in Unreal Engine 5 before its public release and, while it’s been a really exciting time, it also means we’re working with an ever-adapting production process to keep up with an evolving engine, and unforeseen bugs, issues and errors are just part of that process. However, for all of the complexities and occasional setbacks, our experience of Unreal Engine 5 has been so incredibly rewarding, and has allowed us to explore new creative possibilities and push the boundaries of what's achievable for our small team. The Community Since February 2023, we've been gathering insights from our dedicated group of Æsir testers, on everything from mechanics and gameplay to world-building and aesthetics. As a small team, player feedback has been so helpful and we’re so excited to expand our community as we continue to grow. We’ve already started to open up dialogue with our wider community, especially over on our discord server. This has been so useful in helping us prioritise different aspects of development to meet players’ expectations. Looking into the Future We're so excited for the future of our team, and the ambitions and plans we have for the game are a long journey that we can’t wait to tackle with our community. We know that development is a long process and we understand how frustrating it can be for players to wait for updates or development phases. But, even after three years, this is just the beginning!Stay tuned for more updates as we continue our journey towards bringing Skye: The Misty Isle to life!
Skål,
The Production Department ⚙️