Myst Obduction from Cyan (Myst, Riven)

[Crooked Bee]

Damn.

 

[almondblight]

Not a good sign, considering I don't think they've shown any footage other than the "pick up a lantern" stuff a while back, and the original release date was supposed to be this month. Thankfully, this PCWorld hands-on Obduction article makes it sound like the game is heading in a good direction. Not sure why they didn't include something like that instead of a "We're running out of money and can't show you anything from the game but everything's going great!" update.

 

[LESS T_T]

Hmmm (in short: buy our past games): http://obduction.com/?p=350

The best way to help – immediately.
We had some great discussions last week, and came up with several ideas to get enough funds to make Obduction the best game it can be, while still living in reality and not spinning out-of-control into the Endless Void of Perpetual Feature Creep.

We’re working on some of those funding ideas moving forward. The best answer I can give for a time-frame on those is “soon-ish”. And by “soon” I mean T-shirt “soon” as an example: we had the initial concept art for it in 2014, but then spent a year getting bids from fulfillment houses, weaving backstory into the shirt, waiting on delays from a fairly large number of backers who refused to send us physical addresses for whatever reason, waiting on delays from the fulfillment house, and on and on and on.

The same kind of issues are going to happen with this idea, too. Nothing’s ever as easy as you think it should be.

Meanwhile, there is something you can do _now_ that would be extremely helpful in many, many ways, and doesn’t require waiting for anything from us in the short term: go out and buy a version of Myst (better yet one of the versions of realMYST) or Riven (or any of our other games) for someone (or many people, depending on how much you can afford / want to help) whom you know who hasn’t played them yet, but you know them well enough to think that they’d enjoy them.

What does this do for us?
Sales of Myst, realMYST, Riven, etc. go up, which is never a bad thing for us. Having a game that’s doing well is itself free publicity that generates even more sales. Win-win. All the money* goes to Cyan (not 10% to Kickstarter, or whatever funding service would be selected), which means we can continue to fund Obduction ourselves for as long as possible, and maybe get ahead enough to put money aside for that evil “marketing” stuff.

[*Note: yes, whichever service you use does get a piece of the pie, but it is the same slice that they get for our sales anyway as the distributor, not just an arbitrary fee for not doing a whole lot of anything.]

New people are exposed to the game(s) who might not even try them because they’re ~20 years old. “That’s an OLD game. I heard about that when I was a kid. I want something new and shiny. Fallout 4, anyone?”

If they like Myst/Riven/etc., they are very likely to like Obduction – spreading the word (viral, one-on-one, personal “evangelizing” (to use the old Apple term)), and growing the base of potential Obduction players for when Obduction is ready. And if they become an evangelist themselves in the meantime… even better! Go infect someone… with a good Myst / Riven virus.

We do have something else in mind for down the road. It is very cool, but those ideas will take time to flesh out, design, redesign, hone, polish, produce, distribute, etc. Buying Myst/Riven for someone is nearly instantaneous and requires no waiting on anything from us to accomplish. If you chose to do so, you could to it today.

We have a comprehensive list of the best places to buy any of our games for various platforms here. Check it out. Every game you purchase to spread the word helps us get another step closer to an awesome Obduction experience for everyone.

As always, thanks for your support!

RAWA v2.0

And you can read some rant here: http://obduction.com/?p=338

 

[garren]

They should some big sale on digital distribution sites

 

[Redlands]

Not a good sign, considering I don't think they've shown any footage other than the "pick up a lantern" stuff a while back, and the original release date was supposed to be this month. Thankfully, this PCWorld hands-on Obduction article makes it sound like the game is heading in a good direction. Not sure why they didn't include something like that instead of a "We're running out of money and can't show you anything from the game but everything's going great!" update.

Yeah, I really don't understand, and despite being a huge fan of Cyan, this is just stupid. So are telling people (like me) who probably already own all of the (PC) versions of Myst to buy it again is just... stupid and frustrating.

 

[Infinitron]

Everything is good again, apparently. Or at least good enough to do this: http://obduction.com/?p=404

Two Years and Counting!
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been almost two years since our Obduction Kickstarter succeeded, and our Obduction production began in earnest. Wow!

We’ve accomplished so much this year — and we’ve had our share of ups and downs. But we’re in a great space, and Obduction is feeling amazing. We’re looking forward to getting our last world finished — and then polishing things to rusty, shiny, corroded, organic, degraded, alien perfection.

Music by Robyn Miller!

Some incredibly exciting news for those of you who haven’t heard — Rand’s brother Robyn (who co-created Myst and Riven) has agreed to do the Obduction soundtrack! Among other things, (writer, director, actor, artist, and more) Robyn is a very talented composer — well known for writing and producing the award-winning music for Myst and Riven. He has already started on the first of the musical/ambient soundscapes, and we couldn’t be more excited about having Robyn’s music enhance the Obduction experience. Robyn’s production company, Zoo Break Productions, has produced a feature film and two short films, and they have a TV series in the works. You can follow Robyn on twitter at @tinselman.

And, once again, thank you so much for your continued support!

 

[CryptRat]

Last Kickstarter update (which tells us absolutely nothing) :

So Much Done! So Much To Do!

Even amid the Thanksgiving overeating, it’s been a remarkably productive few weeks. We’re wrapping up our latest build of Obduction — another internal build that we use for testing and demonstration. This is one of the first builds that has almost every one of our worlds at a decent level of finish.

Perhaps we should define "decent level of finish" so that no one gets too excited. All of our worlds now have most of their structures, terrain, artifacts, and interaction beyond "block world" and "grey world." Almost everything has been modeled and textured to a sweet level, and they are playable, for the most part.

So what’s left to do? Well the words "most" and "almost" should give a clue that each world still has some holdouts — small areas that still need some modeling or texturing. Then there are the additional items like diaries, journals, messages, notes, books, and other clues. Of course all of those need various passes to make them look authentic, and they all have to be translated into other supported languages. And did we mention the additional sounds and music that have to be finalized and added? And animations? And special effects?

And beyond that we need love, lots of love. Love in this case means polish. And polish in this case means either distress or detailing. Some manmade items might need to be more weathered or corroded. And some natural areas might need a bit more detail to… well… look more natural. Beyond the look of things is the feel — we’ve got to fine tune all of the interface elements so that they feel natural and intuitive. We’ll also be prettifying and smoothifying all of our settings, save/load, and preferences screens, and adding the all important player journal. And we’ve also got to spend time adding "nodes" for both playing Obduction in “point and click” mode, and in VR.

And finally there is optimization — we’ve got to spend a some quality time making simpler and "smaller" versions of EVERYTHING. And we've got to check our code to make sure we’re not wasting cycles drawing things or calculating things that we don’t need to. We figure we should do this so that Obduction doesn’t require a supercomputer to play.

Sooooo… as excited as we are to be making progress, we’ve still got a lot to do. Thanks for your support, and keep cheering us on!

P.S. Here’s a new peek at one more of our worlds…

 

[CryptRat]

From last Kickstarter update :

Limited Edition Art Print Box Set

This beautiful, limited-edition Myst art print box features 5 fine-art-quality giclee prints corresponding to each Age in the original Myst game. These images are high resolution renderings from the original Myst models that have been gently enhanced. The box and prints come with a Certificate of Authenticity that is hand-signed by Myst co-creator Rand Miller.

 

[LESS T_T]

New Year's teaser:

 

[LESS T_T]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/1503304

Hey Backers,

Time flies when your having fun, right?!?!

Please excuse our lack in updates, but it’s not because of lack of news, or excitement, or progress. We’ve been working like dogs, and… well… frankly… Obduction is looking amazing! You are gonna love it!

We’ve crossed the threshold of what we consider “beta” and we’re tuning, polishing, and optimizing. We will have more news soon, but for now please enjoy the new images in this post and a link to an article by Dustin Orgill (Game Tyrant) talking about his visit to Cyan this week and his chance to play Obduction.

Here’s a peek at what’s behind the scenes – Fear not.. all those polygons get optimized at runtime… but our source material is dense!

And a glimpse at a different world.

Dustin’s Article – We played Obduction and it is brilliant!

Get ready to start seeing more!

Thanks for your continued support,

Ryan

According to the linked article, ETA is 2nd quarter.

Oh, and Jon Blow also played early build:

 

[LESS T_T]

Coming June.

 

[Jaesun]

MY BODY IS READY

 

[agris]

So did the post-KS funding ever unlock the 1.7 million KS goal? It was a bonus world + internet-hotseat.

 

[CryptRat]

Released on July 26 and will cost $30.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/1592457?ref=dash

 

[LESS T_T]

Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/306760/

There are new (I think) screenshots.

 

[Astral Rag]

RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows 10 64 bit
Processor: CPU Intel i5-4590 equivalent or better
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 970 w/4 GB / AMD R9 290 w/4 GB equivalent or better
Storage: 20 GB available space

 

[Crooked Bee]

I can understand that optimization is teh hard, but Windows 10? Really?

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Whisky]

So, I donated to this but I have not been following at all.

Someone form an opinion for me, does it look good?

 

[LESS T_T]

Oops, they've delayed a month right before release, for more polishing.

Hey Backers,

We’ll get right to it — we are down to the wire, and we have to delay a few more weeks. We are SO sorry! Please let us explain…

The last few weeks have gone very quickly. We’ve been working long days, and seven day weeks. Obduction has been getting better and better. But we still found ourselves implementing the last couple of systems we needed instead of having quality time to focus on squashing more bugs. Last week we still had a chance, if everything worked perfectly. At the end of the week the leads met to discuss our options. We were so close, we could ship. But we came to the unanimous decision that if we shipped it was driven mainly by the deadline — not because we were satisfied. Obduction is a product that we’re very proud of, and we don’t want to let unpolished edges get in the way of an amazing immersive experience.

So with humble hearts, but admittedly a bit of relief, we’re taking another few weeks (until the week of August 22nd) to do a bit more cleaning and polishing. No excuses, we should be better with our estimated completion dates. It’s really hard — please forgive us.

We know that you are an amazing group of supporters. Most of you have already expressed that you trust us to give you the best Obduction experience we can. We realize that there are a few folks that will think this is just another “20 minute gate delay” of a plane that will never depart. We really do understand the skepticism. We wish you could be here with us, play Obduction, see how good it is, and how close we are. We think it would change your mind.

Thanks again for your understanding and support.

 

[tuluse]

[video]

Just watched this, sounds like the art guys from DoubleFine talking about old LucasArts games. Which is double edged.

It is undoubtedly true there is nostalgia glasses when looking back at old games. They don't look as good as many remember.

However, they miss the broader picture that our minds filled in details because the world(s) felt so alive and memorable. No one gives a shit if there were clouds above Myst Island. We imagined clouds because we were fully engaged. Adding dynamic 3d clouds with volumetric effects isn't going to make a game any more fun.

Bah.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[LESS T_T]

It's out now:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/306760
https://af.gog.com/game/obduction?as=1649904300



Reviews:
https://www.destructoid.com/review-obduction-382029.phtml 9/10
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3111...e-captivating-start-of-the-post-myst-age.html 4/5

 

[Jaesun]

Waiting for my key!

 

[Jaesun]

Still waiting for my key..... kinda pissing me off they didn't send out backer keys before launching it on STEAM and GOG of course...