Heh I almost forgot this existed, mabye because of all the "System Shock 2 is here phase" made me forget about other things.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/420928?ref=email&show_token=16f3164c3d1a145c

Update #45: FATE: Fulfillment, Arcanum, Torment, Egads!
Update #45 · Mar. 06, 2013 · comment


Update by Darren Monahan, Operations Guy
Fulfillment

In this week’s update, we go over a lot of different little things going on here at Obsidian. Here’s a quick teaser: I’ll be covering a brief update on fulfillment; we have another three videos of Mr. Avellone’s Let’s Play series in Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, we’ve got some really great news for fans of Planescape: Torment (along with some sexy fan artwork to share!) and lastly, a project we backed recently that we think is pretty cool that you might too.

OK, so on to fulfillment! Let’s do this FAQ style.

Q: So, what’s happening with the backer portal?
A: I’m personally busy putting together a whole new Project Eternity website, which includes our backer portal, RSS feeds (popular request!), as well as including information and artwork about the universe of Eternity. What we know about classes, races, the gods, and more, and this site will continue to evolve as more and more is designed and released.

It is a big job though for just little ol’ me, so it’s still going to be a few weeks as I work everything out, but we’ll keep you in the know. Oh, and backer badges come with this system as well.

The backer portal will also be a great resource for those of you in the upper tiers who are submitting item, character, or location designs. Speaking of which...!

Q: When will I be able to start submitting my item, character, or location designs?
A: The guys have been talking quite a bit about this recently and have already started designing out the forms. Our current plan is to have those of you with those tiers be able to input them directly in our backer portal, and you can revise them at any time up to a certain point down the road (which we’ll let you all know – this point is when we would send out your text for translation, and it becomes expensive from this point to make edits.) But until then, start thinking about the concept for the thing you’d like to add! Adam will have an update on that in the coming weeks with more detail. We’d like to make sure there’s enough backstory and content available for you to draw connections from, and our new website will be the place for that.
Let's Play Arcanum: Season 0

After the successful pilot, Chris’s playthrough of Arcanum continues, taking your comments to heart with higher resolution, less chair creaking, profanity, Virgil sass, and wolves, wolves, wolves!

PART 1


PART 2


PART 3

InXile Announces Torment: Tides of Numenera!

If you missed Monday’s announcement by the good folks at InXile, Brian Fargo and crew announced their new Kickstarter project opening tomorrow called Torment: Tides of Numenera. That name may sound oddly familiar, yes! They are making a spiritual successor to the beloved Planescape: Torment. We seriously couldn’t control ourselves here guys, and had to make sure all of you knew about it too as fans of the genre!

We encourage you to check out their website and check in tomorrow to see their new video.

...and that’s not all in Torment news. Incredible artist John Crowcraft sent us some beautiful fanart canvases that we had to share with all of you. Swing by our forums to see the full size versions.
Egads!

OK, so I’m not entirely sure how "egads" fits into this update exactly other than to fill the "E" slot in this update title’s FATE acronym, but I digress. One last quick item we wanted to tell you about was a project we "Kicked it Forward" on that we think looks fun and interesting for those of you who like table top dice games. It’s called Dungeon Roll – A Dicey Dungeon Delve. Check it out!

Until next week,

-Darren, seeker of Kerfluffleupogus.

Let us know what you think! Discuss this update on our forums →

It's probably been said already, but these guys have done a great job with consistent updates. I find just reading about the ideas for game mechanics and such extremely fascinating.

What are the most fascinating ideas about game mechanics?

Update #46
http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63491-update-46-how-proto-typical/

In this week’s update, we’re back with me for one more! We’ll cover what the team’s up to currently.

To start, every one of Obsidian’s games goes through a series of phases. Those phases, chronologically, are: Prototype, Vertical Slice, Production, and Finalization. At the end of each phase, the team and owners do an analysis of the progress; we verify that we’ve hit key goals, and (hopefully) officially move the project into the next phase.

Prototype!
So where are we at on Project Eternity?

We’re coming to the end of the Prototype phase. While you might think of a prototype as something you would consider before making a game, in our case, we use the term to mean a demonstration of the game that, when successful, demonstrates the game’s vision (AKA “pillars”) and concept. For Eternity, one of our biggest pillars is to recreate the Infinity Engine experience. To that end, we need to have a number of key things in place to make sure our prototype is a success. Things like:
Character movement and combat. We want to make sure we have a party of up to six characters, each of whom can be moved independently and/or as a group, which does then imply rudimentary support for formations as well as NPC and basic creature AI. Basic AI meaning to ‘see’ the characters, face them, and then move to them and start attacking. This also means we need character models that have enough animations to demonstrate this convincingly, as well as at least one monster. For our prototype demo, we have one known only as “Chompy” for now. More on him (or her?!) in future updates!
Basic RPG mechanics. We need to prove that we’re making an RPG here obviously! We need basics like loot management; for instance, inventory and opening containers like chests. We need basic conversations and quest giving, including receiving a quest, tracking its progress, and then providing a reward for it being completed.
Environments. We want to have a working outdoor area as well as a tileset-based interior that the player can move between and throughout. This makes us prove out area transitions too (I can hear it now, “YOU MUST GATHER YOUR PARTY BEFORE VENTURING FORTH...”)

For our outdoor area (see screenshot above), we’re bringing life to it by not only building out the rest of the level, but getting our technological solutions in place. We have a working waterfall now, with moving water, replete with foam around the rocks(!) and more.

Eeeert (sound of a record scratching…)! Wait, tilesets, Darren? What?
Believe it or not, a lot of the areas in IE games were actually assembled through tile pieces (granted, outside the game in 3D art packages), and then were beautified by hand to give them a more organic look and feel. This tradition carries on with Eternity.


Work in Progress Concept of an Interior


Our next phase of the project is called the Vertical Slice. At Obsidian, this is the phase right before Production. In Vertical Slice, we try to do two things:
Get Ready for Production. During Vertical Slice and definitely up into Production is when the team size grows. Early on, we’re getting all of our tools and processes designed, programmed, and with luck, polished up for our designers and artists to hit the ground running. Unity has been a dream for our developers so far, and it’s been easy for us to bring over our latest tools from other games for things like text and conversation management.
Produce a Final “Slice” of Gameplay. We also try to develop a ‘final slice’ of gameplay. It’s generally a short, maybe 5-15 minute demo that demonstrates all of the core pillars of the game, as well as taken to what we’re aiming for at a final quality level in terms of visuals, audio, and presentation. During our Prototype we try to make stuff look great, but it’s secondary to form and feel.

So, how are we doing?
Well, we are absolutely trucking along. We’ve recently added several new concept artists to the team, two longtime Obsidian designers have also come on board (more on them later!), and we are hiring for other positions too. The team all has their heads down pushing forward for our prototype review.

Fear... of the Dark
Periodically throughout the rest of the project, we’ll have a number of weeks where we’ll ‘be dark’ (or rather more succinctly, "won't have an update" ) due to a variety of reasons, and next week is one of those instances. Don’t worry though, we will most certainly be working on the game, but we want to always make sure we’ve got cool stuff lined up for you, and our Prototype final is something we all want to keep focused on.

When we’re back the following week (3/26), we’ll start a series of fresh new updates from Josh, Rob and the Art team, Adam, me, and more Let’s Play Arcanum with Chris Avellone. You might meet a few new team members, and maybe even hear from George again soon too.


Happy St. Paddy’s Day!

-Darren and the PE Team


In case you're not sure who those folks are above:

- Josh Sawyer: Project director and lead designer
- Rob Nesler: Art director
- Adam Brennecke: Exec producer and lead programmer
- Me (Darren Monahan): Operations dude and co-founder
- Chris Avellone: Obsidian's creative director
- George Zeits: Narrative writer/designer

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63557-update-47-odds-and-ends/

We've got a lot of things in progress on Project Eternity right now. As Darren wrote in the last update, we're winding down our first prototype. We just did an audit of the work that remains from the first prototype and where we will be going with the next prototype. Our first prototype allowed us to prove a lot of the basics of movement, character design, stealth, combat controls, inventory, resting, quests, scripted skill interactions, dialogue, status effects, and the ability and spell systems. There's still a lot of work to do on all of those elements, but by the end of the prototype, it really did have "that IE feel". How I organized and moved my characters, how I used them differently in combat, how I explored areas very much captured the feeling of the Infinity Engine games in gorgeous high-res environments.





So where do we go from here? First, we're going to try another approach to building interior environments to make sure we can capture as much of the organic feeling of the classic levels as we can. Second, we're going to continue to build up the dynamic elements of environment to make them feel more alive. We already have dynamic water, but we have more work to do on with elements like trees, grass, ambient visual effects, and our day/night cycle. We'll be showing you the results of those experiments in two weeks. Third, we're going to continue to develop more advanced gameplay features like fog of war, character voice sets, crafting, stores, AI patrols, and the melee engagement system.



In case you're wondering about the story, we've been working on both a lot lately as well. We really want Project Eternity to strike the right balance of elements: to introduce you to this new setting, to make you feel personally invested in your choices, to engage you with the personalities and factions involved in the conflict, and to give you all of the freedom you've come to expect from an Obsidian RPG. It's a long process, but we're feeling very positive and excited about where we're going, which is always a good thing.

Thanks for reading and, as always, thanks for your continued support. I'll be back in two weeks to show you our exterior environment running with all the bells and whistles in place!

Planescape: Torment Retrospective
Article by Darren Monahan, the Named One

Back before Obsidian was a company, many of us worked at Black Isle Studios, the RPG arm of Interplay Entertainment. One of the games a number of us helped create was Planescape: Torment, an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons based RPG set in the Planescape campaign setting.



As many of you already know, the guys at InXile recently launched the Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter. They’re getting a lot of the “old band back together” to work on this thematic successor. One cool thing they’re generously offering to all Project Eternity backers (whether or not you back Torment) is a Planescape: Torment Retrospective featuring developer diaries and blogs from many of the original developers, including quite a few former and current Obsidian devs.

They’ve got nine days left, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, we encourage you to do so quickly! Please join me in thanking Brian, Kevin, and everyone at InXile!


Kickin’ it Forward: Dwarven Forge’s Game Tiles
Article by Darren Monahan, level 1 rogue/level 1 swashbuckler



So, several of us on the Project Eternity and South Park teams are playing a D&D 3.5E campaign at lunch a few days each week. While they’re short sessions, this is no small production - we’re using a bunch of miniatures and tilesets for the campaign, many of which our DM (and Eternity designer), Bobby Null, has acquired over the years from Dwarven Forge.

He came into work Monday incredibly geeked up because the folks at Dwarven Forge launched a new Kickstarter, which we got right into and backed. If you’re in to playing D&D and really want to get immersed, they make some incredible tilesets.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/444125

Update #48: Documentary News and More Arcanum
Update #48 · Apr 3, 2013 · 11 comments

Project Eternity the Documentary Update

Article by Adam Brennecke, Executive Producer and Lead Programmer

In Update #23 Feargus announced that Obsidian would fund a documentary of the making of Project Eternity without using a dime from the Kickstarter funding. Here's a behind-the-scenes of the behind-the-scenes and some other tidbits about the documentary.

We've been working with the documentary team, Tony Jacobsen and Michael Mitchell from Creative Lane Media, for some time. Tony and Mike are very professional guys with years of experience making films, and have experience working with the games industry. They will be with following us with their fancy cameras for the entire production of Project Eternity.

Our documentary will be a full movie and released in its entirety when the game is complete. We are targeting a 45 minute film that covers the entire process of the making of Project Eternity from the early days of the Kickstarter, into preproduction, all the way through production to finishing it up and going gold. There will be footage from our team meetings, informal discussions, scrums, and major milestone events.

The room pictured above is an office at that we transformed into a small film studio. It will be used to shoot one-on-one sit down style interviews.

Documentary FAQ

When can I get the Documentary?The documentary will be released when Project Eternity is finished. We will have more details when we get closer to the Project Eternity beta.

How do I get it?If you already backed at the $20/$25 tier level (and Slacker Backers via PayPal thus far) and above you will be able to stream it. At the $35 tier level and above you will be able to download it, and at the $140 tier level (and physical tiers above) we will include a DVD / Blu-ray. You can still get access to the documentary stream if you donate to the project today via the Slacker Backer pledge at the Eternity website.

Tony and Mike from Creative Lane
Season 0: Season of the Wolf (Ghosts), Parts 4, 5, and 6

Article by Darren Monahan, HTML monkey

The truth behind Season 0's naming reveals itself in... ghosts. Note that this recording was done at the same time as last season, so any fixes or interface errors will not be fixed again until, uh, the real Season 1. (Ed: Yes, that means Chris is probably not using the world map enough quite yet. :)) We'll be recording a new batch soon and I'm passing along feedback from YouTube comments and our forums.

PART 4


PART 5


PART 6


Next week's update we will have a movie showcasing some of the progress we've made on prototype 1! Stay tuned!

Latest Update featuring dynamic environmental video preview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AUleDEFkUtE

"Welcome. Today's update is a big one, though not by volume of text. Today we’re showing you our game in action. Specifically, we're showing what we've been doing for our exterior environments. The Infinity Engine games were known for their art, and we wanted to hit the high standard of visual quality established by games like the Icewind Dale series. We also wanted to introduce dynamic elements into the environment that were mostly absent from the classic games, like dynamic water, movement in foliage, and dynamic lighting of the scene.

In a 2D game, this required our programmers and artists to come up with some creative solutions. What they came up with surprised us initially and it continues to amaze us. While we are still working on refining some of the dynamic elements, we're very happy with the progress we've been able to make and hope you feel the same way. Special thanks to Hector Espinoza, our lead environment artist, and Michael Edwards, our rendering programmer, who did a lot of amazing work to bring this environment to life.

Thanks for reading, thanks for your feedback, and we'll see you next week."

Looks awesome, so the only 3D models in that scene were the characters? Even the waterfall seems to be a vertical sprite

WOW!! Can you say Slacker backer, I can. Even if I suck at this game (and I almost surely will) there will be plenty of eye candy.

Yeah, I guess so. Which gives the artists the freedom to put in a great load of details and art to the environments without fear that the engine might lag. I think more or less the same deal we had for Simcity 4 when we used 3D software to make buildings and add in all sorts of details and have the BAT tool render the 3D model in 4 perspectives, thus simulating isometric 3D, which the game engine took to assemble as a singe building object, we never had to worry about polygon numbers.
Like a sir

The game looks gorgeous! I'm glad to see new RPG games being made in 2.5D.

Lightning looks great, fire lights look great, smoke looks great, water looks great, stuff equipped by badass looks ...awesome. I'm very impressed.
Edit : 2D ftw ! I hope people will now understand how awesome isometric view can be. We don't need crappy 3D !

Gorgeous!!! :)