The lovely executable for Remnant, waiting to be played

Last night we submitted the final build of Remnant, following a long weekend of last-minute bug-squashing and stitching together of all the levels. After creating the final candidate, the team crowded around and we played through from start to finish without a hitch. Then we high-fived like crazy.

In the end,  I think the game turned out great and takes the Player on a pretty exciting little adventure, although I might be a little bit biased.

I want to thank all the Vancouver Film School instructors for their contributions and guidance, all our mentors for their feedback, all our voice actors for their amazing work, and our sound collaborators for helping us out in an area where we are woefully unskilled.

Now it’s time to rest a little, recuperate from the past few months of intense development, and wait for it to sink in that we’re actually done.

Synopsis:

Anderson Grieg is a crew member on the spacecraft Baiulus, enroute to the Engels Globular Cluster. A joint mission by Lang Astronautics and Vanguard Exploration, it is the first flight in almost a hundred years to employ the previously banned Mezier Drive, and humanity’s first tentative step beyond our galaxy. When the mission is sabotaged, Anderson is the only survivor, and finds himself the furthest human being from Earth.

I think it’s pretty clear where my film inspirations lie with this piece. It was really fun to use everything I knew from filmmaking within a video game context . (I was going to upload my storyboards at this point, but they were drawn in blue pencil, which apparently does not scan… if I figure out how to scan them or I take the time to go over them with black ink I’ll append this post).

This story is actually a snippet from a much larger narrative I’ve been working on for some time. This narrative is truly epic, and would eventually span several mediums (film, television, comic book, video game, novel and music). I had envisioned this particular “episode” as a traditional 2D-Animation piece, and I struggled for a long time about whether I was going to use it for my Machinina assignment. I’m really glad I did, because although it was absolutely laborious (the total running time is almost 7-minutes, when the average of most VFS Machinima projects is about 2 to 3 minutes), it turned out better than I expected.

One of the neat things that came about after showing this piece the first few times was people’s interpretations of it. I didn’t mean to leave parts of ambiguous (in fact I thought I was explaining it all pretty clearly), but I guess a mix of both my own vague storytelling and technical/time limitations left some parts loose enough that a large number of different (and pretty interesting) theories came about. If you think you know what’s going on, please leave your thoughts in a comment below!

For those who are curious, here are some details:

Music: The music is “Neptune – The Mystic” by Gustav Holst; a very mesmerizing piece which also almost sounds as if it were the inspiration for much of the Star Wars soundtrack.

Engine: The game engine used is the Unreal Development Kit. You too can make something like this, because it’s free. Go here: http://udk.com/

Models / Animation: I am not a modeler nor an animator, and I likely never will be. However, the fine folks at Bioware are, and all the models and animation you see are from Mass Effect 2 (a game made using the above-mentioned Unreal Development Kit). I did change the color of the man’s space suit from black to white.

Architecture: I did, however, create the environment/architecture, as I am a decently competent level designer.