Dear esther art12/24/2022 ![]() Since much of the game is spent trudging through ferns and Highland grasses, this means that the foliage, if you are looking at it while turning, turns to follow you in a disconcerting fashion. This is actually responsible for one minor frustration: foliage in Source is two-dimensional - either a single plane or two flat planes slotted together at right-angles, like a cardboard Christmas tree. Nonetheless, for all that, is Dear Esther interesting not just as an investment story, but as a game?ĭear Esther is, inarguably, a game engine - the action is driven by Valve Software's Source engine. The Indie Fund is a relatively new organisation, but this is a feather in its cap. ![]() This success joins the rush of indie developers towards Kickstarter and the emergence of the independent patron as a demonstration that the right funding model, coupled with the right market approach, can rapidly repay investments in the game space. "The fact that a title like Dear Esther can be a Steam top-seller, trend on Twitter and shift units in this quantity is really amazing and we're incredibly pleased," Pinchbeck told me by email. Expected to be a niche success, instead Dear Esther was the top-selling game of the day, with 16,000 sales - a 200% return on the Indie Fund's investment. And, on Valentine's Day, it arrived on Steam, where it promptly covered its costs in five and a half hours. This project mutated from an updated mod to a full conversion, funded with a $55,000 grant from the Indie Fund (a fund driven by seven successful indie game developers). The caves are a tour de force by Briscoe. Why is the island covered in luminous graffiti of chemical symbols? Why does the number 21 keep recurring? If I am alone on this island, who dropped that paper boat into the river? A syphilitic historian's account of the barren landscape. Stories spill out about the island and its sole inhabitant. As the exploration of the island progresses, the letters become more lyrical, looping and, arguably, loopy. What am I doing on this island? Who is this Esther I am writing letters to? As the character - disembodied as all first-person shooter characters are, but almost without physical presence, unable to run, jump, climb, shoot or perform any of the usual activities associated with the genre - traverses the hostile landscape, readings from his letters to Esther are triggered by the sight of a shipwrecked tanker, a flashing buoy or a crumbling bothy*. There is a puzzle, though, and a quest of sorts. It's not a large island, and most of it is (realistically) inaccessibly rocky. The only real challenge is working out where on the remote Hebridean island on which your character is stranded to go next. For more information on the full story of the game's development, please check out my DevBlog.Is it an adventure? There is neither combat nor conversation. ![]() Since it's release in 2012 (PC/MAC/LINUX), Dear Esther has been a phenomenal success selling over 50,000 copies in it's first week and over one million copies to date, and still going strong six years later! Dear Esther's success has inspired and birthed an entirely new genre in gaming known as Narrative-Based games, or the more colloquial 'Walking Simulator' which is now home to dozens of smash hit games. This required me to completely re-build shaders, code and functionality from the ground up on a new engine, but due to this work, Dear Esther Landmark Edition was released in 2016 on Xbox One and PS4. My work during this time covered everything including asset building, lighting, FX, technical art, UI, level design, sound engineering, QA, Steam, team management, PR and most prominently Environment Art. In 2014 I also took on the task of porting the game over to the Unity Engine so that we could reach a broader audience. I worked mostly solo on the development of the original commercial release of the game, with support from the original writer and designer, Dan Pinchbeck, and composer Jessica Curry (Now heads of The Chinese Room) and Jack Morgan, on code. ![]()
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