Neyyah: Explorations Brought To Life
Feb 04, 2025Work on Neyyah continues to push on, with a lot of work recently in making sure features such as the Traveller's Guide is implemented and updated nicely in-game. The Traveller's Guide is an image based, automatic observations system, which will definitely aid you in your explorations, compile and organise your discoveries, and keep you orientated in the game world, and enable you to recall where you were last time you played ... A big world to explore, so much to find and learn. You may need that nudge to get you back on track! More on this feature at a later date!
Anyway, location by location work continues.
Wearing many hats to get various tasks completed for the game, Faster Travel has come rushing back on the scene. This was a feature I covered a while ago in one of my dev logs in greater detail, which is available here:
In Neyyah, you traverse the world by pointing and clicking in the direction you want to go. A node system is set up for the player to be able to make progress through the 3D world, which is delivered in-game as prerendered images. You can change transitions within the game to suit your desired style of traversal (OFF resulting in snap/cut no transitions between movements, through to RELAX which has the biggest fades between scenes and gives more of an impression of traversal).
However, you can also FASTER TRAVEL to get to where you want FASTER in Neyyah, and this little snippet of recent developments showcases just that. You'll see me placing faster travel nodes into the game world. Each scene needs them, as at any point, the player could enable faster travel (either with F on the keyboard, or manually enabling within Options Menu). This little video shows a quick of example of how I plan out these nodes and where they can best fit within the game world, plus making sure either forward, forward right or forward left faster travel cursors are showing at every given time, which gives you more of a sense of what direction you'll be facing once faster travelling there!
My girlfriend had a lot of fun with this feature in a recent play test. It serves as a way to get around faster to where you want to be, and can be enabled at any time - which certain areas are locked until you've gain access there.
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Animation has been at a forefront in two different styles which Neyyah heavily relies on to bring its world to life.
One of these is WATER. Yeah, Neyyah has a lot of it ...
While Neyyah is prerendered and doesn't rely on realtime technology, certain VFX such as moving portal plasma, traversal through portals, steamy / smokey effects and fireflies can be generated for Neyyah's world, making it feel more real and immersive. And so, water is animated and brought to life!
This is a big task and is still ongoing. It's been great seeing Neyyah's ocean bring more depth and dimensions to Neyyah's world (whether shallow, close up, or high up, looking across into the vast horizon beyond)
I create masks in Photoshop, which are then brought into Sqirlz Water Reflections, giving me a great tool to create some realistic looking water ripples. Neyyah's water isn't meant to be crashy or stormy. The placid water effects work fine for Neyyah's world. This small pond area featured in this video requires more of a shimmer, a subtle ripple. You'll see a brief insight into my work here ... Stick to the end for the in-game result, along with sounds which I produced / arranged myself, and mixed in the game engine, Visionaire Studio 5. Some sounds were recorded by myself, others from freesound.org and edited as needed.
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While VFX are fun to generate, using Photoshop, Wondershare Filmora and Adobe After Fx, I also generate a lot of Neyyah's dynamic elements within Blender too. I use Blender to generate all of Neyyah's 3D world. While more of my time is in the construction of the game nowadays, building the environments was one of my top favourite tasks of building Neyyah, and with game dev in general. I spent a long time making Neyyah's environment feel as real, beautiful and immersing as possible.
So, of course, outside of static camera angles to display your windows into Neyyah's world, having some cool crafts to ride and operate, levers to pull and elevators to traverse up and down makes sense, right? Here's an example of some elevator magic in Neyyah ...
Although I don't show the complexities of its modelling process in Blender, or the animation or rendering process itself, I do show some Adobe After FX work ... I splice two parts of an animation together in order to create a seamless animation for one of the elevator rides. While errors occured in one part of it, it was then re-rendered and I could salvage the first half. All artwork is modelled and rendered in Blender by myself, using Cycles rendering engine. This prerendered artwork is then brought into Visionaire Studio 5.
This 'cool elevator' consists of going up two floors in a building. You'll also note the different designs for buttons to show which level you can go to once you're at the middle section. All sounds were recorded mainly by myself, too - with a bit of freesound.org thrown in ... I mixed, arranged, and produced the sounds in Sonar Cakewalk.
I also showcase the animation being placed into Visionaire Studio 5 game engine, which is used to create Neyyah. It's fantastic for point n click adventure game development! I then showcase the elevator in action by playing this segment of the game.
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I'll be delving into some sound design for the rest of today, which is going to be fun! Outside of Neyyah's world sound design, I also have to focus on UI elements which have been progressively getting better along the way. With some new in-game 'high tech computer console artwork' now in place, I am generating the mouse hover and click sound magic, plus some other cool sounds as you
delve deeper into Neyyah's vault of scifi tech goodness ...
Here's a quick peek at a recent upgrade in such interfaces:
I'll be aiming to provide a lot more Youtube content over the next while, as I build the channel, exploring my practises in game dev and Neyyah's work - and eventually, other projects in development!
Definitely check out provided videos, and subscribe to the channel to be up to date with the best visual and exciting way I can convey my journey in game development.
Thanks for taking the time to stop and read up about some cool Neyyah stuff!
- Aaron Gwynaire