PC The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts)

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Ex-People Can Fly Devs Unveil Weird Fiction Horror in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
Weird Fiction Horror Coming to PC in 2013

Inspired by the weird fiction stories and other tales of macabre of the early 20th century, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a game to be played at night, alone, and in headphones. With The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, The Astronauts – a team comprised of People Can Fly (Bulletstorm, Painkiller) veterans – aim to evolve immersive storytelling in games. It’s set for release on PC via digital distributors in 2013.

As a detective with the supernatural ability to visualize scenes of lethal crimes, you investigate the kidnapping of a young boy, hoping to save him before it’s too late. The investigation leads you to a beautiful mountain area, where you come across a severely mutilated body of one of the kidnappers. Using both your paranormal skill and modern detective tools you discover the mystery behind the trail of corpses in the valley, the roots of an ancient force ruling the area, and the fate of the kidnapped boy.

“What we care about the most is that the players feel like they’re really there. Immersion is our number one priority”, said the game’s designer, Adrian Chmielarz. “It’s a game about exploration and discovery. We’re not abandoning the gameplay – on the contrary: we’re trying to strip it down to the bone and make sure it’s always meaningful and truly makes the experience better.”
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The game is being developed on the latest version of the industry-leading Unreal Engine 3 technology from Epic Games, as well as exciting new technology, the details of which we will reveal in the coming months.
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Teaser video (in-engine)



Screenshot:
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Data de Lançamento: 25 - Setembro - 2014
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The Vanishing of Ethan Carter won't contain any combat

Yesterday Bulletstorm creative lead Adrian Chmielarz announced his new PC "weird fiction horror" game, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and today he has detailed the mysterious title in an exchange with Eurogamer.

The most notable points are that The Vanishing of Ethan Carter will be in first-person and won't contain any combat - a big shift after Chmielarz's work on Bulletstorm and Painkiller.
"It's not about shooting monsters," Chmielarz explained. "Not that there's anything wrong with that. After all, I did design Painkiller and Bulletstorm and I enjoy grinding meat with bullets as much as the next guy. But I wanted to make a different kind of game for a very long time, and now it can finally happen."

When asked about the gameplay mechanics Chmielarz said, "The focus of the game is its escapist factor: the immersion, the exploration and the discovery. But it wouldn't make much sense to play as a detective if you weren't doing any detecting, would it? So there's a little bit of that, but again, the focus is not on mind bending puzzles, but on unsettling discoveries.

"Take Dear Esther, add gameplay, murder and corpses. That's the closest to what The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is."

Regarding the first-person perspective, Chmielarz told me, "A few amazing games like The Walking Dead or Journey have already proven that third-person can work perfectly fine for emotions, but I think that when it comes to immersion, it's hard to beat first-person perspectives. This may be just me, but I get a better sense of presence in the virtual world if it happens in first-person. And that sense of presence is exactly what we are after. We want the players to feel like they're really there, shiver when it's cold and lower their heads when it's windy."

He also noted that he would like to support Oculus and other 3D devices and displays - something that's well-suited for first-person games.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is due out this year on PC.
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The Vanishing of Ethan Carter First In-Game Screenshots and additional info






What’s this about?
After seven months of hard work, we’re ready to reveal what our game – a weird piece of horror fiction called The Vanishing of Ethan Carter – looks like. We’re releasing four in-game screenshots from the first few minutes of the game. We don’t plan to have any cut scenes in the game, so these screenshots all derive from actual gameplay.

What’s the game about?
In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you play as Paul Prospero, an occult detective who receives a disturbing letter from Ethan Carter and realizes that the boy is in grave danger. When Paul arrives in Ethan’s home of Red Creek Valley, he realizes things are even worse than he imagined. Ethan has vanished in the wake of a brutal murder, which Paul comes to see might not be the only murder to investigate. Using both regular and supernatural detective skills, Paul must figure out what happened to the missing boy. A few weeks ago we released a short prequel comic.

How do you play this game?
Via a First-Person Perspective, you explore and interact with the environment in order to discover the truth. Paul has a supernatural gift that allows him to visualize the final moments of anyone who’s been murdered. The more clues you discover, the clearer and longer Paul’s vision. Exactly how much you are able to discern from a corpse is entirely up to you. You might discover the motivation of the murderer, or find a hint of where to go next – or both.

Why are you making this game?
We believe video games are a largely untapped medium for powerful storytelling possibilities. Every developer with a deep interest in the storytelling side of gaming uses different ways to let players live through a story: from interactive dramas like The Walking Dead to story-exploration games like Gone Home to online adventures like Journey. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is our own attempt to tell a multi-layered story while keeping the player completely immersed and constantly engaged-with the unique sense of presence only video games can offer.

What kind of horror game is it?
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a “weird fiction” horror, meaning our focus is on atmosphere, mood, and the essential humanity of our characters. With its mixture of a beautiful world with the haunting and macabre, this story is for adult players. That said, there is no combat in our game. If our game leaves any scars, you won’t be able to see them. Also, we want gamers to experience the story of Paul and Ethan at their own pace, and without the need for sedatives. It’s less about pure terror and more about clammy unease.

What platforms and when?
We’re currently developing the game for PC, but we’re hoping to eventually bring it to next-gen platforms. We’re in full production, but we don’t have a set release date. It’s a question of months, however, not years.

Who are you?
We are The Astronauts, a small – eight people at the moment – team founded in 2012 by the ex-owners and leads of People Can Fly, creators of Painkiller and Bulletstorm. Our webpage is TheAstronauts.com, our Twitter is twitter.com/TheAstroCrew, and you can also follow Adrian, who is both writing these words and the lead designer on the game, at twitter.com/AdrianChm.
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Demasiada qualidade para algo que nunca vou poder usufruir ao máximo. :p Mas por curiosidade, essa team está a construir o motor gráfico desde o inicio?
 
Nem tinha reparado. Mas mesmo assim, não dizem se o motor gráfico é de origem ou se o estão aproveitar de outros jogos que já fizeram.
 
eles estão a usar a última versão do motor que existia na altura, como abandonaram a People Can Fly para criar este novo estúdio ficava muito dispendioso fazer um motor próprio de raíz.

como sempre usaram o unreal engine nos jogos feitos na People Can Fly decidiram continuar a usá-lo por causa da experiência.
 
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VISUAL REVOLUTION OF THE VANISHING OF ETHAN CARTER

This…




…is not a photograph. It is actual 3D model of a church from our game. Before I tell you all about how we created such photorealistic assets (and, maybe surprisingly, why we are not using them in fully photorealistic way in our game), let us think about what makes it look real.

Look around you – do you see any tiling textures?

You shouldn’t, but if you do – look closer. That brick wall or those floor tiles are not, contrary to popular belief, a textbook definition of tiling. Look how some edges are more worn out than others, how some parts seem smoother than others, how dirt and dust settled in certain areas. Some parts may be chipped off, some areas stained, on some parts mold or rust started to settle… Ok, maybe those last ones are not in your fancy neighborhood, but you get the point. And it’s all not random either. If you really wanted it, you could probably make sense of it all. The floor might be more worn out around the front door, or where your chair wheels constantly scrub a patch of the floor, and the outer wall might be darker from the side that gets hit by the rain more often, etc.

You could make sense of it all, but who cares? Your brain usually doesn’t – it’s real, it’s normal, nothing to get excited about. However, your brain does take notice when things are not normal. Like in video games. Even if on the unconscious level, your brain points out to you all those perfectly tiling textures, all those evenly worn-out surfaces, those stains placed in all the wrong places – and whispers in your ear: LOL!
I’m really proud of Bulletstorm — I directed all of environment artist’s efforts — but well, sometimes art was just as crazy as the game itself. Take a look at this floor surface, does it seem right to you?

It’s not that technical limitations prohibit developers from creating things that feel right, not on modern PCs and consoles anyway. The problem – if we put time and money constraints aside – is that more often than not the graphics artists’ brains don’t care about the conscious analysis of reality either. We can be as quick as you to point out unrealistic looking asset in other games, but we rarely stop to think about our own work. Need to make a brick wall texture? Basically a bunch of bricks stuck together? Old-looking? Sure thing boss! If we’re diligent, we may even glance at a photo or two before we get cracking. But even then, quite often we look but do not see.
In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you’ll see some of the most realistic environment pieces ever created for a video game. Assets are no longer simplistic approximations of reality – they are reality. But it’s not that somehow we have magically rewired our brains to be the ideal reality replicators…


Enter photogrammetry.

With photogrammetry, we no longer create worlds while isolated from the world, surrounded by walls and screens. We get up, go out there and shot photos, lots of photos. And then some. Afterwards, a specialized software — we are using Photoscan from Agisoft — looks at these photos, and stares at them until it can finally match every discernible detail from one photo to same exact feature in other photos taken from different angles. This results in a cloud of points in 3d space, representing real world object. From there, the software connects the dots to create a 3d model, and projects pixels from photographs to create a texture.

I’ll spare you the details about Lowe’s Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm, solving for camera intrinsic and extrinsic orientation parameters and other details of what that software does – all that matters is that you feed it with good photos taken around some object and you get the exact replica of that object, in 3D, in full color, with more detail than you could ever wish for.
Take a look at this slideshow to better understand the process of turning a bunch of photos into an amazing game asset:
You can find extra video in today’s post on our Tumblr.

Photogrammetry is incredible. I have been making games for 20 years, I have worked with amazing talented artists on huge AAA blockbusters like Bulletstorm or Gears of War, and you could say I am not easily impressed in the art department. But each new photoscan gets me. So much detail, so many intricacies, but most importantly, all of them just make deep sense. Cracks, stains, erosion – Mother Nature has worked a billion years on some of these assets, it’s almost unfair to expect comparable quality from artists who spend no more than few days on similar assets.

Enough convincing, see it for yourself. We have found a pretty new and unique way to let you experience photogrammetry of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. What follows below is not just static screenshots of our game assets. After you click on the image, a 3D object is loaded, then the texture downloads and voila, you get to experience early glimpse into our game world.

You can orbit, pan and zoom camera around these objects, or just sit back and let the automatic rotation showcase them. I highly recommend to take charge of camera (hold down LMB, rotation direction depends on the position of the mouse pointer in the image), especially after going full screen, to fully experience the detail and quality of these assets.

Speaking of quality – these are raw unprocessed scans, and some of them are actually lower res than what we have in the game.


39 photos taken around a cemetery statue, and you get this. :wow:
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Gosto do aspecto de algumas imagens, pela naturalidade das cores. Infelizmente, o produto final deve vir com um filtro para aumentar a saturação e ficar "bonitinho".
 
Parece me bastante interessante! Faz me lembrar o Phantasmagoria (1995), não sei se conhecem..
Quanto à release date.. só referem TBA 2014
 
Última edição:
Só agora fiquei a conhecer este jogo e confesso que fiquei surpreendido com a qualidade destas imagens. Certamente que ficará de baixo de olho até ao seu lançamento.
 
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