Development
When Mattel Interactive still owned the rights to the Myst series, development of Myst IV was contracted out to DreamForge Intertainment, developers of the game Sanitarium; Dreamforge was hired before Presto Studios to develop Myst III: Exile. Dreamforge's Myst used real-time graphics, and was two years into development and twenty percent complete when Ubisoft, who had by this point acquired the rights to the series, cancelled the project and decided to restart development from scratch internally.
According to Geneviève Lord, Revelation's producer, concluding the story of the two brothers had originally been intended as the plot for Myst III, but due to a limited amount of time to develop the game, as well as to not interfere with Dreamforge's Myst game, whose plot details were still forming, the plot was dropped and then redeveloped when Ubisoft began work on Myst IV. Cyan, Myst and Riven's developer, set down "a certain number of rules" that Ubisoft had to follow, according to Lord, but otherwise the team was free to develop new ideas, keeping in the spirit of Myst lore.
Ubisoft's development of Revelation took over three years and more than eighty employees. Early on, the development team made the decision to use pre-rendered graphics for the game, to match the style of previous Myst games. This proved to be a challenge, as the studio had never developed a pre-rendered game before, and had to hire over fifty new employees who had experience in the field. Full production was started on the game before artistic direction and engine development tools were fully established, and the resulting lack of focus and communication meant that a bad working relationship existed between the game designers, programmers, and modelers for most of the production.
As an improvement over the prerendered technology present in Myst, Riven, and Exile, Revelation uses its "ALIVE" engine to animate nearly everything in the game. The water animations, for example, are fully rendered for each location. The trees sway in the breeze, and the sky has moving clouds. Wildlife includes creatures that walk through the environment and occasionally interact with the player. The game also features a number of effects applied in real time, such as lens flares, dynamic lighting, and an optional focal blur. In a trend started by the original Myst, the game uses live actors to play the game's roles in live-action video sequences. There are more than 70 minutes of video, and the game allows players to look around and interact with the video while it is playing.
Read more about this topic: Myst IV: Revelation
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)