Some of our main influences probably are Tim Burton and American McGee, but I would not exclusively compare Jeklynn to any one thing. The art team is amazing, and there is a lot to our style that can be only described as “Jeklynnesque”. I mean, you don’t often have a Lead Designer that talks to you over Skype while in the shower, or an Art Director random as ours. And don’t even mention the level designer.  The point is, most of us are really weird developers but with that comes a mountain of unique and interesting ideas!

Hello there everyone, and welcome to an insider from Vex Studios on the title Jeklynn Heights.

Name’s Norbert Varga, and I’m in charge of the level design for Jeklynn Heights.  First and foremost, I must say Jeklynn Heights is such a great and innovative project to work on. I’ve always prefered things that are unique in their own way – and well, as you can tell, Jeklynn certainly is.

I’ve been toying with level design for approximately six to eight years now, including various RTS editors, Cryengine 1/2, Worldcraft/Hammer, TES Construction kit/GED, Doom builder and Unreal editor (since Unreal 2). I’ve always enjoyed being able to create things. That’s how it all started. Custom maps, mods, small games and now Jeklynn. Don’t get fooled though, I still prefer pancakes over level design. Who doesn’t?

My main goal is simple. I joined Vex to make some nifty maps and turn everything inside out and make sure you guys constantly enjoy every second spent playing this game.

While I’ve heard various complaints about Unreal, the engine was always one of my favorites because of its’ lighting system. So I decided that the first task I would tackle after joining Vex would be establishing the overall ambiance. For Jeklynn Heights, I had to create something dark and gritty yet still colorful and saturated. This proved to be quite the challenge because having an environment that consists of dark tones with significant color is a very delicate process.  However, being an addicted experimenter with lighting, I’ve slowly managed to nail down the eerie, dark, spooky yet still colorful environment. After all, it’s one of our main points with the artistic direction as you can see in our released media.

Some of our main influences probably are Tim Burton and American McGee, but I would not exclusively compare Jeklynn to any one thing. The art team is amazing, and there is a lot to our style that can be only described as “Jeklynnesque”. I mean, you don’t often have a Lead Designer that talks to you over Skype while in the shower, or an Art Director random as ours. And don’t even mention the level designer.  The point is, most of us are really weird developers but with that comes a mountain of unique and interesting ideas!

Anyway, after I managed to get the style down, I spent a lot of time brainstorming on various gameplay aspects within the actual level design.  Since Jeklynn combines third and first person perspectives in addition to a multitude of genres, it’s very important to find the right environmental balance to harbor all the crazy action that you will soon experience!

As for my current plans, I am working on our first actual level which will be optimized for 5v5 matches.  We have already started to play test this map last weekend, and needless to say it was very fun!

So what do we have planned for in the future? A lot!  We will be working a lot on gameplay mechanics and balancing but I can assure you – I’ll make sure that each level is what it needs to be to accommodate our game design. I only accept pancakes in return thou. Double.

Keep up for more screenshots and our launched game website in the very near future!

Firstly I’m Dan, one of the new artists part of this motley crew that calls themselves game developers. With any luck the art team might even be making regular posts showing you all updates of our progress and other cool things that happen here in our little corner of reality. (that’s providing Ryan doesn’t try and sell us all crackers again)

Anyway onto our first order of business, the new screenshot-

Firstly as I’m sure you can all see, there’s an awful lot of mushrooms in that screenshot, and yes, you would be quite correct there are a lot of mushrooms in this particular scene. However this is one of a very diverse set of environments that we are building.

In the words of Sage (One of the other artists) “While the outpost is a very small portion of our world, we think it accurately portrays the mood, style, and atmosphere that players will experience in-game. Besides, what’s a game without giant colorful mushrooms?”

At the art department we may have let the whole mushroom idea run away with us a little bit, however on this particular occasion it didn’t end in us summoning great Cthulhu, instead we spawned this little device.

At least for me, this small little device sums up what our game is all about,  taking two seemingly incompatible ideas and grinding them into a fine paste until something interesting appears.

If any of  you have some ideas of things you would like to see in the game or any other comments please leave a comment below.

-Dan

What we have here is essentially the base mesh for the center of our demo. By base mesh I mean every asset in here will be further detailed as the project progresses. Each asset consists of relatively low triangle counts at this point – but as the scene becomes more and more detailed – the count will probably need to be more carefully watched.

Above, you can see the “building blocks” of Jeklynn Square. By piecing these modular pieces together in various ways, we can achieve a varied environment. Of course, we will be adding texture variations to these pieces later on to hide any repetition. Clocking in at 50-150 triangles per wall piece, performance wouldn’t much of an issue with these particular assets. However, things may get hairy depending on the amount of detail we apply (i.e. more roots and vegetation growing along the walls)

Here is a quick little video of one the work-in-progress structures – Angora’s Flower Shop. Lacking some vegetation for a flower shop, eh? Well that is next to come! The point of this is really a test render to demonstrate my particular style of texturing – which is a combination of high-resolution photographs, sculpting, and hand-painted height maps. Also, we decided to use billboard light rays for the windows so we can keep performance levels on an even keel – instead of directional lights (god rays, unfortunately, don’t like to hang out around windows in Leadworks).