Eastshade is Coming to PS4 and Xbox One!

Eastshade will be available for PS4 and Xbox One on October 21! While our core team has been busy squashing bugs and delivering updates, our partner DO Games has been hard at work bringing the world of Eastshade to consoles. It has proven to be a behemoth task, but we’re finally closing in on the finish line. In under a month you can play this open-world travel simulator paint-em-up from the comfort of your sofa! Accompanying this announcement we bring you a new extended trailer:

We’re looking for a Quest Scripter/Coder!

UPDATE – Thanks everyone! The position has been filled!

Hello, everyone! We’re looking to increase our bandwidth for implementing quests. We’re looking for someone who’s excited about Eastshade and loves authoring/implementing quests! Its a bonus if you have writing chops, but more importantly we need someone who can actually implement quests in Unity within our framework. If you’re interested, find out more here (link removed, position has been filled!)

Steam Page and Trailer 1.1!

We now have a Steam store page! It would mean the world to us if you go wishlist and/or follow the game there! Plus then you won’t miss its release :). Another way to ensure you don’t miss release is to sign up for our email notification list, so you get an email when the game comes out (we won’t send you anything else, just a release notification). With the release of our steam page comes an updated trailer, which you can watch on the store page, or embedded below. Since so much has changed since our initial announcement, I wanted the trailer to reflect all our updates. We now have full voice acting and lip sync after all! I’ve updated almost all the shots, and replaced some with new ones. Now that Jaclyn is helping me art the world, many areas have more tender loving detail.

Voice Acting Casting Call!

For the past nearly four years of Eastshade development now, I’ve been pretty dogged in my belief that Eastshade should be text-only dialog, like Final Fantasy. I held this belief due to the following reasons:

  1. Voice acting means we have to do lip sync animation.
  2. Lip sync means tongue model, teeth model, full facial rigging, and full phoneme markup for every gosh darn character.
  3. The costs of casting and recording full voice for Eastshade’s 20,000+ words over more than 40 different characters.
  4. The overhead of managing many different voice actors and deliverables.

These are reasonable points in favor of no voice. However, things have changed, I’ve done more research, and my outlook has changed. The first critical thing that changed is I got rid of the mouth coverings in the character designs from Leaving Lyndow. I initially thought that mouth coverings would be a design decision that would make things easier, weather we did full voice or greeting lines only. However I learned the hard way what a terrible mistake this was. The difficulties of art design with mouthless characters turned out to be far greater than any savings in production. Of the criticism we received for Leaving Lyndow, the facial design of the characters was probably second most common.

New and improved!

Once the characters had mouths, I got to thinking: What other bad decisions have I made in the interest of saving production time? I questioned everything about the characters. How hard actually was lip sync? Was I blowing it out of proportion? I’d never actually tried, so I carved out a day, and told myself “If I can get a reasonable dynamic lip sync on a character in a work day, then full voice might be viable.” Well turns out lip sync was easier than I’d thought. With the help of a Unity plugin called Salsa, I smashed the goal with flying colors. The assumption I’d been holding for nearly four years was turned upside down in a single work day!

And moreover, I made another assumption-shattering discovery in the experiment: Even with extremely amateur voice acting recorded by yours truly, the character came to life before my eyes. As I imagined each character with their own unique voice, I could feel another dimension of discovery materialize. Each character would have a new type of feedback to offer, and despite how much repeat there was in the character models, distinct voices would bring another layer of spice.

Once I knew it would be technically feasible, and I realized that I didn’t necessarily need Meryl Streep, the last thing in my way was costs and management. After doing some research around the web, its clear now that costs aren’t as inhibiting as I’d assumed. And for how much value I can see it adds, I know it will be worth it. The last thing that remains to be seen is weather we can handle casting in an organized enough way, and empower each actor to create their own deliverables that we don’t have to do a ton of work making game-ready.

So without further ado, if you’re an interested voice actor with means to record yourself, here are our open audition guidelines!