New Years Update news

While you’ve all been sitting with family, eating, drinking, and playing with the awesome new toys that Santa dropped down your chimney this holiday season, we here at Lost World Returns have been locked in our basements, diligently powering on — ignoring such trivial pursuits as "celebrating" and focusing instead on bringing you the most amazing mod in the history of re-purposing game engines!

…Actually that’s total bullshit. We were definitely sitting around playing with our new toys and drinking copious amounts of alcohol with our families and friends too. Although, the whole thing about being locked in the basement was mostly true.

Speaking of re-purposing game engines though, the New Year brings with it a whole host of exciting new prospects, including the possibility that your favourite mod team might be expanding its horizons to include commercial release on a brand new engine!

More on that in later updates though.

For now, let’s take a look at what’s new for LWR at the end of this year, and what’s coming up for the next one!

Current Status / Demo

We’re sure a lot of you are wondering where the mythical demo has gotten to and why you’re reading this post instead of off exploring a dinosaur-infested island right now.

Sure, we could spin some story about it having been buried in the snow and lost until the spring melt, but the truth is that it simply isn’t ready yet. You could say we’re “pulling a Blizzard” — we’ll release it when it’s done.

The thing about our team is that we all have a psychotic dedication to quality, and that means that we’d rather pull out our grandmother’s nose hairs with our teeth than release anything to you that wasn’t a shining beacon of awesomeness. It’s true: we set high standards and we do our best to adhere to them, so while it takes us a while longer to get everything finished up and polished to those standards, we feel that the result is far more valuable.

New Members

It's been only a couple of weeks since our last update, so not too much movement has happened in the team recruitment sector; however, we would like to welcome a very valuable new member!

• Craig, from the USA, is a THX-certified sound designer who we’re happy to bring on board to help the audio department re-create the prehistoric world. Craig’s work will start cropping up in future updates as he does his part to bring our dinos to life!
• Marius is…not a new member. But he has a new job! Now that there’s some extra help in the audio department, Marius was asked to take on the role of PR Representative/Community Liason in addition to the composing work he does now. He’s very excited because it gives him another excuse to speak in the third person and handle project updates (like this one) and community affairs.

The DIG Team — An Update

Since we toss the term “team” around fairly often in these updates, it’s come to our attention that it might be nice to update everyone on just who exactly is part of this “team” of ours.

With that in mind, our secretarial monkeys have performed extensive background checks on all our contributing members and provided us with names and brief descriptions of each person:

• Andrew…has quit his job and started a game design course at a university where DICE recruits their team from, in Sweden.
• Neon…has gotten an internship at a game studio in Belgium, with a promising future.
• Jonas (Avimimus)…has a room in the shape of a cuttlefish, and is taking his exams on Paleobotany.
• James (Beaubell)…cannot make websites, but is being hired to do voice acting for a small Welsh game studio making java-based games.
• Joe…left Crytek and now works Ubisoft on a project that we’re not allowed to disclose the nature of.
• Macco…hates exams, but looks forward to one day leaving school.
• Marco…has gone missing. Nick is planning on sending a search party to Rome after him.
• Sophie…has a job in London working with the CryEngine2, a great opportunity for her.
• HP…might be fleeing the nest and venturing to Germany to pursue a new job opportunity.
• Hawke…is still undecided about what to do, but can make a damn good submarine.
• Ogre…is being all American and celebrating this month in Florida with his parents and family — we miss him!
• Mdog…wants to do another university course, and looks forward to getting back to the dinosaur factory.
• Hell Demon…has made a return after the PC problems, and is taking lots of painkillers to deal with the trouble of banging his head over the SDK tools.
• Rixx…still loves the drugs, and loves making high-poly dinos too.
• Alfie…is enjoying his level design, and is experimenting with interior areas (of the game, that is).
• Rick…is making lots of progress on an RTS system we don’t really need, but it keeps him busy. Seriously though, we love his flowgraph experience and the fact that he can make wonderful things happen.
• Jimboob…left university and is now a bum who keeps asking Nick to meet up with him…creepy.
• Toast…is busy with an old friend, working on another title in development, while still contributing plenty of ships and weapons to us.
• Tom…has been busy getting a job at Universal Studios; fingers crossed for him!
• Adam…finished his work on the new Mummy film and is having a well-deserved rest.
• Ray…is celebrating Christmas in India and is working on the raptor.
• Nodunit…has fallen in love with Sennia (the Landrover), and has implemented a real-time damage and texture changing simulation. As well as proper working headlamps. Once he’s finished, he expects everyone else will also fall in love with the vehicle.
• Nick (Smiley)…is battling world hunger and the AIDS epidemic in Africa with one hand, while simultaneously managing the hell out of the LWR team.
• Marius…is skillfully avoiding the secretarial monkeys.

So, barring any unexpected stowaways and, of course, the undead horde that handles our security and coffee, that is the current roster of our team.

It continues to be a point of pride for us that, even with the hugely diverse backgrounds and experiences that everyone brings to the table, we all work together seamlessly to annoy Nick.

But, more importantly, we work to put together this mod with the kind of passion normally reserved for Burlesque shows.

Media / Music

Once again, with the time of year being what it is and everyone being so occupied with that “life” stuff, we have very little new material to show off this time around. Marius would like to share a new music track though, just to keep people’s appetites whetted for what’s to come…

Marius wrote: This track is meant to accompany the opening titles sequence of the game, which finds you waking up, disoriented, following a shipwreck, and realizing slowly that you’re stuck on a mysterious island… Prologue – Opening Titles.

What’s Coming…

Now that the old year is passing us, we have one primary resolution for the coming year: progress.

We’re hard at work on the episodic demo, and are very excited to get it out to you as quickly as we’re able.

In the meantime, dinosaurs are being modeled, animations are being rigged, environments are being designed, story sequences are being polished, music is being written, sound is being recorded and painstakingly designed…

And all the while, Jonas — our intrepid staff explorer, sometimes known as Avimimus — is out there risking life and limb every day in the libraries, museums, and digital information sources of the world, providing us with vital research to make sure that we keep our production as factually accurate as possible.

Progress is being made, and this coming year, we’re striving toward completion.

So just where are we, progress-wise? As our beloved project leader, Nick, so eloquently put it:

Nick wrote: We are a rocket ship. So far, we have managed to have:

1. Main engine start
2. Take-off
3. Solid rocket boosters
4. In orbit

The next bit we need to do is…the mission.

Of course, as a team, we would also like to take this opportunity to extend a massive THANK YOU to you, our supporters, who make it all worthwhile and are always eager to lend suggestions and encouragement (triangles, we’re looking at you!).

Here’s to the New Year: to new horizons, continuing progress, passion, and copious amounts of caffeine!

Cheers!