About:
R Y V
E N
The Imitation of Myst
I didn't intend to do this.
All I was going to do was experiment with some of the lighting and textures
I found interesting in Riven. But suddenly, quite accidentally, I had the
beginnings of a tiny world. And you just can't destroy worlds, no matter
how tiny they may be.
It is still a tiny world, and probably always
will be - I've already spent a few days making it, and can't really justify
spending even that much time, let alone more. (I prefer my "non-commercial"
creations to be a bit more independent and original :-) Developing a game
like Myst/Riven is something I would like to do however, so maybe one day
I can let a world become my full time creation, but until then...
  
Telescope. By Justin
Fisher. Construction time: 3.5 hours
(Now I'm imitating the Riven
web site too :-)
Except that I thought the brass
coloured wireframe looked too cool to have just one wireframe...
|
Ryven, as noted above, was not
originally designed to be complete enough to even resemble a world, let
alone a world that makes a good game. This shows. As a result, there are
no real puzzles in it, so all you can really do is wander around, and look
around. Golly. Basically, it's just a pretty way to get to the Journal
of Riven. (A hintbook in the form of an embellished version of my notebook
from playing Riven. Red herring speculations and all :-)
I intend to remedy the situation however, and
more of Ryven, including (shock! horror!) stuff to actually do,
is underway, despite the problems caused by not designing Ryven with a
game in mind. (If you have any suggestions, opinions, criticisms, feel
free to send them to me). For some time I've been interested in the idea
of making a game suited to the WWW, and with Ryven already in place, expanding
it into a game seems a good idea.
I also intend to make a "cache page" to overcome
the problem of waiting for the image to load. This would simply be a page
containing all the images from the game, so that those people with
fast modems and no data charges can just open it in a browser window, then
continue browsing the web elsewhere in another widow while all the images
and sounds are downloaded and cached in the background. Once it's done,
you can move around in RYVEN free of loading delays.
The images amount to over a meg though...
Other problems with Ryven
include my sub-virtuoso grasp of HTML, thus don't
expect much of sound effects, ambience, music etc. Not to mention the fact
that the graphics are not as good as Riven's :-) (Well, I didn't exactly
put as much work into it... Oh, and all the platform/software/etc advocacy
losers who think it's the important thing can rest assured that my tools
are pathetic compared to those of the Riven developers, but officially,
I'm not taking that cop-out :-).
By the way, I apologise for the somewhat excessive
filesize on some of the things I've done here, but I suppose it's pretty
mild compared to some web pages today... :-)
| By the way, I do mean tiny - this shot includes
pretty much all of Ryven, and there are only seven or so locations in it
(as compared with the zillion or so in Riven :-) |
I am still not very far into
playing Riven; the game which inspired this. This is because I've barely
played it since I started messing with those textures. The only thing more
addictive than exploring a strange world seems to be creating one yourself...
:-) Anyway, because of this, I still have only a vague idea of what the
D'ni are, who Atrus is, etc, which is why there are so few references to
such things here.
More info on the Making of
Ryven
About:
The Journal of
R I V E N
I spent a little too much
effort on my notes when playing Riven, and as we all know, the way to justify
such efforts to put even more effort into them. Ie sticking it on the web.
Ha ha. (sigh).
But to get to the point, I was thinking that
"Ryven" alone didn't justify a trip to these pages, so something else should
be added. By the way, I created the Journal before I saw or knew
about the Riven Journals :-)
Anyway, as hints and tips books go, the Journal
is a bit of a minefield. I don't actually know if it would be very helpful,
or if it were, a very desirable method of obtaining help. I've basically
taken the notes I made, and added a first-person account of the progress
through Riven to match them. To read the journal, you can either enter
Ryven to get it, or (anticlimax) just
skip straight to it.
Unfortunately, the Journal is currently so incomplete
as to be only of help to those just starting Riven, rather than helping
with the tougher problems. Hopefully though, it would help in the sense
of demonstrating a way to go about playing the game. (ie pretend youre
not playing at all :-)
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