Hello from Cinder Ridge!
Welcome to our first blog post! We are excited to kick off this blog as we ramp up development on Cinder Ridge in 2024. We want to take this first blog post as an opportunity to share some information about our team and our project and show some of the exciting things we’ve been working on!
Our Story
Back in March of 2020, at the initial height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nick Crockett moved back to his hometown in California's former Gold Country, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. While home, he was confronted firsthand with the effects that climate change was having on the place where he grew up, including the increasingly dangerous wildfires that had already had devastating impacts on other nearby communities.
During this time, he started working on Cinder Ridge; imagining it as a kind of loving portrait of the woods where he grew up while also using the game as a way to imagine a better future for the forests - one in which all people could come together to take care of nature. Shortly thereafter, his partner and cofounder Julia Wang started working on the game, guiding early stages of interaction design, visual direction, and background research.
After working on the project in their spare time for a few years, Nick and Julia decided it was time to take the next step and found a game studio to truly bring their vision to life - and so they founded Understory Games!
Over the last year, the team has grown from two to ten as they have brought on a team of talented artists and engineers who have helped to breathe new life and vision into the project.
One of the most amazing parts of the development process so far has been to see the outpouring of passion and interest, especially when it has come time to add new members to the team. Understory Games received over a few hundred applications for each of the most recent job postings, a number that we could have never anticipated. It has been so touching and rewarding to see how dedicated people are to seeing this dream into a reality!
While we will introduce more of our team directly in future installments of our blog and on our socials, we want to take this opportunity to highlight our newest team member - Madeline, our new gameplay engineer! With her strong Unity and development skills and passion for our game, we know she will be a tremendous addition to our studio and the project.
A message from Nick and Julia
“Thank you all for being here! We’ve been blown away by the amount of excitement around the game. We’ve been heads down on production, and we can’t wait to show everyone what’s up next. Get outside and look at some plants!"
Our Progress
Cinder Ridge has come a long way since the initial prototyping stages and we are so excited to share a brief look at some of the updates that we’ve been working on - with the caveat that these are behind-the-scenes looks at the game in development and not the final appearance.
An exciting step in development right now has been establishing the visual look for Cinder Ridge. Impressionism and plein-air painting were big influences on the art direction decisions we made around rendering the environment. We wanted the game to look both timeless and inviting and also read well on both small and large screens, as well as the technical challenges of rendering a ton of plants that are all interactive. So much of spending time in the forests feels like stepping into a painting that it felt only right to bring that to the look of the game itself. We are so excited to share with you a few of our early concept art pieces, both done by our tremendously talented concept artist Genie Liang.
We’ve begun to bridge the gap between concept art and how it renders in-engine. Though this isn’t a finalized look, we are excited to show you the progress we’ve made toward realizing the vision from our concept art. Since trees are such an important part of Cinder Ridge, we wanted to make sure specific tree species are legible from many distances, while trying to hit a balance between scientific accuracy and stylization.
Wrap Up
Thank you for hanging out and catching up with us here in our first official Cinder Ridge blog! We cannot wait to send you exciting new information with our next installment!
If you want to get involved with Cinder Ridge beyond just our blog, be sure to follow us on our socials or join us on Discord!
