Whether you’ve been following us for some time or just discovered us recently, it’s no secret that reproducing the environments of Riven in a modern game engine is a considerable undertaking, and of all those tasks, terrain is by far the most time consuming.

Historically we have avoided committing too much development time to terrain because in many ways it is secondary, and just wraps around more important features of the environment. Our priorities have always been to first block-in the navigable areas and interactable objects, followed by large set dressing, and only after that was complete would we start on terrain.

We’re now at a stage in the project where large parts of the game are ready for a detail pass, and so our intrepid 3D artist Jonas Becsan has been hard at work sculpting out the terrain on what is inarguably the most challenging location in the game – Jungle Island!

We’re eager to share more of our workflow with you, so stay tuned for a more technical breakdown of our process early next year. Stay tuned!

Note: Edited 2017-12-11 for clarity