The team has finally returned to their homes around the world, and is looking back on an important week for the project. So what happened? Here are some highlights:

Cyan’s headquarters in Spokane, WA

The Presentation

This year’s convention was a special one: it was Mysterium’s 20th anniversary(!), and held in Spokane, WA — the home of Cyan Worlds. It was also the biggest Mysterium ever, with registration being capped early for the first time in the convention’s history. Attendees came from all over the world, and were an incredible audience for our traditional annual presentation.

Not only was this the biggest group in Mysterium’s history, it was also the biggest gathering of Starry Expanse team members in one place, ever! We knew we had to take advantage of having so many different perspectives, and decided to mix up the format a bit for our presentation, staging a panel-style discussion about our game development pipeline. We also showed off one of the areas we’ve been working on: the Mag-Lev dock that leads into the Survey Island elevator room.

Mag-Lev dock

Survey elevator room

In addition to rebuilding this area in Unreal Engine 4, the team talked about the additional considerations when developing for virtual reality. We even had the entire area available for Mysterium attendees to try as an in-person VR demo, which proved to be extremely popular throughout the convention. People of all ages and levels of VR experience come by to try the demo, which was a special experience for all of us. We even got to share it with some of this year’s special guests, including Chuck Carter (art director for Myst), Marty O’Donnell (sound designer for Riven, who also surprised us by bringing his archive of original audio files to share!), Philip Shane (director the upcoming Myst documentary film), and Russell Brower (composer for Firmament).

A Mysterium attendee tries out our VR demo for the first time

Chuck Carter explores the Mag-Lev dock

Marty O’Donnell shares his feedback with the team

The video of the complete presentation will be posted by the Mysterium committee in the next few weeks; we’ll link to it once it’s available!

A Special Announcement

As many of you know, we‘ve operated for a long time with Cyan’s blessing. This enabled us to work with our minds at ease, knowing that Riven’s creators trusted us to treat their masterpiece with the respect it deserves. But we’ve always operated independently, as a group of fans volunteering their time toward a passion project.

As we’ve continued to make progress on the game, however, questions about resources and distribution have grown (which many of you have asked us, too). This prompted us to reach out to Cyan directly to talk through different options for completing and publishing the game. They welcomed our questions, and after a series of conversations, we are incredibly excited to announce that we are officially working with Cyan Worlds to bring the dream of a real-time Riven into reality.

This is the culmination of a lot of hard work, both on the game itself, and on our team’s development pipeline and internal structure. We’ve always held Cyan in the highest regard (that’s our professional way of saying we’re their biggest fans), and it is literally a dream come true to be moving forward with the project in this way. After Mysterium concluded, we even had the opportunity to sit down for a meeting with the team at Cyan headquarters, which was both wonderful and a little surreal for all of us.

The Starry Expanse team with Rand Miller at Cyan HQ

There’s still plenty to figure out, and there will be more details to share in the future. Right now, we are just excited to be a part of the extended Cyan family, and thrilled to be able to share this major development with all of you. This is the beginning of a new chapter in the development of the Starry Expanse Project, and we can’t wait to write it together.