Greetings, explorer!
When I started to work on The Fabled Woods I had a bunch of main intentions: I wanted to tell players a deep and interesting short story, that can be experienced in one evening. The best immersion can be created when you are not removed from the game, right?
And I wanted to create the best-looking forest that I could as a single indie developer. The Unreal Engine is a very powerful tool for this and helped immensely in the progress of Ray Tracing. Over time (with support from Nicolas, Pumpkin Jack developer) the forest became a truly fabled place.
At about a year into development, my path crossed with Nvidia. From that came the question, "Would you be interested in adding Ray Tracing to The Fabled Woods?". Of course, I wanted to work with Ray Tracing and Nvidia! What else could I have said? Hey, after all, the question came directly from Nvidia. And I can't tell you how happy I was about it!
Before Nvidia had reached out, Ray Tracing and foliage was not possible. Unfortunately, I quickly came across the bad news on the internet: If you have a game with a lot of foliage, don't even think about including ray tracing. Even Nvidia at the time said to turn off Ray Tracing for foliage as the solution. I just thought: Damn! After all, what does a forest consist of?!? But I didn't want to give up. So: Challenge accepted!
And as The Fabled Woods has evolved over the past year, I continued to work on implementing Ray Tracing features and have been heavily tweaking everything with Nvidia over the past few months. I am damn proud of the results as you can see in the video here:
Our goal was to launch the first game that can handle Ray Tracing foliage with over 1 million instances and good performance. All the trees cast Ray Traced shadows and there are Ray Traced reflections in all the water you can find in the woods. Here is the complete list of features that I’ve implemented into The Fabled Woods:
- Ray Traced Shadows
- Ray Traced Reflections
- RTXGI
- Hybrid Translucency
- DLSS
The Fabled Woods is also the second game worldwide on the market that uses RTX Global Illumination! In all the interiors you'll find in the game, Global Illumination comes into play and casts a nice, warm light with great shadows.
Many of you will now ask yourselves what this whole thing is about. Aren't these all just technical gimmicks without a deeper use? Not quite. This technology from Nvidia is allowing developers as small as one the ability to develop photo-realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections without a team behind them. This is a great step in the right direction for all indies wanting to create realistic worlds.
For me as a developer, the implementation was an exciting task, and to be quite honest: I LOVE how the game looks and feels with all settings on “epic” and Ray Tracing activated. I can reassure all of you out there who do not own a Ray Tracing capable graphics card: We have worked hard to make The Fabled Woods look as good as possible even without Ray Tracing enabled.
Well, what more to say? I am not a fan of advertising blah blah, but a huge "THANK YOU" to everyone over there at Nvidia. Without your help, The Fabled Woods wouldn’t look as beautiful as it does now. I’ve said this before: At the risk of repeating myself, I'm damn proud of what my little project finally turned into!
I love it! And I hope you will as well when it launches next Thursday, March 25th. I’ll see you all in the woods.
All the best and take care!
Joe
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