Zarf Updates

As promised, the Cyan report for 2024, straight from Mysterium.

Cyan update

We started with the fireside chat: Rand Miller, Hannah Gamiel, and Eric A. Anderson giving us an update from Cyan HQ. (Hannah is the Development Director; Eric is the Creative Director. Rand is still Rand; more on that later.)

We had some audio issues on Friday morning, but the entire session is now posted on Youtube.

No big surprises or announcements this summer. Riven is out! Yay! The reviews and responses are extremely positive, both from fans and from the greater gaming audience.

The sales (so far) are not, well, not extremely positive. "We hope that sales cover things. Riven response has been phenomenal from a review point of view. [...] But that doesn't necessarily correspond to equal amounts of sales," said Rand.

This is of course tricky to communicate. In game dev, you never say "sales are bad" to a journalist -- everybody knows this. If you do, every journalist after that will start by asking you "Why are sales so bad?" and that's what all the headlines will be about. In particular, Cyan didn't directly compare Riven's sales to Firmament or Obduction or even Myst. They're really just telling us that they need to work on the PR. And it's early days anyhow.

They talked a bit about the process of redesigning Riven. As I noted, much of the game is the same but the changes go deep. Everything from the progression sequence to the core puzzle structure has been at least rethought, if not always changed. Rand noted that they started with lots of wild redesign ideas. In development, they winnowed them down to changes that directly supported the game experience, the puzzles, or the narrative. "If we couldn't answer 'why', if there wasn't a good reason, we didn't do it."

They also talked about the launch, which was apparently a nailbiter. As late as mid-June, they were still fighting bugs and glitches. (Rand mentioned Atrus's closing cutscenes as having a creepily lipless "Doug Henning" look.) It was only a few days before launch that QA started coming back and saying "This is good, we can ship this."

What's next?

• Firmament ports. PS4, PS5, PSVR2 should be this year. (High priority because they've been hanging so long.)
• Myst update. The Quest3 port will look a lot better, "close to minspec PC".
• Riven for more platforms. No announcements yet; watch the FAQ page.

But what's really next? Rand confirms that Cyan has started on a new game in "the D'niverse". They're not calling it "Myst 6", or "Myst anything" in fact. It's a new storyline and you won't have to be familiar with the Myst series to play it. They're about a year into development. No further news, details, or announcements; they expect to talk more about it next year.

It's worth going back to the Twitter thread that Hannah Gamiel posted last week. I quoted this in a comment on my Riven post, but I'll repeat it here:

In Friday's chat, she emphasized this -- Riven 2024 cost maybe $5 million to make. ("Less than 2% of a $250M game" is the quote.) This is less than half of Riven 1997's budget (inflation-adjusted). It's way less than modern triple-A games with a comparable visual quality. But, on the flip side, the game was a "monumental effort" for Cyan's small team and they really want to scale down their workload.

(Rand: "We've shipped four games in eight years." Hannah: "That's insane!" Rand: "We gotta slow down." Eric: "Time to slow down.")

If they do keep up the current pace, the next game could ship in 2026. But there's too many variables to call that a prediction.

And finally: Rand is retiring. Rand was deeply involved with the redesign phase of Riven, and then he playtested the heck out of it. With Riven out the door, "It's good timing for me to cut back tremendously." (Note that the "running the company" roles were handed over to Hannah and Eric some time ago.)

Rand will still be involved with Cyan; he's on the board of directors (or whatever equivalent Cyan has), and he'll still advise on game design and so forth. But, he said, "I will not be at the morning meetings."

(Rand: "I get to work on projects that don't actually have to earn money." Eric: "Wait, we've been doing that for years!")

Fan updates

Since 2020, Myst Online has had a steady cycle of fan-created updates. That includes fan-created narrative and storylines, although these have been hard to follow; you need to log in regularly and meticulously search for journals. (I admit that I have not been doing this.) The fan writing team is now trying a long-term story arc they call "Diplomacy", involving first contact with an unexpectedly inhabited Age.

The Age-builders teased some upcoming releases:

• Tweek: A library Age commemorating the Restoration; a garden homage to Myst; more of Fahets; a new larger Neighborhood.
• Yali: A private residential City region. Also UI updates for the client.
• Harley: More of Naybree; an Age called Rei'schu, which is intended to be something of a fan-built Relto. ("Collectibles and Journey elements.")
• Semjay: Working on completing Venalem, one of Cyan's cancelled plans for Uru. Also the Explorer's Emporium, a Cavern gift shop (with narrative elements).
• Doobes and AgeExplorer are still working on the Descent. (They apologize for the slow progress.) You can now take the elevator down the Shaft and mostly solve the puzzles there (originally seen in Myst 5). You can also walk down the spiral staircase that runs the entire length of the Shaft. This takes about two hours, real time. (The staircase is blocked in both Myst 5 and current Uru.) All of this needs polish, however.
• Doobes is also in the early stages of a major Chiso expansion.
• DPogue has continued to improve the Korman Blender plugin (for Age dev work), as well as the open-source H'Uru client. The client is not yet ready for testing against the production servers, however.

Other updates

The Myst documentary is still bogged down. Philip Shane is having trouble funding the full production. He's brought on David Van Taylor to help with pitching, and is also getting production help from Julie McElmurry. He ran through the updated fundraising pitch deck. (Nobody in the room had a million dollars to spare, but he'll keep looking.)

Regardless, Shane is still filming. He showed some footage fresh from the Riven launch event at Cyan HQ. Also, we can now call the movie something besides "that Myst documentary". The working title is "A World I'd Want To Live In: Myst and the Video-Game Revolution".

Jeff Barbi did a presentation on hacking the original HyperCard-based Myst, getting into the HyperTalk source code. (Thanks to Uli Kusterer's HyperCard work -- see thread from last year.) I missed some of this due to audio streaming problems, but a couple of highlights:

• The original fireplace puzzle accepted two codes, from codebook page 148 and page 158. The 148 solution was not clued anywhere as far as we know. (I wonder if Sirrus and Achenar gave different page numbers in some early draft of the script.)
• The HyperCard stack was password-locked against editing. This was a HyperCard feature, easily bypassed with modern tools. Jeff was able to hash-search and recover the original password: oblio. Possibly the Miller brothers were Harry Nilsson fans?

Deater is back with more demakes: the intro to Riven on an Apple 2 (video). Most of this is cutscene animation in Apple 2 hi-res and lo-res, but it leads into the very small amount of Riven that Deater has implemented on Apple 2 floppies.

The conference also featured a bunch of retrospective panels on Myst 4, which is now celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Those aren't news (although there were some nice development tidbits) so I won't cover them here. Keep an eye on Mysterium's Youtube channel for the archived recordings.

And that's the report for this year. Next year in Atlanta! See you (virtually) there.