Revealing The Mysterious World of The Alters

Editorial Feature

June 10, 2024 - Los Angeles/Budapest

As announced by IGN, the playable demo for the highly anticipated survival game The Alters is now live! The game is from 11 Bit Studios, the developers who brought us acclaimed titles like The War of Mine and Frostpunk. In The Alters, gamers can assume control of Jan Dolski, a space miner who creates alternate clone versions of himself in order to survive on an inhospitable planet. As a full-service animation and VFX studio, Ionart Studios partnered with 11 Bit Studios to create the Announcement Trailer and character spotlight promoting the upcoming game.

For the initial trailer, Ionart created full CG scenes based on key art provided by the development team. In collaboration with 11 Bit Studios, our team did storyboards and additional concepts to lock the look of the environments, like the outdoor planet surface with the massive wheel-shaped base - unveiling the intricacies of the game’s enigmatic alien world that the main character has found himself in.

Under the leadership of our in-house VFX Supervisor Balázs Drenkovics and CG Supervisor/Technical Head of Characters Szabolcs Sinka, we created fully detailed CG environments and a cinematic, high-fidelity version of the character that was rigged using Epic’s MetaHuman Facial Rig and animation system. Then, utilizing our Signature Motion Capture Services in collaboration with our partners at Kraft Studios, Animation Supervisor/Director Csaba Bardos directed actor performance to bring more natural animation to our main character. As a part of our optimized production pipeline, after the creation and animation of our key assets in Maya, followed by further scene assembly, shading, lighting, and look development in Houdini. The scenes were rendered using Maxon’s Redshift GPU renderer.

Motion captured with OptiTrack - Motion Capture Systems.

From script to final frame, Ionart Studios is proud to have been able to bring this cinematic trailer to life. “We have a great relationship with the team at 11 Bit Studios and really appreciated the level of creative freedom we were given to deliver the final product,” VFX Supervisor Balázs Drenkovics enthuses. We would like to thank our client-side collaborators, including Producer Krzysztof Maliszewski and Senior Project Manager Jacek Kłopotowski for trusting us with this project as well as our fantastic in-house team of artists and Producer Charlie Seiner for their contributions to this exciting project.

The Alters demo is now available to play on Steam through June 17. The full game is scheduled for release on PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S later in 2024.

Lastly, catch our team represented by BizDev Executive & Consulting VFX Supervisor Mark Nazal next at the world-famous San Diego Comic-Con in late July for a special panel on Creating Compelling Characters and Artificial Intelligence! Stay tuned for more details as we get closer to the event date.

Searching for your next Gaming Cinematics production partner? Contact us at bizdev@ionartstudios.com.