Dev Log #24: Project Lighthouse, Next Vaults

The last few months have been transformative for Poly Haven, and the future is looking bright!

In this long-overdue (as usual) Dev Log, we've got a lot to share:

• Project Lighthouse: Our atmospheric exploration puzzle game releasing next year.

• Two new members join the team full-time!

• The Vaults are out, and the Lunar Landscape collection is already unlocked.

• What's next, and some updates on current projects...

Project Lighthouse

If you're out of the loop, Poly Haven is venturing forth into game development as a side-hustle to making assets. The purpose is three-fold: Prove the value of our assets by using them the way they're intended; give us a focused purpose and theme around new assets we make (like our collections, but bigger); and explore alternative funding methods as a means to fund CC0 asset creation and protect ourselves from AI-based competitors long term. Read our previous posts to learn more.

We're not quite ready to announce much more about the game yet, but we can share a little teaser for now...

Explore an atmospheric lighthouse island, solve puzzles with otherworldly technology, and uncover why it’s not so easy for you to leave.

Concept lighting study.

The game will be small, aiming for around 2 hours of gameplay. Our focus is on making a visually impressive and memorable experience. We plan to complete and publish it on Steam next year. We also intend to integrate our next community project when working on the game's assets. Patreon supporters and contributors to the community project will receive the game for free.

The Bothas Board the Boat

Poly Haven grows by another two full-time members (there are 7 of us now!), as the twins Garreth and Hayden Botha join the team.

Hayden has worked with us before, on the Namaqualand UE5 port and the demo scene for the Wood Vault. His role is primarily as lead technical artist on Project Lighthouse.

Garreth's role lies more in the design and development side of Project Lighthouse, leading the gameplay and level design.

The Vaults

In the last proper Dev Log, we announced our intensions to remove ads and introduce the Vaults. Both of those already happened a few months ago, and now we can see the benefits:

This new graph on our public stats page shows the number of active Patreon supporters over all time, since we launched HDRI Haven back in 2017.

You can see that when we removed ads from the site earlier this year (6) - alongside some UI updates to better communicate our need for support - there was a noticeable jump in new patrons. That was surprising enough, but after we introduced the Vaults (7), growth really took off.

Thanks to your support, we've already released the Lunar Landscape vault, and are on the verge of unlocking the next one (Fabulous Fabrics) as well <3

What's Next?

Apart from the usual new content every week day or so, we're hard at work on a number of projects:

1. Aerial HDRIs are a big focus for Jenelle at the moment. Things are looking promising, though it's been an uphill battle fighting with DJI's SDK and integrating a custom application with the hardware safely. The goal is to eventually release an open-source app to allow anyone to shoot HDRIs from a DJI drone. We'll also hire a licensed pilot to shoot a few ourselves, and maybe make a vault of it.

2. Dario has started researching the feasibility of scanning marble and other natural stone slabs to produce a new Vault. It's early on this project still, but it looks like it's going to be solid.

3. Similarly, James is looking into producing a Vault of surface imperfections: scratches, finger prints, grunge, that sort of thing.

As you can tell, the Vaults are a big motivator for us! Having already released the Lunar Vault and with the Fabric Vault on the verge of release, we're keen to make a few more so that there's always a significant set of content available to Patreon supporters.

Other Projects

1. Our grass assets have been converted from particle systems to geometry nodes, and they've also been updated in our Blender Add-on to make it easier to scatter them on a surface by just dragging and dropping them.

2. Similarly, our trees have been updated to include static variants. Now if you just want "a tree", it's easy to add that to your scene. If you still want the configurable geometry nodes setup to customize the trees, they're also included and will show up next to the static variant in the asset browser.

3. USD and MTLX files are now available on polyhaven.com, and our Namaqualand scene was ported to the Unreal Engine a few months ago. We love Blender, but we do try to cater to everyone :)