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Quick opinionated rant for no reason in particular:

I was taking a (now exceedingly rare) gaming break to reacquaint myself with the backlog on my retail PS4, and found yet another crop of newly-released themes on PSN. the kind that use some kind of short cropped video assets, with extremely obvious fade-ins to try and mask the loop points. found a couple of others which re-used some royalty-free space and starfield / cosmos imagery AND royalty free music, which is essentially a wallpaper with some dissociated looped audio.

I also stumbled across a couple of 3-D themes that are clearly modeled after our own "Azure Earth" series (even in name), but free of anything but the most basic models and lighting elements. I presume this is due to the fact that the theme software does not make doing more than rudimentary texturing, point and edge shading easy to do. Theme software does not allow for volumetric lighting, depth-of-field, particle effects, or many of the other post-processing effects that have become commonplace in our games.

We will never have the output of companies or individuals who cut corners and flood the store, week after week, with re-purposed public assets haphazardly thrown together in the hopes of roping in hapless buyers expecting more for their hard earned money. And that's fine.

My goal here is to create something that truly feels premium and lends itself fully to the term 'dynamic' in the theme description. NONE of our themes will EVER use pre-recorded video flips. None of our themes will ever utilize royalty-free or publicly available audio. It is possible to create high-quality real-time themes that showcase the capabilities of the PS4 console, and provide something to look at when you're not playing something. Themes are a bit of a niche product as they generally do not get the kind of coverage games do, but I really wish they did. We have now been at this for a little more than a year, and I promise that we have much more in mind for the year to come.

To that end, we are proud to demonstrate early footage of one of our latest works, created base upon a kind user request sent to our twitter:

"Fractured world" (name not final) captures a planet's final moments after a cosmic catastrophe - a shattered world floating in the void, as dust, debris, and ejecta from its molten core are scattered into the void.

This theme features our own custom script-based implementation of adjustment-layer lighting effects, dust and smoke effects, and even particle effects. All of this occurs in completely 3-D space, with a scene that gradually pans around the through the debris-field. The entire sequence is more than 10 minutes long. I've tried to ensure that, no matter what point in the sequence the user interacts with the theme, the imagery is both dramatic and pleasing. Because it is comprised of entirely real-time elements, it will be able to take advantage of 4K displays.

This is by far the most object-rich scene we've made so far, and it was created in the span of 24 hours, between project commissions.

As always, we appreciate the kind words of encouragement, inquiries, and even the occasional suggestion, either here or on our twitter.

Okay, rant over!