Friday 3 March 2023

Barrow Hill and The Dark Path - Location Tour

2016: Taking DJ Emma Harry on a location tour for Barrow Hill: The Dark Path, before recording game dialogues later that night. Golitha Falls is a special place, steeped in legend, where the last king of Cornwall, Doniert, drowned in 875. 

Venturing down Rocky Valley, in North Cornwall, to see the rock carvings. Much of the Barrow Hill games are based on real locations, with Cornwall providing magic and mysticism aplenty. The shrine at Trevillett Mill was spooky on a warm, misty, humid day.




Barrow Hill and The Dark Path, point and click puzzle games. Archaeology meets Adventure, in Cornwall. Globally published in a variety of boxed formats and languages.




Thursday 2 February 2023

Time Team Games


Join the archaeology adventure in a world of Time Team Games. Time travel from your own home as you discover and resurrect the past. Investigate alongside Time Team experts, uncovering archaeology msteries and piecing together clues. Time Team Games allows you to join a dig through an interactive and guided archaeology investigation experience. 


Delve deeper into history with the Discovery Mode, as Time Team experts are always on hand to answer questions, keeping you informed, investigating and learning more about what you have uncovered.

The more discoveries you make, the more questions need answers.  Who occupied a site, what events occurred there and what happened to the people of the past.

Tim Taylor from Time Team said - "Time Team is incredibly excited about partnering with Shadow Tor to create a game that brings the skills and strategies of archaeology to life, in an environment that has the excitement of a Time Team dig combined with the thrill of solving the games and puzzles of a computer game."

"For a long time we’ve looked to convert the excitement we all feel on a Time Team dig into a computer game that matters.  It’s not just about finding shiny stuff, it’s about understanding, learning, developing skills and attitudes that will enable the player to suddenly understand what really matters in archaeology through the Time Team format, which has been so successful worldwide."

Shadow Tor Studios is proud to have been awarded support from the UK GAMES FUND towards the development of Time Team Games.

Matt Clark of Shadow Tor Said - “Shadow Tor has the amazing opportunity to expand as we make Time Team Games, based on the popular archaeology TV series."

“Shadow Tor Studios are in a unique position, as a game studio, we are already working alongside Time Team archaeology investigations, being on site and part of the digs, capturing 3D finds and crafting historical recreations of the past for the TV show. Extending this work into creating Time Team Games will be an exciting step forward.”

Development

We are in the early stages of development. These images represent some of the initial design.

Our vision is to create an ongoing game series, using past and future Time Team digs as a foundation.

This first project sets up a game from which we plan to build a franchise – with further locations, VR editions and games exploring wider archaeology sites around the globe.




Sunday 4 September 2022

Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials

Digital work by Shadow Tor shown during this weekends events at the Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials, a huge event in Lincolnshire, attended by 170k people and shown on the BBC! Dynamic realtime map, 3D landscaping and digital capture of historic trees.





Showreel of recent gfx work, creating 3D content and maps for the Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials. A great landscape to recreate, a 'Capability Brown' no less, with many challeneges on a hot Summers day in the Lincolnshire countryside, but all came together beautifully.

 


A look around the gorgeous 'Lion Bridge' at Burghley; first person exploration, with dragonflies and swallows, with the house peeping up over the treetops.

 




Lion Bridge - Digitally remastered by Shadow Tor for a realtime flythrough. Bridge and landscape designed by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, 1778. The bridge is part of one of the most-loved views of Burghley House, a pleasure to capture and place in a digital landscape. 





Lots of huge, very old estate trees at Burghley, with individual characters. Many have stories attached to them as Burghley is a very old estate, dating back to the 1500's. Very special to capture the enourmous trunks for the live visuals, immortalising them forever.

 

Monday 23 May 2022

Beltane - A strange encounter in Duloe 'Stone Circle'

 

Beltane - A strange encounter in Duloe 'Stone Circle', a new adventure game from Shadow Tor Studios. Explore a real location in 4K 360 detail and solve a mystery.  www.shadowtor.com/beltane



POLICE and local people are baffled by phone cam footage that seems to show extraordinary phenomena over the 4000 year old stone circle, in Duloe, Cornwall. Experts are examining the footage, filmed by a local farmer, in the hope that sceptical eyes may reveal what the farmer describes as an "encounter". Is it a drone? Faked? Experimental military craft? Or a power generated by the stones themselves? Play to find out.

Strange and mysterious sightings have been reported at the ancient stone circle at Duloe, Cornwall, in the far South West of Great Britain. The area is steeped in folklore and legend, with human activity dating back millennia, the time of stone age tools and celestial worship. Many believe that stone circles are placed to align with planets, the moon and the movements of the sun. Others believe there is some otherworldly quality, an unknowable power from beneath the soil or perhaps, given recent evidence, from above? 



Creation: Beltane was produced by three people, over 50 hours, as part of an educational course in virtual tours and digital presentation, with all images, effects, sound and music created especially for the project.

The main shoot at the Duloe Stone Circle, was carried out on May 4th, not long after 'Beltane' a pagan festival that gives the game its name. Field recordings were made of local sounds and ambiance, while full 360 captures were made of the meadow and ancient monument. One stone, the tallest, was captured in full 3D using photogrammetry, a technique used in advanced digital archaeology. 

Matt Clark has long had an obsession with the stone circle, ever since visiting as a boy. Since then, Matt has made hundreds of trips to the stones, not too far from Shadow Tor Studios base, on the coast in Looe. "This short course was a great opportunity to produce a short adventure game, set somewhere I love, but go places we've not been before. The best way to capture the essence of the place is to feature the actual location, and augment the 360 views with birds, bugs, weather effects and there's even a friendly cat in this game. He's based on Rusty, the old ginger cat that used to follow me to the stones on visits, many moons ago".


Tuesday 22 March 2022

Boden Fogou - Digital Reconstruction

 

A reconstruction of the Fogou at Boden, Cornwall, in the early Iron Age. The high angle reveals the extent of the enclosure ditch with internal rampart mound, southern entryway and a 40 meter (gentle sloping southern approach) pathway. 


Inside the Fogou, the journey underground begins through the rock cut passage connected to the outer ditch, joining the stone cut steps which lead up to an antechamber (likely covered with a wooden roof, but dismantled in the Romano-British period) before passing through the corbeled passage. The passageway may have been lit with Tallow Candles.


Beyond the antechamber, the stone lined long ‘L Shaped’ fogou corridor, still very obvious to this day, would once have been capped with large stone lintels.

 
Eventually, the fogou tunnel reaches a hairpin bend, transitioning down steps from the stone walled passage through a bedrock cut tunnel, where it meets daylight again in the outer enclosure ditch. 
 
 
The bedrock cut passages connecting to the outer enclosure ditch may have been added to the fogou at a later construction phase.
 
 
Boden Fogou - Digital Reconstruction was created by Shadow Tor Studios for Time Team Boden Fogou and surrounding site continues to be investigated by Meneage Archaeology Group

Monday 21 March 2022

Time Team

It’s no secret Time Team - The hit British archaeology TV show is back with the first dig in a new series, investigating an Iron Age Fogou site, here in Cornwall. Shadow Tor Studios brings its range of services to the new returning archaeology TV show.

For Time Team, Shadow Tor has been creating Photogrammetry 3D models of archaeological finds and features, rendering digital model footage, 3D modeling and animating virtual reconstructions of archaeology artifacts. We are also capturing 360 degree photos, building interactive virtual tours and crafting full historic digital reconstructions of the featured sites. 

Capturing Photogrammetry

Finds Photogrammetry

360 degree photos, building interactive virtual tours.




Wednesday 27 January 2021

Looking back at ‘Reading the Hurlers’ on Bodmin Moor

Looking back at ‘Reading the Hurlers’ on Bodmin Moor; a chance to evaluate the relationship between the stone circles and outlying monoliths.

There are three confirmed circles at Minions, dating from Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, 4000+ years ago. Many features remain an enigmatic mystery, but the passage of the Sun & Moon were recognised by many stone alignments.

 













Barrow Hill and The Dark Path - Location Tour

2016: Taking DJ Emma Harry on a location tour for Barrow Hill: The Dark Path, before recording game dialogues later that night. Golitha Fall...