3:00 am Dead Time™ Windows game

0 comments by IrrSoft on May 21st, 2013

Hi there everyone. Today we have a new article, to share with you some news about the development of 3:00am Dead Time. Also, we will have our first video since the change of engine, and a new set of pictures. A lot of test are being done, to check UDK, its limits, and its performance. Lets start with the info :

There are a lot of differences between both engines, mainly regarding the lights and the workflow. In unity, the lighting available in the free version was simpler, and the rendering pipeline was easier to optimize. In UDK, due to the great ammount of rendering features, light effects and all the eye-candy at our disposal, we need a lot of setup in order to have a nice-looking scene, with stable and playable framerates. We need to combine a lot of lights, both static and dynamic to have a realistic look in our scenes.

This makes harder to properly lit a scene, but also offers tons of different possibilities. Another advantage of the UDK, but also a new step added in the development, is the setup of different materials. If you look closely to the previous screenshot, you can notice a little distortion in the glass material.

With the access to  complex and advanced effects, render to texture, depth buffers etc, we can achieve a lot of visual effects that were impossible to do before. These materials can also be used to produce better and more creative scares, using not only models, animations and sounds for the phenomena, but also screen effects, light and shadow setups, and almost whatever we can think of.

Once we finished the basic lighting of the scene, we placed some models inside the hospital micro-scene. This scene, even if it is called a micro-scene, has several rooms, including : Urgency Room, 2 Operating Rooms, 2 X Ray rooms,the Intensive Care Unit, Changing rooms, bathrooms, stores, etc.
Each room of the microscene is based in real-life hospital rooms, with all the elements you can find in a real hospital.

Hundreds of elements were modeled just for this microscene, including surgery instruments, wheelchairs, special lamps, x ray machines, the operating tables, hospital furniture, stretchers, crash carts, electronic devices, etc. Most of these elements have a physical simulation enabled, and many of them are also interactive.

This means that the player can pick, move, throw, or use many items inside the scenes, from opening a drawer, pushing a wheelchair or using a phone, to use a fire axe to defend himself.

The complexity of the demo was increased with the change from one engine to the other. Due to the lack of shadows and lighting effects in Unity Free, most of our scenes were played in the night, or in an almost complete darkness. Some of you complained about the darkness of the previous demo and the first Beta, but it was a necessary step at the time, to make less noticeable some of the graphical issues and the lack of some features.

 Now that we have complete control over our scenes, we can make them look the way they were planned. For example, of you look some of the old images of this demo (from Unity) you can notice that this scene was going to be played in the night, but with UDK, we are going to move it to the original design, this is, a hot, big and arid landscape nearby Phoenix, at the evening. The demo will develop through several hours in that day, so you can see some changes in the scenery.

The original micro-scenes were a lot smaller, and had far less elements. We are taking more time to release this demo, because we want to show you, this time at our full capacity, what you can expect from 3:00am Dead Time, without any kind of limits. We want to make this an indie game, with the look of a AAA game, and make it the biggest and most complete experience in the horror/survival/simulation genre.

Thanks for your patience and for following us all this time, you will not be disappointed with the results, and we can promise than the wait will be worth.

Thanks for reading, and remember to check the next article, which hopefully will include another video with the hospital microscene almost finished, and the first look of the next ones.

The Irreverent Software Team.