Hey everyone!
First off we want to apologize for the delay getting this over here! As some of you are aware, we are all working on Schwarzwald as a second job and things have been hectic between end of last year and now unfortunately!
That said, we're still working on getting info over to you guys and in that spirit here is the next devlog we are transferring over from our Youtube channel!
Immersion
We had to think a lot about how we want the environment in Schwarzwald to feel, primarily with how you interact with the environment to make it more immersive while still falling under our capabilities.
The best way to make the world feel immersive was to let the player interact with anything they would normally be able to interact with. So door, drawers, lamps, etc needed to all have working functionality -- but not only that, they also needed to be tied into the game itself! This means that anything could AND should be used in scares and aid in making you feel like you are being messed with by the demon.
Spooks
Introducing a general spook system was our main way of breathing life into the Schwarzwald world. It allows for there to be potential interactions all around the level and activate to create creepy moments or scares without us needing to command it each time.
These spooks range from small interactions with common objects on the level to full on creepy occurrences and appearances, all of which have a lot of varying conditions to occur. Everything can happen at slightly different times and attribute towards the player being caught off guard and feeling like the world is more alive around them.
This also leans into the idea we brought up last time, about going for a different type of replayability! Instead of Schwarzwald being made to be played over and over with lower quality and higher quantity, your playthrough will feel different from your friends and the streamers you watch with these slight variances so you can still appreciate it and we can still provide higher quality horror moments!
Cel-shader
Being a small team means that creating a realistic look was difficult. With realistic appearances, you need to work out level of detail, super tuned lighting and also just performance (which Schwarzwald already struggles with due to the amount of content per space). But that said, in order really make you feel like you are in the game, we needed a more realistic feeling world.
By adding a cel-shader, we managed to bridge the gap! This shader allowed for visuals to still retain a more realistic appearance up close but softened details to achieve this with less-detailed models and lighting techniques that didn't require as much time to do. We also love how the cel-shader works with our LUT to provide a very painted realism look, and on a gameplay level, feel a false sense of comfort while the demon sets up traps around you.
Doors
Yes, DOORS! You may be asking why doors are anything special, but we are here to tell you just how troublesome doors are in games.
Doors don't sound complicated right? You open and close them so what else is there? Well, that's where things get tricky in games. Because you need to be very explicit in how you want the door to behave. Some things you need to manually program in are, how the door should collide with you if you are too close, where should the door stop when you open or close it, when should it be locked and how can it be unlocked, and much much more.
Even just on the type of doors, there are several options. Some such as:
- Click to automatically open/close - Pretty simple because its automatic but not very immersive.
- Collide to open - Somewhat simple but very prone to breaking depending on collision logic, plus can just look silly if you are running into doors constantly.
- Animate to open - One of the most complex depending on how detailed you want it. Requires custom animations for each type of door and tech in order to ensure the door/player pair line up for it.
- Click and Drag - Complex on a technical level but does not require complex animations. You need to think about a lot parameters for controlling the door since the player can move it however they want.
Our choice was Click to Drag doors! But why does this matter to the player and to Schwarzwald?
This allowed us to make the experience interaction with the world more immersive, make the player feel more in control (so the demon can take it away later hehe) and so that we didn't need to dish out more funding towards custom animations for it.
Not only were we able to do that but we also have completely procedural audio for all doors, drawers and door like objects! This allows the audio to also be immersive and pull you into the game as you play... all the better to scare you with!
You can see the work we did around this tech on our Youtube page with a technical breakdown:
That is everything for this one! Our biggest focus right now is to get heads down into development so we can get the demo to you all! But as mentioned, we'll try to keep more in touch here!
Don't hesitate to join our discord for more frequent info and twitch stream notifications: https://discord.gg/v5sXwn3ZvC