It’s been a while since we last posted an in-depth devlog about the development of our upcoming survival horror bodycam shooter - Chasmal Fear. And to be honest, it’s not that our indie game has stopped or anything, but more like, we were way too focused on the devving part.
During these past two months, we (my brother and I) managed to do a complete lighting overhaul of the game, optimize a few things, program and polish new gameplay mechanics, and improve AI behaviors. Moreover, a couple more enemies have been added to provide diverse gameplay.
The Lighting Overhaul
Giving it a lot of thought, we decided to remove Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen from the equation and go with optimized, baked lighting for the game to be playable on more computers than high-end machines. Lumen is great, don’t get me wrong. It’s amazing. However, it is also a bit more performance-expensive than we thought. That’s why we decided to carefully re-do the lighting, the post-processing, and analyzing every tiny bit in the profilers, we managed to hit 120 fps on cinematic quality with baked lighting and a couple of other optimization techniques.
New Mechanics
Besides the usual features we mentioned before such as limited resources, mutating monsters into new foes with varying strengths, weaknesses, and behaviors, and choices that affect playthrough, we thought of diving into the tiny details and adding some interesting gameplay mechanics to enrich the overall experience. Some of them include:
- New monster execution animations
- Puzzles (which won’t be hard and hinder gameplay, but are a good addition)
- Breakable floors (some areas will have breakable floors that have a small chance of breaking and sending you down into new, never-before-seen levels
- Health Station - added health stations similar to Half-Life 1 and 2 where players will be able to heal. We thought this way it’d be more interesting than the more generic way of finding a first aid kit or some healing item.
- Crawling AIs - at least that’s what we call them. We added “holes” and vent openings around every level that work with a chance. Be careful! By chance, a random monster might come rushing at you from them. They’re not really “crawling” per se, as they might drop from a ceiling or come through a higher hole with a different animation, but you know what I mean.
- Random Spawn Doors - we’ve added automatic doors which are almost indistinguishable from regular walls and these doors have a chance to spawn an AI behind them and open when you least expect it.
- Small visual addition - added different types of physics hair to enemies using code so that the computer will randomly choose what haircut to place on a mutant’s head.
- Weapons Addition & Improvement - we polished the current weapons in the game (pistol, rifle, knife) and also added a new weapon - Shotgun.
- 17 new levels finished since the first trailer (not all of them are accessed in a single playthrough)
- Added New Sequences - we’ve added a few animated sequences (like cinematics, but think like Half-Life where the player’s keyboard and mouse are not disabled and he may walk around).
- Continued working on the lore & story
New Trailer
If you read our last Devlog at IndieDB.com, we mentioned that due to some unlucky circumstances (lightning frying our PC), the old trailer we did was rendered on medium quality and although it was good, it did not reach our expectations. Luckily now, we finally managed to get a new, far better PC and this next trailer was rendered on maximum quality.
1000+ Wishlists in Just 3 Days
I always say horror gamers and the gaming community are those who motivate us to keep on pushing and working hard on our indie games. It was like that with our two previous games too, and it’s far better with Chasmal Fear now.
Although we rarely check the Wishlist count now (the game is still very early in development), I thought about checking it two weeks ago just in case. What we found is that Chasmal Fear amassed over 1000+ Wishlists in just 3 days. And it has been growing steadily ever since. Thank you, everyone, for your amazing support and we can’t wait to watch you play it.
Demo Soon
We’re working day and night (full-time devs) to bring you the demo for Chasmal Fear as soon as possible. So far, the development has been going great and we’re nearing the polish phase for our demo. Make sure to Wishlist Chasmal Fear on Steam to be informed when the demo releases.