Demersus Devlog #1 - Engine Woes and SFX Inspo

Engine Issues

We just had the first, proper, meeting regarding Demersus. During the meeting, we played around a bit with trying to get ray tracing to work on the HDRP template in Unity 6.3 LTS, (as it’ll most likely be a big part of the game) - had an issue where my install would default to DirectX 11 because of my problematic Windows 10 install making it impossible to get ray tracing to work. That happened until I switched to 2022.3.22f1 LTS which worked with DirectX 12 without issue:

Then we also played around with Unreal Engine 5.7, which long story short, didn’t leave us impressed.

We took in to account things like our previous experience, the approachability, learning curve of the engines, their functionality and use in the market and finally settled on going with Unity as it quite simply just seems to suit our project / workflow a bit better.

Ideas

The core ideas floating around right now are:

• Start + 2 ending cutscenes (good / bad ending)
• First person view
• Semi-open level design (exploration) with semi-linear scripted events (encounters)
• Delayed death (no instant death - be able to take hits with special negative effects)
• Withdrawal symptoms mechanics (2 endings depending on how much you drink - this influences how easy / hard the gameplay is)
• Monster not really revealed (staying hidden)
• Single, very smart monster AI ( Alien Isolation like)
• Main environment set in a ruined apartment complex (see Silent Hill 2 Remake )
• Special, meaningful, family related memorabilia with inspection mechanic and voice acted flashbacks*
• Putting together a key / some sort of puzzle to escape the torment (family stuff found in environmental storytelling scenes)
• Silent Hill 4 like, locked door???
• Dead Space like hallucinations with QTEs
• You carry over the gun to the dream scape (mechanic with monster screaming ; hallucinations and QTEs (cognito-hazard of raising gun up to your temple + suicide)

Inspiration through SFX

My bud actually hit a stroke of luck near the end of the meeting as he found an incredible horror SFX / music resource that provides licensing! He found some incredible SFX that got the both of us very excited and gave us inspiration for different scenes, moments or encounters with the monster.

I also shot them a message to see about licensing the tracks in our slightly weird situation where we need them for a game that will be shown at a contents and then maybe published for free on itch.io and / or Steam (they only had options for YT / Twitch content creators and student / small film makers.

What’s Next?

For now I’ll do some more testing with Unity and finally get around to doing a full pipeline test. I’ll also try to come up with some more ideas and if things go really well, might start building a very rough prototype to test out some gameplay mechanics.