Games Dust Chamber - story driven antisurvival

Hello!

We (the artist and me) are making a first person adventure game with antisurvival elements.

The game takes place in the closed, abandoned world at the intersection of dark fantasy, ancient mythology and science fiction.

We play as an immortal character, consumed by the defiling, seeking eternal oblivion.

He no longer needs food or water, he can't sleep anymore.

One day he meets a lonely child, who believes that somewhere deep in the Abyss, under abandoned settlements and ancient gravesites, there's a way out of their closed world.


We'd be grateful for any feedback

You can follow us on Twitter :
https://twitter.com/DustChamberGame

 

Started working on new locations :

 

Narrow streets of Infinite Structure

 

Environment in 4k :

 

Old marketplace. Once upon a time bitter copper, fuel cells and refined dust were sold here...

 

Feedback: Looks Awesome !

How have you managed to achieve such a marvelous lighting ?
Is this baked in unity3d ?

 

Thanks a lot!
No, the lighting is not baked.The artist would go into more detail on monday.

 

Main thing that make it looks nice I think is volumes to add depth, soft spot lights to highlight main area of interest. And also rule of cold light and warm light. If you have overall cold light you want to use more warm light for the spot lights. If you have any questions feel free to ask. I'm not very good teacher but i will try to do my best

 

Can I assume you are The Artist ?

 

Yes. And thank you for the kind feedback )

 

Is scene in this trailer playable ? What I mean by this is that one can put a lot of shadow casting lights to have a nice effect but performance is very low .

Is your ambient light completely dark ?

How are you doing shift/passage from lit places to dark places ?

Do you use main directional light for this scenes ?

Also do you use secondary volume profiles or just one global profile.

 

Yep, quite playable.The average frame rate on these scenes is 40-50 fps. It is not great, but we haven't done any optimization yet.




This is just one question, the artist should answer others tomorrow

 

Started working on the new location - The Sewers.

 

Scene is playable now but later if the frame rate goes very low we will bake some lights that eat to much performance.
Yes ambient light is disabled. I use low brightness point light with no shadows and big source size in some places that are too dark.
Right now we don't have very light places, so there is no need for the dynamic eye adaptation. Exposure is fixed for now.
There is main directional light but its cast no shadows and no light, it only affects volume to create overall fog in the scene. I didn't find any other way to create that kind of volumetric fog.
In some places there is density volume to create the ground fog for example.

 

Refiner. Extracts metals, organic matter and acids from raw dust.

 

You can find a lot of things inside walls : secret stashes, hidden mechanisms, walled up bodies (sometimes not quite dead).

 

Looks amazing, would love to know more about gameplay.

 

Thank you!

Regarding gameplay, in a few words :

- collecting raw dust with void machines, refining it, extracting metals organics and acids

***Dust in our world is a mysterious type of matter that contains all the necessary chemical elements***

- printing parts and components to repair and improve machines, increasing production


- exploring, finding secret tunnels and shortcuts, opening the way to Void (where Abyss starts)

- creating or finding artifacts to get acess to previously closed locations (elements of metroidvania)

- navigation with a radio and white noise

- detection of contaminated airborne particles to avoid dangeruos zones

- X-ray wall scanning to find secret stashes and buttons

- repairing anceint mechanisms using flaw detector

- solving spatial puzzles (like giant labyrinth of moving tonnels - nod to Clockwork Mansion)

- searching for schemes, programs and recipes, crafting food for a child and embalming agents for yourself

- restoration of old cargo system that connects distant parts of Structure to help the child survive

- searching for junk for incineration in the kiln to get some heat, creating heat injections for using outside of hub

- energy management, creating fuel cells

And in the last part of game :

- descent into Abyss, following the child (like Orpheus and Eurydice)

These are just some gameplay aspects, without narrative stuff.

And NO MONSTERS. Or enemies. No hiding from chthonic creature. Environment is an enemy.
Perhaps, some subtle horror vibe, but not allien-like, rather Lynchian.

 

Sounds great, if you have no enemies you'll need a solid story and atmosphere.

 

Yep, we are working on it

 

We got rid of almost all the on-screen interface, so this is how the game inventory looks now :

 

The colour and lighting in this is just beautiful.

Really interested to see the inventory UI in action.

Awesome work!

 

Thank you!
We will make a video with the inventory system soon, probably this Saturday.

 

Inventory in action.

 

That is the Half Life Alyx tool

 

I haven't played HL Alyx, what tool do you mean exactly?

 

Starting at 12th second of Inventory video, how did you create close up UI for reading in HDRP?

 

If you mean this :



it's a render texture from the camera, looking at the world canvas with background image and text. Plus transparent glass material over that texture to create an old monitor look.

 

Do you use second camera for the render texture or do you use render texture alone with one main camera in HDRP ?

 

Yep, there's a second camera under the scene capturing UI. Its output is a render texture on the display.

 

The thing where you detect the lines in the wall (Wires?) Half Life Alyx does exactly this for some puzzle elements using a similar tool - worth watching a video on youtube. really good game

 

A bit of craft.

A bit of things behind the light.

 

Void machines collecting dust.

 

Void machine docking

 

Started working on the Harvester - kind of a mix of a crossbow and a vacuum cleaner. For now, we are testing it on urns and flying orbs, but later it will be possible to use it to hunt all sorts of strange creatures for dust.

I apologize for the video quality, we'll make a 4k version later after we've finished the device.

 

Looks great and sounds fantastic.

 

Thanks a lot!

 

We continue working on the hunting mechanics.

 

Tried out a custom pass for the first time :

 

Collecting mold with a weird vacuum cleaner

 

Who needs boring notes and diaries? Everything is written on the walls!

* appropriate tools are required to uncover ancient inscriptions and secret passages

 

First experience with facial animations.

 

Main characters

 

MFG i'm so happy seeing this, most of the time on this forum most of the users lower my hopes with unity, but then i see your work and is so inspiring and kick ass, this increases my motivation with unity and it makes me remember some words that i always say: "is not the tool, is the users and their imagination/hard work"
This post make my day for sure, i'm definitely following this, you guys rock, now:
Do yourself a favor and work in performance right now, if you leave that work for later it will became a mess i'm telling you and i'm working on a simple low poly game -.-"
Also i'm sharing this on facebook, more people needs to see this

 

Thank you for the kind words, we'll try to keep it up!

Regarding technical debt - oh yeah, I feel the time is coming
Geometry optimization, baking stuff - we do have a bad habit of shelving these things.
We'll take on this problem soon.

 

haha Lol, that is a very important task, because as a gamer if a game looks good but the performance is weak, then for me, the game is useless. Now i have to ask (because i'm so skeptical too) are you guys buying some assets or something like that? (i'm not against the asset store at all)

 

Yeah, I agree, poor performance can easily kill your game.

We'd even like to, but there are almost no assets that suit our art style and world. Plus it's HDRP. So nope, we do all by ourselves.

 

impresive, i'll keep an eye on this

 

The look and feel is just incredible! Every single screenshot is so deeply captivating!

 

Thanks a lot!