Dead Space

Dead Space is a survival horror set in space, it has quite a linear story but it doesn't ruin the gameplay. It has many new ideas that have not been used in video games such as the zero oxygen, whilst getting chased by a group of aliens and having only a minute to get to the next air lock, it can be really tense. Some of the weapons are quite innovative and I definately like the fact that there is no excess of ammunition, it's either make sure you are hitting your target or enjoy fist fighting alien Mike Tyson.

The game is quite dark and adds a lot of atmosphere especially that there are a lot of corridors and corners, every time there is a hole in the wall you expect a huge alien plant to grab you by the foot, but there are times when this doesn't happen, leaving you not expecting it.

Things I would take from this are the way that the whole ship seems empty and you really feel alone, except for of course the enemies, I also like the way that the game makes tense moments even more tense by taking away oxygen, this could be done with our game with doors that may be stuck and the player will have to bash buttons to get through.

The things I don't like is that even though there is limited ammunition, the enemies are still quite easy to kill, I think enemies in horror games should always be quite difficult to defeat, unless you are going for a more arcade feel, in which Left 4 Dead does this brilliantly.

Another Window

Cutting windows

Putting some of the windows in, not finished yet just cutting out holes for them to slot in.

Television

Made a good old looking 70's tv.

Well

A quick well model

First Enemy Development/Concept

After A brain storming session, Steve and I came up with a few concept ideas for enemy characters. We have decided that we will be minimalistic on the enemy front, rather than making hords of enemies chasing you down or a hack and slash fest. The enemies will be far and few between. This will add more suspence and help add to the desolate feel of the building giving it a more abandoned, spooky feel and make you feel more lost and alone. We also decided to base the enemies on real life human fears and started naming some of the more obvious fears such as Nyctophobia (Fear of the dark), Trypanophobia (Fear of syringes) and Acrophobia (Fear of falling). With this in mind I started on the first of these Fear Characters "Fearacters" The Dark Man. We decided to make him have a smoke effect emitting from him, engulphing him in a black mist if you will. We will also look into animating a smoke texture over his entire body with areas of intence heat moving around (like embers).
After a shed load of problems He is almost complete. We managed to acheive the effect we where after but we I rigged and animated the model. The particles no longer worked.

Back to the drawing board. We managed to find out that graphics card are incapable of coping with a particle emitter on an animated mesh. So we eventually found that we could add the particles to the bones of the rig. But in doing this the effect we where after was lost. The particles where too clumped togeater so we changed from smoke to a sort of ash look.

We are happy with the result but need to work on the javascript for the animation of the textures a little more so that is appeares more randomly and has more of a rotation and life span.

Lighting Problem

The lighting wasn't appearing realistically because of the way I designed the level. I designed it so that the planes where one sided, opposed to two sided, my method saves polys... but creates a couple of little problems.


The lighting was going through buildings and casting shadows in certain rooms, which while it is a nice little horror effect, it's far from realistic, and these effects could be caused easily anyways, it just made everything look wrong.
The way I tackled this was creating a huge box around the whole level where there would be walls and ceilings, this means that I can replicate all of the walls in the level with less than 50 polys, it would have taken about 4000 if I had done it all two sided.


The box around the level. (It is transparent to show where it covers, it is not transparent in the engine)