[WIP] 3:00am Dead Time, a different kind of single and cooperative horror game.

Hi everyone!
We want to share with you the work we are doing in our game 3:00am Dead Time, currently on Steam Greenlight and IndieGOGO.

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3:00am Dead Time is a single and multiplayer horror game with a very unique premise, where you play as an amateur paranormal investigator who won the casting of a one of a kind TV show, along other 5 people. You can play alone or up to 3 friends, and travel to different locations around the world trying to find the next big mystery and record the evidences of your paranormal encounters. But along the way, there may be many deadly creatures that will risk the whole mission and the lives of the team.

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For this game, we have both researched and included not only mainstream, common monsters and phenomena such as ghosts and poltergeists, but also went very deep into occultism and mythologic research to feature more hidden and obscure paranormal phenomena taken from the cultures of many countries around the world. Many of them have never been featured in games (and some of them haven't been featured in any Western media like movies or TV).

The game is meant to remind of old school horror games with a more modern approach, featuring rich storytelling and heavy atmospheres instead of endless jumpscares, as well as a very open flow with multiple paths and endings for every level. In our wish to make it remind of old school titles, we included a movie-style (or Resident Evil style) camera besides the Third Person and First Person views.

Being based around a TV show, the game is split in different Episodes. Each Episode starts with a small playable Prologue, then the proper Investigation where you and your team will interview witnesses and victims, explore the area, collect samples, use the latest research and tracking equipment (including motion trackers, heat sensors, EMF detectors, EMP emitters, cameras, recorders, drones, etc) , consult experts in different fields (such as mediums, ufologists, exorcists, etc) and face the phenomena, trying to uncover the story of each place, record evidences for the world to see or even vanquishing the entities from the place. Scattered during the Investigation, there are also several Flashback levels that help fleshing out the story.

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Each episode is its own, unique story, with completely unique characters, locations and phenomena. The game is big and varied, including a wide array of stories and people to experience the world through. Fighters chasing UFOS in secret missions, a strange case of missing lumberjacks after a mysterious myst appears, an abandoned shelter where the screams and noises terrify the whole neighborhood....the world of 3:00am Dead Time is full of mysteries, and it is you and your friends job to go and find them.

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We are Irreverent Software, the developers of the game. A small team of only 4 members, 1 helping with the storyline and creative elements, the other 3 working directly into all the technical-artistic parts of the project.

Despite being made while we all have full time and part time jobs, the development is going at a very fast pace with updates and new content being added almost every day. From our earliest, private prototypes and the moment we started learning how to use Unity (then Unity 3.2), we have been working on this game for a little over 3 years. Since January, formal development began and we have now most of the core features of the game ready, and are focusing now on level design and asset creation.

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Almost every single asset in the game has been developed by ourselves, except the music and sound, and it has been a work of most of our savings, thousands of hours, and many, many sleepless nights, but we are very happy with the results we are getting and the support we've received so far from the different communities.

We wanted to share this game with you to get your feedback and your opinions about it, as well as to let more people know about this project. We will be answering all your questions and replying to all of you, as well as posting updates regularly to this post for those who want to follow the development of the game

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!
The Irreverent Software Team

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All the pics and videos in this post, except the gray alien (Sculptris) and the concept art drawing have been taken or recorded in-game.

 

Very cool rat hair shader - or however you created it. Nice.

 

Thanks, it is a custom 8 samples fur shader with some basic PBR support

I had to make our own shader to have better control in the quality and performance (as we use it for the bat too, and we will need to render several dozens at a time for a scene later on in the game).
Thanks for your comment!

 

A little update in the development of the game (for the moment, this work is a WIP).

The game will have many pieces of fully interactive furniture, that we are modelling and animating individually in Blender :






Each model has its own individual lighting, occlusion and shadowing bakes made on Blender's raytracing to improve a little the performance and the quality in lower end PC's. For this, we are using a custom shader that manages in a optimized way these extra texture maps, besides using atlased texturing in the props.

We also keep on polishing little by little the outdoors scene and rendering. Soon, in a few days, we will start our multiplayer tests on this map, as soon as the basic setup of the scene is ready

 

Here is another update from the development of the game, as we are making new human characters for 3:00am Dead Time. Every character is sculpted and painted inside of Sculptris, then we make full retopology of the different pieces, rigging, fine detail texturing and animating inside of Blender3D. Once this process is over, we move forward and start setting up the materials with our custom shaders inside of Unity, and add them to the core scripts so they are usable in the game.

Making a human character, from the draft to the point where it is ready to be animated and usable in Unity, takes around 20-25 working hours (in some characters with complex hairstyles or clothes, this can go up to 40 or 50 hours).





















Here is a small timelapse of part of the sculpting process of one of the characters :















Due to the performance and polygon limits in Sculptris, making a character is a particularly long work, having to make the faces, hands, feet, upper body clothes, lower body clothes, shoes and accesories all in separate sculpted files, to preserve a high quality, and then they are reduced in polygons, joint inside Blender 3D and baked together. This process alone takes most of the development time for a character (which is one of the reasons the funds in our IndieGoGo campaign are asked for ZBrush and Substance Painter licenses, to improve greatly the speed of development by getting rid of these limits).

The characters are still works in progress at this point in the 3D part, but they are being written and well defined in our script for the upcoming releases (for which we have plans of seeking some voice acting help soon)

This is a small update for today, as we are now improving and cleaning up our scripts from the Pre-Alpha demo to fix bugs and improve their performance, towards the upcoming release of the Prologue and the Early Access builds.

Thanks for reading!

 

Just a few little pics, as part of the updates. We are working on the retopo of a character we sculpted in the past days, as well as in the basic layout of this Episode's map.

 

Loving the rat shader any chance of sharing the files?

 

Thanks! It is a custom fur shader made for our game. And yes, we will probably put it up for sale on the Asset Store soon

Thanks for commenting!

 

Ah ha brillant good to know.

Can you just explain what you mean by baking in blender. I tried but found it way too slow and tedious, as much as enlighten has its shortcomings, for a lightmapper it is far superior than blender internal or cycles for baking. Unless I'm mis understanding you.

Second why is sculptris better for performance than blender sculpting? I've read the performance and tools are pretty much on par now, especially if you have plenty of RAM.

Third, are you not using any blender plugins for retopo, for example when I sculpt I use the 'polystrips' retopoflow addon.

https://blenderartists.org/forum/sh...o-setup-test&p=2889556&viewfull=1#post2889556

OK it's not zbrush remesher but it is something.

Fourth, I'm not so sure on your typography, I don't think it goes well with the game.

Thanks so much for answering these questions.

 

Hi there! let me try to answer all of your questions

We use blender for several kinds of baking (AO baking, normal, displacement, height and color baking, etc, etc) from one or more high poly meshes into our low poly ones.We use a simple lightmap from blender to Unity for a higher level of detail (as this allows us direct access to the per object maps, and works better with our custom shaders which we use in a lot of the assets), and we found all these baked maps, together with Unity's realtime GI improve a lot the look of the scenes, even if these screenshots are from our pre-alpha demo and WIP levels.

The game mechanics and style make it impossible to use static lightmaps, as every light in a building can be turned on/off and the game has a day/night cycle. Realtime GI and simple lightmaps from Blender were the best call for us

The sculptris choice is in good part for ease of use at this point and part because our PC for sculpting is a laptop, so performance is a little better for Sculptris. The performance limits in both apps and with our PC makes it impossible for us to sculpt characters in one go, so we have to sculpt them in several pieces (often times, up to 8 different files for a total of 4-5 million triangles) that then are optimized one by one and joint in blender.

The retopo we do it manually without any plugins, yes. We used a few before, but found out that we had far better control without the plugins (though we may give a try to the one you recommended, thanks ) especially in the face, which allows us better control for the animation and shapekeys setup.

And about the typography...are you talking about the logo? Well, if it is about the logo, it was made in that style mainly for icons and displays as it is (in our opinion) quite recognizable. If it is the in-game font, we opted for a simpler font on purpose, as our game tries to be a callback to old-school games

Hope this solves the questions, if you have any more feel free to post them here and we'll do our best to reply ! Have a nice day

 

Minor critique - the thumb is too short in relation to the size of the hand and other fingers. I couldn't tell if this was fixed in the final model.

Sculptris is extremely light weight - performance wise I see no slow down while manipulating 10-20+ million poly models. It's very nice, although I agree - having a beefy graphics card and as much ram as possible helps.

You may want to consider Mudbox instead of zbrush. Mudbox performs as well as Sculptris does, is light weight, can output pbr textures (as long as the low res mesh is UVd before sculpting) - doesn't have a convoluted UI workflow, is very easy to pick up / use and is cheaper @ $10/month.

 

Hi there! Yep, it was fixed in the final model and in all the following sculptures (this was the very first we made )

About Sculptris, yes, we can push it to 1 million tris without much trouble, but for painting and exporting to blender and seeing that we often have background process in our laptop, we decided to better split the work in several steps and files for both performance and stability. Upgrading the 2 main development PCs is our main priority for funding right now, with the software licenses being the close second.

And thank you for suggesting us Mudbox, we saw it briefly before but we will check it more in depth to see all its features, as 10 USD a month is a much more accesible price indeed (even if we have always preferred to own the software license over the subscription models). Thank you very much for recommending us this tool

And thanks for commenting!

 

A new update to the new character, now with improved skin rendering. Today we will start working on the eyes, hair and other details.








And also a small timelapse video of how we sculpt some clothes for a female character.

 

Another small-ish update, as we have just added hair to the character and are currently improving it. The hair uses a custom shader based on the Kajiya-Kay model for anisotropic specularity, and some basic vertex displacement techniques to add more volume to it. We are researching options to add vertex-based movement to it, but right now this is the first test :



And at the same time we keep progressing with this character, we are also making some concept art for the next few levels of the game :



Here, we keep working fast on the game, to rig that character and start with all the animation process
Have an excellent day!

 

And another small update. Right now we are improving the control of the character and its rendering, but it is now finished and with proper clothing :







As well as preparing new concept art for Episode 2 :



Have an excellent day!

 

A small update, but a very important one for us :
3:00am Dead Time has just been approved on Steam Greenlight!



We are incredibly happy with this, and with all the support the game has received, and cant wait to keep sharing with you all the results and progress in the development of our game. Thanks for all the support, and have a great day!

 

A small update. Right now we are making some new characters, new animal models, an animation based aiming system and highly improved control for the characters. At the same time, I am also coding the multiplayer portion of the game using a custom network manager for the Legacy Network system (with a little help of UDP clients) and Steamworks networking solutions. We hope you like this brief update

Thanks for reading!

 

For the past few days, we've had less pics to share due to heavy work on the coding part. Using Steamworks.NET and steamworks networking API, we are adding full online multiplayer based entirely on the Steam services with managed byte data messages between Unity and the Steam servers.

We are currently in the middle of these tests, but it is going on very well and with the LAN portion of the multiplayer working and ready for the game, the first multiplayer gameplay videos will be up soon.

There'll be more updates in the next days so for now, have an excellent day/night!

 

For the last few days I've been mostly coding, and because of that, there have been less updates. In the coding part, we have now a core collection of managers and controllers for a very wide array of functions, including file management, saving systems, inventories, customizable character controllers, a full network manager for both LAN and Steamworks, UI managers for the game, localization and in short, all the framework to improve the development quality and speed. We also upgraded and improved greatly our custom shaders for a better performance/quality, as heavier optimizations are required now that the levels of the game are so big and open.

And keeping with this, the characters are also being improved. Here are some new pics from the latest character we've been working on :







Have a great day!

 

A few more updates on the new character's rendering, and a small hair physics test we made to run on low-end PC's. It is basic, but it is very efficient with the resources, and adds a nice extra touch of realism :

There will be more updates soon!

 

After several months without updates, we have a ton to share with you! First of all, we are making great progress with the new characters after completely reworking our rendering / modelling pipeline and rewriting our shaders to upgrade them for full DX11 support. We have also been working on new improved 3d models.














We've also developed a system to manage thousands of interactive foliage instances (using some help from the great the Advanced Foliage Shaders package) for the cornfield present in the scene :

We have also improved greatly the in-game hair physics and are currently making a completely custom solution for lipsyncing, eye tracking and natural movement as well as procedural emoting using face and gesture animations. We will show much more details from these soon!



Also, as another big news, during the last months we made a cast call to find voice actors and actresses for the game, and we are currently recording and preparing all the voice over work. Progress is being done fast, and there are many news coming soon for the game. Thanks for reading!

 

Here we have a small test we've done using Dynamic normal maps for the facial expressions as well as an improved and optimized version of our skin shader with real translucency and SSS approximations.

 

We have been working very hard these last months in getting the game's multiplayer up to speed, with great results so far!



We've also kept improving on the game's graphics, including a complete overhaul of Unity's deferred rendering system to allow for custom lighting models and softer point shadows :





A new iteration of our fur shader :



Improved first person camera



As well as our first attempts at an accurate night vision effect :



We hope you like it, adn we 'll keep working towards the release!

 

Some small updates, now after we have recorded our first multiplayer tests for the game :

and with the new system and tools we have developed for creating facial expressions and lip-sync for our characters :