DARKSPIRE

DARKSPIRE

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I worked on DARKSPIRE with Andreas Yiannikaris and Drew Jones in the Autumn of 2024.

Dre had been cooking up this idea in his big lovely brain for years. A classic survival horror, but with a clever twist that makes every play-through unique. "Resident Evil but its a Rogue-like" was his initial elevator pitch, but it evolved in to much, much more. I won't go into full detail on the design here, but suffice to say that DARKSPIRE is a cinematic survival horror that cannot be trusted.

I'm not a big horror guy, but as memories of playing RE 1 & 2 as a kid came flooding back, it didn't take long for everything to "click". Once the core systems were in place, we were cookin'. We built a demo that I'm really proud of, and hope to share soon.

The main menu and intro cinematic from the DARKSPIRE demo.

Setting & Inspiration

At first, we began building out the basic game mechanics while working with a more generic Resident Evil-style theme, and tested out some film-noir-ish vibes.

The codename for the project at this time was "RESIDENT BASTARD", because I am so incredibly funny and clever.

However we soon found a shared desire to work in a dark fantasy setting, and so began developing the world and artistic direction from there. The world of DARKSPIRE is loosely inspired by 17th century England, with echoes of the Civil War. I bought a few issues of the fantastic HELLEBORE for inspiration, and found the amazing work of Nona Limmen on some of their covers.

Early test scenes; focused on colourful volumetric lighting, with a little too much VHS filter..

Whilst developing the visual identity of DARKSPIRE, we found the work of Mountain Realm to be a huge inspiration; the perfect sound for the retro fantasy vibe we were going for. The track used in this video is "Gravedigger".

The first scene I made to test out the dark fantasy setting.

Building The Demo

As Dre's design took shape, I built all the core systems and features we needed to bring things to life:

  • Rule based world generation system, which arranges rooms together to form a unique layout on each run.
  • Room system, with doors, keys, persistence and so on
  • Character controller, based on Kinematic Character Controller
  • Enemy AI and jump scare system
  • Interactions, items and puzzles
  • Health, consumables, weapons and ammo
  • Save & Options System
  • Editor tools for testing and debugging the world-gen

We decided that getting the demo running nicely on a Steam Deck was a worthwhile aim, so the game plays nicely on both keyboard and gamepad, and runs at a fairly solid framerate on a Deck.

With the tools in place, Dre built out the set of rooms planned for the demo; getting those fixed cameras just right and devising the puzzles, which I would then put together whilst developing the system.

Visual Development

As well as my usual code-monkey duties, I got to do a bunch of art, lighting and look dev/art direction. I pulled together selected assets from the store and customised them to suit our needs, as well making a few original pieces.

We wanted DARKSPIRE to feel somewhat retro, but not in the fully PS1/N64 style that is currently in vogue. We think of it as a sort of PS2 era game, remastered for a modern audience. I love the photo-texture style of the early 2000s, so I plastered a photo over the replacement head I made for our main character asset, and used the lowest LOD available.

We used HDRP to make use of all the lovely volumetrics, a key part of the cinematic style. Latterly we also began experimenting with a more "retro" render style, with a pixelated/CRT vibe via some custom post-processing.

Cinematics

We knew that having a few impactful cinematic sequences would be key for this kind of classic survival horror, and so I got to grips with Unity's Timeline system, having not used it a lot over the years.

While I was limited to store bought assets and animations, and didn't have a sound designer to call upon, I'm still pretty happy with the results I was able to produce in a relatively short time. I've got a taste for this work now, maybe I'll have to revisit The Cat in 14a...

The intro sequence at the top of the page was the biggest cinematic we made, with Dre providing a really fitting voice over.

Two of the cinematics I worked on for the demo, (no audio).

Screenshots

This really was a dream project for me, as taking screenshots of is probably my favourite bit of the job? Maybe in another life I'm a cinematics director at some AAA studio, or a knock-off Duncan Harris ❤

The Demo

We are not actively working on DARKSPIRE, but would like to release the demo one day. I'll update this page once we've worked out how best to do so.

Credits

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