Soviet Project – Horror game about the recent past

Once I was looking for interesting 3D games in the Play Market for a long time and, unfortunately, I did not find almost anything interesting.

The graphics of these games were too simple, the lighting was terrible, the textures were too soapy. Some games did not even reach the quality of PC and console games of the 2000s.

It seemed strange to me, now powerful graphics processors are installed in mobile phones, and the quality of the graphics is doubtful.

Soviet Project game
Soviet Project game

Later it turned out to be not so simple, by launching Unity, setting the project to URP, adding post processing, several models and a couple of lights with shadows, I got about 5 frames per second on my phone.

I decided to achieve higher performance and graphics. One of my friends was modeling and was able to put together a small but detailed map.

About the game

Together we decided to make our game in the spirit of Silent Hill, but in the Soviet setting.

Apartment from the game Soviet Project
Apartment from the game Soviet Project

In the game you have to explore the city, solve puzzles and find a way out of the current situation.

There will be monsters – dolls. (Of course, this is horror, where without them). But not everything is so simple, they can be fought back.

What's going on here?
What’s going on here?

Either kill or run away – it’s up to you. After some time, the player will be able to make weapons against them. The weapon will be quite unusual for horror. There will be two types, one for protection – the other for active actions.

In total, the game will have two options for passing completely independent.

The map is a semi-open world. It will be possible to go into many buildings located in the city, all places are unique in their own way.

In a chair and with a guitar.
In a chair and with a guitar.

The player is not limited in actions. You can study some part right away, then proceed to the passage of the main storyline, which will allow you to discover new places.

Development

To begin with, I ran the same test, but among the different versions of Unity, the 2018 version of the engine turned out to be the fastest.

To achieve maximum performance, we combined all textures into atlases, optimized all models as much as possible to avoid overlaps and unnecessary triangles.

We have selected the optimal settings for light baking and finalized the models so that the light is baked as correctly as possible.

Gearbox and fog shader.
Gearbox and fog shader.

I had to abandon the standard shaders, I wrote all the main shaders from scratch, for static, dynamic objects, details, particles and grass.

Next, I had to solve the problem with the earth’s surface, the standard terrain in Unity is no good and even for computer games it consumes a lot of resources.

A huge mesh with a shader that mixes textures by mask was ideal, but the mixing operation in shaders also takes a lot of resources. As a result, the same mesh was made, but without mixing textures.

Another big problem was post-processing, with it the picture in the game looked much more colorful and livelier. But the mobile phone, when the effects were turned on, generally went into a sweet show.

The Unity engine has access to low-level graphics rendering functions through the GL class. By writing my own image processing shader and drawing it at a low level, we managed to get fast effects.

Unfortunately, on weak devices, they still consume too many resources, so I made it possible to disable all effects through the game menu.

Graphics settings.
Graphics settings.

The game turned out to be unique and completely made on our own. The font also needed an original one, it took a lot of time, but it turned out well.

For rendering the font, I liked the Fontographer program the most. In the future, we decided to translate the game into several languages, and in addition to Russian and Latin letters, I drew all the Unicode letters.

Most of the sounds for the game were also hand-recorded at 5am in complete silence, processed and mixed.

Part of the street and the fire shader.
Part of the street and the fire shader.
Font
Font

All scripts for the game logic were optimized in the classic way – using item pulls, a compressed save format, quick randomization, and other techniques.

The heaviest script is used on dolls, but it also proved to be excellent even on the weakest phones.

## Outcome

At the moment, the game is 80% ready and will soon be released for Android and IOS platforms.

As a result, the game is a captivating mobile horror game with an open world and many puzzles with an unusual plot.

Game process
Game process

After being fired from a secret laboratory, a young scientist moves to a small provincial town. Having managed to take some developments with him, he continues his experiments on synthetic materials, taking as a sample plastic dolls from the nearest children’s toy factory. After a failed experiment, the entire population was affected by a psi-virus, except for the player, who will have to unravel the mystery of the scientist, his experiments, and also get out of the abandoned city.

All the latest news on the game, my friend and I publish in our VK group.

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