00:00The Casting of Frank Stone is set in an imaginary piece of north-western America, Cedar Hills,
00:11a town that's probably gone through a lot of regeneration.
00:15It was a town built around a steel mill, and that steel mill went bust, and it became repopulated
00:22and then become redeveloped in a careless kind of way, so you have a lot of clash and
00:27a lot of bits left over, so there are old pieces amongst the new pieces, there are people
00:32who've come here because it's close to where they need to work, and they don't have any
00:35of the values of the original inhabitants, and the original inhabitants' ideas become
00:39lost, but they're still there under the surface to be picked out.
00:44On the outskirts of the town is the Cedar Steel Mill, and it's a massive industrial
00:48complex, and we see it earlier in the game when it's still active, and you've got the
00:53giant furnace tower, which kind of looks like this industrial haunted house, and then
00:57later in the game, we revisit the same location, and it's since been closed, and it's been
01:01abandoned, and it's all overgrown for over a decade, due in no small part to the events
01:06that happened earlier in the game.
01:08One of the really great things about it is when the player, but also some of the characters
01:11are able to retread some of the same footsteps that characters do earlier in the game, and
01:16you start to see an echo of some of the tragic events that happened there in the past.
01:21There are particular locations where there's a real sense of death in the air.
01:25What is that?
01:29There's one particular location in the mill that's quite key, and that's the furnace chamber.
01:33Earlier in the game, the furnace chamber's alive and brimming with fire and energy.
01:38When you then find it again in 1980, there's been lots of overgrowth, lots of rust, and
01:43a sense of nature taking over, but in this particular place, anything that has grown
01:47here has since died.
01:50For whatever reason, there's just something that's off about this place, it's just killed
01:54anything that's tried to grow here.
01:56It's a place I'd like to go and make a movie.
01:58What do you guys think?
02:00I say we do it.
02:01Sounds good.
02:02We are using Unreal 5.
02:04We've been really focused on that from the very beginning.
02:07It's one of the first projects from Supermassive that's using that platform, which is very
02:10exciting.
02:11We've been able to harness lots of new technologies because of that engine upgrade.
02:16We're using Lumen for our environment lighting, which gives us a lot more flexibility and
02:21increased quality.
02:22We're also using Nanite for all of our environments, which allows our artists to include so much
02:27more detail in the final product than they were before, which is very exciting.
02:31Nanite's this new virtualized geometry, which enables us to have incredibly detailed geometry
02:37throughout all our environments.
02:39So whereas before we'd have to heavily optimize all of our game meshes so they can run efficiently,
02:44it also means that we can do our own scanning for photogrammetry, which is where you take
02:49a lot of photographs of something and you can generate a completely lifelike representation
02:53of whatever that object is.
02:54So with Nanite, we can just drop it in as is, and we keep all that incredible detail
02:59and realism in our environments.
03:02There's a particular road that's just about 20 minutes from the studio, and we went out
03:06and we scanned the verges.
03:07They've got these really high verges, and the road surface itself, because it happened
03:11to be the time of year that's correct for the games, we went out and we did it when
03:15we could, which is in the autumn.
03:17The leaves all looked exactly right, and that now appears in the game.
03:22I hope that's something that players start to look around and they start to see some
03:25of these nods we're making to Dead by Daylight, and some of the iconography of the entity
03:29and the lore and all that kind of stuff there.
03:32As they explore further, we're hoping to strike this balance where it's kind of scary, you
03:36don't want to press on, you want to just get back in the car and go, but there's something
03:40about the place that piques your interest and you want to go and explore it, maybe against
03:44your better judgment.
03:45I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but there's more than one way into that mill.
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