Shades of Sanity has the heart of an old-school puzzle based adventure game in a custom built engine, and for the past 6 years has been a labor of love; with kickstarter comes the dream that the game can be completed with the look and feel it deserves.
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The player takes the role of Joseph Springer, a schizophrenic patient who enters the house thinking that his estranged wife is now living there. He is soon trapped in his house, with his only contact to the outside being Doctor Reynolds, with whom he communicates via cell phone.
Joe is soon haunted by strikingly real hallucinations of the previous residents. As he explores the house he learns that each previous resident is somehow connected to him, and each has met a horrible fate. The owner of the house, known as Mr. Sarver, wants to make sure he never leaves, even in death.
Game Features
Artwork
The goal for Shades of Sanity is to tell the narrative not only through the characters, but though the environment as well. Taking place in a victorian house we aim to create places that have been both untouched and completely consumed by the surrounding maddness. From the brightness of familiar rooms, to dark, claustrophobic rooms with hidden secrets and surreal nightmares we are aiming to create a game where every piece and place has a story.
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Ease of use
The Sassafras engine has been modeled to make real time changes to speed up development. Light properties, particles effects, texture compression and updates, sound properties, materials, performance options, and game code and be changed on the fly to see instant results. These features help with rapid iteration which is a key to an efficient and happy content creation pipeline. 3D Studio Max integration allows for a simple interface to create visuals that do what the artist expects in a familiar tool.
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Engine
Sassafras is a game engine targetting PC and Mac systems featuring a modern light prepass rendering engine, PhysX (tm), 3d positional audio, multithreading, SIMD acceleration, a custom scripting engine, and more. The rendering engine supports eye-space reconstruted ambient occlusion, thin lens simulation depth of field, deferred reflections, an offline ray tracing light occlusion solver, deferred refraction, deferred subsurface scattering, anisotropic hair rendering, Cook/Torrence BRDF as standard, projection maps, shadow maps, volumetric light occlusions, and many more features. Threading support accelerates skinning, particle simulation and even some script functions on multi-core systems. Sassafras is constantly under development to increase performance and add new features.
