Game description:
Absylon 7 is a first-person psychological horror game with shooter elements. The game features 13 different locations with multiple playthrough options.
The player investigates several incidents near the Absylon research complex in Eastern Europe. The player has several types of weapons at his disposal, but it's necessary to use them wisely, as there is a limited amount of firepower at all levels. For this purpose we made several variants of passing each level, traps and unique AI for each type of enemies.
Game plot:
The protagonist of the game is a former businessman who lost his daughter more than 5 years ago and decided to start his life from scratch in the countryside, away from the hustle and bustle of the big city. However, he had no idea that a research facility was located near the village, where horrible and unethical experiments were conducted.
Gameplay features:
- The protagonist can move around, interact with many interactive objects, including physical objects;
- In the game you will have to solve various puzzles using logic and physics;
- The opponents of the protagonist will be more than 10 kinds of enemies, each of which has its own behavior and features (for example, immunity to bullets, fear of light, etc.);
- The main character can set traps, deal with mutants head-on or try to avoid them unnoticed;
- We have tried to diversify the world with different contextual narrative through level design, audio diaries, camera footage, etc.
Minimum System Requirements:
Intel Core i3 (8th Gen);
NVidia GeForce GTX 1080;
8 GB RAM;
40 GB HDD;
Windows 10, DirectX 11;
Keyboard + Mouse / Gamepad;
Recommended System Requirements:
Intel Core i5 (8th Gen);
NVidia GeForce RTX 2060 (6GB), DLSS On (Quality);
16 GB RAM;
40 GB SSD;
Windows 10; DirectX 12;
Keyboard + Mouse / Gamepad;
Console Specifics:
XBox Series S - 4K / 30FPS / HDR
XBox Series X - 4K / 60FPS / HDR
Hi all. Welcome back to the TinyPlay team. Today we would like to talk about how and why we use audio tracing and cloud technologies in Absylon 7.
The project consists of 3 components: sounds (footsteps, atmosphere, enemies, weapons, and more), music (atmospheric, action music, extra accompaniment), and voice acting (characters, audio diaries, thunderclaps). The audio architecture is divided as follows:
Sounds:
Music:
Voiceovers:
Compression settings for music and sounds are different. Music – streaming, big sounds are loaded and unpacked before the scene is loaded, small sounds – on the fly.
To achieve smooth transitions, different sound areas, and work with compression, we use the standard Unity mixer. For smooth transitions, we use DOTween.
Mixers are also switched through special Volume-zones that change the active mixer or its settings to suit the environment (for example, to have an echo effect in the basement).
We use a player based on the animation’s event.
We went through several options for working with surround and, most importantly, physically-based sound. We tried Steam Audio, FMOD, Microsoft Acoustics, etc.
In the end our choice was FMOD + Dolby Atmos + Microsoft Acousitcs. Why not Steam Audio? Well, we were getting unforeseen crashes in Windows builds from their library, which we couldn’t debug.
What do we use it all for?
1) For automatic calculation of sound propagation in the environment, taking into account its geometry, materials and reflectivity (each object in the game is configured separately);
2) For spatial processing of audio using HRTF. In conjunction with Dolby Atmos, the sound is as natural as possible.
How does it work?
The system takes into account the spatial position of the sound, its receiving source, angle, and dozens of other parameters for correct perception, both on headphones and 5.1 systems.
In addition, the system uses raytracing (real-time ray tracing) to determine collisions and reflections applicable to sound waves. To reduce the load, these calculations are done on the GPU + sound is baked (similar to Light Probes, but for sound).
Baking sound into a scene with thousands of 3D models and millions of polygons is long enough, so we use Azure cloud computing. Fortunately Microsoft has a great tool on virtual machines designed for this – Azure Batch
Using a cloud computing service it is possible to reduce the sound bake time from 2 hours to 10 minutes, which saves a lot of time at a fairly low price (1.5 bucks per hour).
The combination of these technologies allows us to achieve more or less realistic sound, and it, in turn, can greatly affect the atmosphere of the game.
To see an example of how everything works together you can here (don’t pay attention to the voiceover of the main character, we have already replaced it, but haven’t published it yet):
User voting has begun on the DTF website. If you like our game, rate the article on the site, it will help us. We also posted some free Steam keys on...
Hello, everyone! Today the official page of the game on Steam became available. Right now you can support our game and add it to your wishlist. There...
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We updated our demo with more lucid narration, adjusted lighting and updated gameplay mechanics. We also fixed a lot of bugs and flaws.
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Absylon7 is a first-person view horror game set in a small village whose residents have become victims of terrible experiments. Now the protagonist has...
New Demo are avesome! Please, give me more!
It looks interesting. Played the demo, of course there is something to improve. I'll keep an eye out to see if they'll be able to finish it off.