GZ: As far as enemies go, Caffeine doesn't have your prototypical boss battles. What type of encounters, if any, can we expect as the story goes in during the game
DB: There will be definitely some kind of encounters and they're kind of mysterious. Especially in game when they happen. You've seen in the trailer probably the shadowy figure that pops up in some of my trailers?
GZ: Correct.
DB: So, he's a bit, he's there watching you especially during the first part of the game and he does pop up from time to time. The first part of the game will be very kind of restrained. The encounters themselves will further along the story a bit. He's kind of there getting closer to you a little bit and blending into the background. Basically, I can't really divulge any more than that because it's very tight with the story kind of thing.
GZ: Initially you began on PC. Was their any issues with development on PS4 or Xbox One and was either one easier than the other?
DB: I've been focusing on the PC release first just to get everything up an running. It's been very good to work with both PS4 and Xbox One my experience so far. They have very different ways of applying to get into them. It was definitely good having friends who have gone through it before, people I've met. In terms of Xbox specifically, it was actually very easy. Actually due more to Epic and Unreal Engine. They are really supportive of their developers so it became very easy for me to start porting to the consoles. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be.
GZ: With the announcement of DX12 how do you think that will help as far as PC and Xbox One development goes?
DB: It should help a lot. I've been in the DIREct X12 developer program for a while so I've been playing around with those builds of Unreal Engine and seeing how they play out. Usually you are seeing a 20-ish% performance increase so it definitely boosts the FPS. Which would allow me to, especially on Xbox, which is a little more underpowered than your PS4. On Xbox, it might allow me to do things like have the soft chatters that I have on PC which I didn't originally enable when I was porting to Xbox it was cut out due to performance. It performs pretty well, I could actually probably enable them on the current build but when I get a DirectX 12 build on there I'm definitely going to be exploring ways to boost the resolution and things like that.
GZ: Now when you say 20%, you mean 20% increase in FPS?
DB: Yes, yeah.
GZ: You've also mentioned previously that it would support Oculus prior to beginning development on consoles. Now that they are a go, are you looking at Morpheus or Hololens integration as well?
DB: Not at the moment. It depends on a few things. It's definitely possible to be coming to the console versions it just depends on how it plays out performance wise. I would say I'd like to do it b/c when I've been using Caffeine on Oculus for example, it's very immersive and it actually works quite well. The support is getting a lot better as well so the performance as a result is getting higher. It is quite taxing at the moment but it is getting better.
GZ: We see the game is being developed using Unreal Engine 4, which is known for great the great lighting/shading abilities we see in Caffeine. What went into the decision to choose that engine over others like say Cry Engine and was this one of the reasons.
DB: I originally chose the Unreal Engine 3 because they had the UDK, the Unreal Engine dev kit which was free at the time. So, obviously I had no funding so basically back at that time even Unity was quite expensive. They had a free version but to get the premium version with shadowing and stuff like that it was still kind of expensive at that time. I went with UDK and when Unreal Engine came out and started charging developers $20 a month I jumped straight on that and it worked out very well. It was an easy process to go over engine to engine as a lot of the core concepts are the same.
GZ: In December you mentioned the game would be episodic in that it will be released in three separate parts. Will this be all one story separated into three parts or 3 diff games with interconnected stories and will they all be one price or separate?
DB: It's one story that has three very separate parts to it. They're all following the same person but it made sense at the time to work really well in three parts and you are only paying for the whole lot once. You can't purchase them separately, just pay once they would come down as they come out. On console, it's not confirmed if it's coming in the three separate parts or just as one at the time. It depends on release dates and stuff like that.
GZ: Is the release date still set for 2015 and do you have a more specific timeframe for release or a date set yet?
DB: Definitely for pc the first part is definitely coming out before the end of the year. Soon as I get a date I'll be telling everyone about it. On console I wanted it to be this year and I still hope it can be because of the ease of porting. I've been keeping up with porting each version to consoles, but at the moment I don't really have a concrete date.
GZ: I want to thank you for your time, but before we let you go, is there anything we may have missed that you want to let everyone know about?
DB: No I think that's pretty much covered most of the things.
GZ: Have a good evening sir, thank you for your time.
DB: You too, take care.
As noted, Caffeine is set for a PC release later this year and hopefully console as well. We'd like to thank Mr. Browne for taking the time to speak with us and be sure to check out the demo which is available now on Steam.
We first heard about Caffeine earlier last year when initial development began on PC. An unusual title, Caffeine is a first-person exploration game that is based in horror and puzzles which takes place on a caffeine mining ship in outer space. We had the pleasure to sit down and speak with it's developer/creator Dylan Browne of Incandescent Imaging about Caffeine's inspiration and development.
GameZone (GZ): Good evening and thank you for joining us. What can you tell us about Caffeine and what the main premise is for those who may not have seen it?
Dylan Browne (DB): So basically, it's a game all about space coffee. Basically everyone on earth runs out of coffee producing parts and caffeine producing parts so they have to build a massive kind of space stations to mine enough minerals out in space to synthesize enough caffeine to quench everyone's thirst. So it's basically a first person exploration game with horror elements, puzzle elements and a hell of a lot of back story and lore.
GZ: From what we know so far, Caffeine takes place in space on a caffeine mining ship in the future as caffeine has taken over as the world's number one drug. How did you come up with such a concept for a horror/exploration puzzler?
DB: I've always been fan of exploration and horror games, even though I'm terrible at a lot of horror games. I used to just do modeling, and I was creating random pieces off a science fiction hallway kind of based on the movie Moon and Alien kind of style. I put them into Unreal Engine 3 at beginning of last year. I put them into a simple, playable level and people I showed it to said you should make something out of this. So basically, I'm a big coffee drinker and was thinking about how I could get a story to go with this cool station environment I'd come up with. So I came up with the idea that we ran out of coffee and we have to create a fake caffeine because we've over farmed kind of thing.
GZ: Other than the backstory, do we use caffeine for anything in the game? As in does it have any practical in game uses?
DB: It's more for reference. It does have in game uses but not particularly with the protagonist consuming it. When it's released you will be able to mess with it a bit. You're basically alone on the space station. It's all run down and there's caffeine, coffee leaking everywhere. It uses a mechanic to drain coffee out of places in order to explore more areas and stuff like that.
GZ: We play Caffeine from a first person view. Being that as it is, what was the reason to have the main character as a young boy rather than an adult since we don't get to see him very much while playing?
DB: So, I thought of having it as a child to increase the tension and horror because you're smaller and everything seems a lot bigger in game, like the scale of things seems quite huge. Especially when you're playing and immersed, having the perspective quite low to the ground can increase tension. I've had a few pretty good positive reactions to it. It kind of has a little bit of back story as well but that would be spoiling the main story.
GZ: So more like a psychological intensity kind of thing?
DB: Yeah, kind of.
GZ: The story set up in Caffeine, I really enjoyed and something we are starting to see more of lately with games like Nero, where there isn't much narrative but rather the story is told through notes and items left throughout the game. How did you arrive at this type of setup opposed to the more traditional uses of story telling?
DB: It arose from, I thought well a lot of games especially when you have notes in games. To save on performance and stuff like that you'd have notes but they wouldn't be in the game world. You'd click on them and then they would appear closer to you so you could actually read them. I wanted to be able to have everything readable in game. So you could just walk up to something, zoom the camera in and read it. I wanted to do these notes and I thought of sticky notes because some people go a little bit overboard on sticky notes. I thought that would be cool, that's the main source of paper on the station is sticky notes. They use to remind themselves about things, clues to the story and also printouts of reports throughout the game world. I thought it was really cool to just walk up to something and be able to read the whole thing.
GZ: Almost like Outlast does with the zombie exploration?
DB: Yep.
GZ: You've described Caffeine as a psychological horror game where the story presses on you even in moments that wouldn't normally be considered "scary". Was it difficult in development to keep a balance that would both keep the player intrigued from a story point of view during these non scary parts while also maintaining their focus on exploration so as not to get lost in the game?
DB: Yeah, definitely. I spent a lot of time in areas and places where it should be tense and not tense. A lot of it is helped along by my sound designers and composers. The exploration parts, the game tends to fade out the back kind of creepy kind of sounds to a little bit more of the background and fades in some nice music tracks, like ambient music. I'm a big fan of having spacial sounds. Especially all of the environmental sounds are spacial so they accurately represent if they are further away or closer. I really wanted to have that creaking lopesound, it's a space station it's made of metal so there'd be lots of different stresses on that wherever it would be. So I wanted to have that background groaning and kind of the ship's bending kind of sensation.
