The casting of Frankstone is set in a imaginary piece of Northwestern America. See the Hills? A town that’s probably gone through a lot of regeneration. It was a town built around a steel mill, and that steel mill went bust and it became repopulated and then become redeveloped in a careless kind of way. So you have a lot of clash and a lot of bits of the leftover. So there are old pieces amongst the new pieces. There are people who’ve come here because it’s close to where they need to work, and they don’t have any of the values of the original inhabitants, and the original inhabitants ideas become lost. But they’re still there under the surface to be picked out.
On the outskirts of the town is the Cedar Steel mill. And it’s a massive industrial complex, and we see it earlier in the game when it’s still active. And you’ve got the giant furnace tower, which kind of looks like this industrial haunted house. And then later in the game, we revisit the same location and it’s since been closed and it’s been abandoned and it’s all overgrown for over a decade due in no small part to the events that happen earlier in the game. One of the really great things about it is when the player, but also some of the characters, were able to retread some of the same footsteps the characters do earlier in the game, and you start to see an echo of some of the tragic events that happen there in the past.
There are particular locations where there’s a real sense of death in the air. What do you say? There’s one particular location in the mill that’s quite key, and that’s the furnace chamber. Earlier in the game, the furnace chambers alive and brimming with fire and energy. When you then find it again in 1980, there’s been lots of overgrowths, lots of rust and a sense of nature taking over. But in this particular place, anything that has grown here has since died for whatever reason. There’s just something that’s off about this place. It’s just killed anything that’s tried to grow here.
It’s a place I’d like to go and make a movie. What do you guys think?
I say we do. It sounds good. We are using Unreal 5. We’ve been really focused on that from the very beginning. It’s one of the first projects from supermassive that’s using that platform, which is very exciting. We’ve been able to harness lots of new technologies because of that engine upgrade. We’re using lumen for our environment lighting, which gives us a lot more flexibility and increased quality. We’re also using nanny for all of our environments, which allows our artist to include so much more detail in the final product than they were before, which is very exciting.
Nana. It’s this new virtualized geometry which enables us to have incredibly detailed geometry throughout all our environments. So whereas before, we’d have to heavily optimize all of our game measures so they can run efficiently, that also means that we can do our own scanning for photogrammetry, which is where you take a lot of photographs of something and you can generate a completely lifelike representation of whatever that object is. So with Nano, we can just drop it in as is and we keep all that incredible detail and realism in our environments.
There’s a particular road that’s just about 20 minutes from the studio, and we went out and we scanned the verges. They’ve got these really high verges and the road surface itself. Because it happened to be the time of year. That’s correct. The games, we went out and we did it when we could, which is in the autumn. The leaves all looked exactly right. And that now appears in the game. I hope that some of the players start to look around and they start to see some of these nods we’re making to day by daylight and some of the iconography of the entity and the law and all that kind of stuff there. And as I explore further, we’re hoping to strike this balance where it’s kind of scary. You don’t wanna press on, you wanna just get back in the car and go. But there’s something about the place that peaks your interest and you want to go and explore it, maybe against your better judgment.
I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but there’s more than one way into that mill.