u/Odd-Pie7133

So, it's been 3 months since I started developing my game. On my own. I wanted to nail a certain vibe, isolation, anxiety, creepy-eerie atmosphere. Kinda like silent hill series. And so here I am - demo version of my game is almost ready. Now I just need to polish and reconsider some decisions. And I need your help!

Game Title: Red Lake
Playable Link (Request Playtest): https://store.steampowered.com/app/4867910/Red_Lake/
Platform: Windows (mac + linux soon to be added)
Description: A psychological horror with no interface to guide you. The forest watches you — so watch it back. Use your notebook to document impossible objects, then descend into the Red Lake. Each time you return, something has changed.
Free to Play Status: Free playtest.
Involvement: Solo-dev.

Додаю сторітелінг в гру. Посилання на стім сторінку - https://store.steampowered.com/app/4867910/Red_Lake

Я роблю психологічний хоррор, і мені потрібна була анімація, як гравець прокидається на підлозі та встає.

Написав дуже просту систему з кейфреймами, де вони інтерполюються по smoothstep та воно мутує позицію, крен, рискання та схил.

Ну і от замість того, щоб вручну прописувати кожен кейфрейм - написав функцію, що парсить лог з параметрами по регуляркам та автоматично ставить кейфрейми.

Досить зручно вийшло :) (воркфлоу - в грі ставлю себе в потрібні позиції, натискаю F1 та отримую лог).

Я спочатку думав, що якщо я таким рукописом власноруч помалюю текст, буде прекрасно та +вайб. Але я згодом зрозумів, що ідея херня, та переробив текст. Також, я на текстуру папіру додав такі "штампи". Що скажете?

Роблю психологічний хоррор Red Lake. Це з'являється у гравця за спиною, і я змушую його обернутися - а там оце.

I noticed, that a lot of people talk about a certain look in Unity games. Like it has a distinctive lighting and tint, plasticky look, that is unlike other engines.

Screenshots from my game are edited using "backrooms" filter, though it is a custom engine on Rust :)

My game's link - https://store.steampowered.com/app/4867910/

Технічно я просто підміняю меш на інший залежно від мови по побітовій масці. Чесно переключати текстури це був би гемор, оскільки я власний рушій роблю. Тому такий "костиль". Хе.

В мене чорна кімната-коробка, не дуже велика. Туман чорний, та нічого вдалині не побачиш. Ви бачите тільки пелюстки на полу — ви б пішли за ними?

Психологічний Горор Red Lake - https://store.steampowered.com/app/4867910/Red_Lake

I'm building a psychological horror game, Red Lake (on Steam), and wonder - does this reflect emotions of isolation and eeriness? Thank you!

Hello everyone! I'm making a psychological horror game - Red Lake -, and this scene in the screenshot is like the "final" of the demo. Do you think the lighting looks good?
You fall here after reaching the lake's bottom. I want to create a sense of isolation and creepiness, and I'm thinking - what can I add to reflect this?
I'm thinking - make some kind of a maze using barbed wire fences, but that seems very generic.
Also, the walls will be covered in dust that falls off when approached - revealing some things and the wall itself. The exit will be under some layer, just a tight corridor.

I'm building Red Lake, a psychological horror game on top of a Rust/wgpu engine I wrote from scratch (no Bevy, no off-the-shelf ECS). While working on tooling, I ended up removing two recurring sources of boilerplate.

1. #[derive(Component)] — automatic component registration.

Previously, adding a new component meant editing three different places: adding its storage to Scene, registering it, and making sure it was removed when an entity was destroyed. It was repetitive and easy to forget one of the steps.

Now my #[derive(Component)] proc macro handles all of that automatically. Scene owns a single Components container, which is populated through the inventory crate by iterating over every type that derives Component.

THE COMPONENT
#[derive(Component)]
pub struct Translate {
    target: TargetKind,
    speed: f32,
}

SCENE FIELD
pub struct Scene {
    pub components: Components,
}

ACCESS
scene.components.write::<Translate>().insert(meshid, translate);

The only thing required to add a new component now is 
#[derive(Component)].

2. MeshName — asset names as an enum, generated from the packer's own TOC
   The engine ships assets baked into a custom .pak file, built by a packer binary that walks assets/, transcodes GLBs, and writes out a TOC + blob. Mesh names used to live in a handwritten table:

   pub const MESH_PATHS: &[(&str, &str)] = &[ ("boat", "meshes/boat.glb"), ("deer", "meshes/deer.glb"), // ~30 more, added by hand every time a new mesh landed ];

...and every call site looked like load_extra_meshes("baot", ...) - compiles fine, panics at runtime when the pak lookup misses.

The fix: the packer already knows the full mesh list - that's the actual source of truth, not a second-hand-maintained copy of it. Sobuild.rs, right after the pak is finalized, reads back just the TOC (a few hundred bytes, no decompression) and emits an enum into OUT_DIR.
Which is then pulled as:

#[derive(Debug, Clone, Copy, PartialEq, Eq, Hash)] 
pub enum MeshName { Boat, Deer, /* ... */ } 
impl MeshName { 
    pub const fn key(self) -> &'static str { /* "meshes/boat.glb" */ } 
    pub const fn stem(self) -> &'static str { /* "boat" */ } 
    pub const ALL: &'static [MeshName] = &[ /* every mesh */ ]; }

And I wrote a small macro for QOL:

macro_rules! meshname {
    ($($name:ident),* $(,)?) => { &[$(crate::scene::MeshName::$name),*] as &[crate::scene::MeshName] };
}

So now the call sites look like this:

let names_toload_init = 
meshname![
    Notebook,
    Onboard,
    FogCards,
];

INSTEAD OF THIS
let names_toload_init = &["notebook", "onboard", "fog_cards"];

Why bother?

1. Type safety.
2. Eliminates boilerplate.
3. IDE autocomplete.
4. Inability to make a typo in the mesh's name.

What do you think? The game's name - Red Lake.

Не буду розкривати, який це розробник, просто цікаво, що ви думаєте з цього приводу?

Роблю психологічний хоррор - Red Lake на Steam.

Перший скрін без GI, другий з. Пайплайн - рантайм запікання проб з сферичними гармоніками L1 в об'ємі, та зворотня трилінійна інтерполяція в шейдері освітлення. Запікання кожної проби - 0,34мс. Можна краще, але так достатньо.

Схоже на те як це працює в блендері 😁

First screenshot is with Global Illumination, second one is without.
Pipeline: Baked grid of Spherical Harmonics (SH) probes.

1. At bake time, a 3D grid of probes is generated inside the volume. Each probe captures a cubemap and projects the raw radiance into L_0 and L_1 SH coefficients.
2. Probe data is uploaded to GPU via a Storage Buffer (alongside a small Uniform Buffer for grid metadata).
3. At runtime, the shader performs trilinear interpolation of the 8 surrounding probes, then evaluates the irradiance along the surface normal.

It's not ideal but that's a start ;)

Kinda adds the vibe hehe.

Been working on this for two days! What do you think? It's a surreal emergent psychological horror

This is gonna be a surreal psychological game with a heavy emotional core.