The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR
The spiritual successor to Until Dawn Rush of Blood.
Immerse yourself in this fast-paced rollercoaster action-horror-shooter where every move you make, and everything you see, could mean the difference between life and death.
In the blink of an eye, more and more enemies are upon you as your pupils are being detected. With PlayStation VR2’s innovative capabilities experience horror up-close-and-personal with adaptive triggers, haptic feedback and HDMI rumble in your controller and headset.
Come face to face with the most terrifying antagonists from Season One of The Dark Pictures Anthology. Survive the Ghost Ship and its distorted apparitions, confront hideous demonic incarnations of persecuted ‘witches’. Fight for your life against other-worldly vampires and escape the horrifying World’s Fair Hotel’s sadistic serial killer.
It’s your own personal nightmare where each track has multiple terrifying paths. No two runs will be the same, but each will test your reactions in this multi-sensory VR horror experience.
In the ride for your life, choose your path wisely and try to stay alive.
Contributions
I was one of the two graphics programmers assigned to the project. It had been underway for a bit of time already and was suffering from some degraded performance, in particular on the GPU. So I spent a lot of time profiling both using editor tools as well as PS5 tools. A lot of poorly optimized meshes and materials were identified and rectified because of this. Besides that it allowed us to tweak our overall graphical settings; related to postprocessing, shadow quality, lighting quality and so on, for the best balance between quality and performance. For clarity this was using a forward rendering method.
During the project it was also apparent that we did not have any telemetry methods yet, so I was assigned to create this system. Which interfaced with a Sony provided service.
Lastly, I was able to provide the design team with tools that allowed them to add fade-ins and fade-outs, full screen postprocessing effects; without any performance degradation when they weren’t being used.