Shades of Sanity is a psychological horror game that is a 3D "Spiritual Successor" to Sanitarium, made by former members of Dreamforge. We strive to create a game that is memorable in atmosphere, story, game play and graphics. It is designed with puzzles/adventures in mind, with limited action sequences. The environment is fully 3D with real time lighting and effects.
What's the story?
You are Joseph Springer, a schizophrenic patient who skips out on his therapy sessions and drives down to Virginia to repair his estranged relationship with his wife. As Joseph nears the house he blacks out and wakes up in a strange environment filled with conflicting clues and disturbing visions.
With only limited meds to cope Joe explores the house, learning that each previous resident is somehow connected to him, and each has met a horrible fate. Eventually his meds run out and you are left with primitive methods to cope with the strange and surreal visions, hoping that if you close your eyes or look away they'll disappear. But even innocent scenes could be feeding a deeper delusion. Is this really my house? If this is Kim's stuff, where is she? Who are these other people I keep seeing?
And why does everyone react as if I'm going to hurt them? .
The Sassafras engine was created using OpenGL, and has been modeled to make real time changes to speed up development. Light properties, particles effects, texture compression and updates, sound properties, materials, performance options, and game code and be changed on the fly to see instant results. These features help with rapid iteration which is a key to an efficient and happy content creation pipeline. 3D Studio Max integration allows for a simple interface to create visuals that do what the artist expects in a familiar tool.
Sassafras is a game engine , targetting PC and Mac systems featuring a modern light prepass rendering engine, PhysX (tm), 3d positional audio, multithreading, SIMD acceleration, a custom scripting engine, and more. The rendering engine supports eye-space reconstruted ambient occlusion, thin lens simulation depth of field, deferred reflections, an offline ray tracing light occlusion solver, deferred refraction, deferred subsurface scattering, anisotropic hair rendering, Cook/Torrence BRDF as standard, projection maps, shadow maps, volumetric light occlusions, and many more features. Threading support accelerates skinning, particle simulation and even some script functions on multi-core systems. Sassafras is constantly under development to increase performance and add new features.
Current Features