How has it been transitioning from developing on Unreal Engine 4 to developing on Unreal Engine 5?Bilnicki:
Unreal Engine 5 is very similar to Unreal Engine 4. Many elements remained unchanged and the transition to the new engine was made easier.
The obvious challenge was to learn about new possibilities and technologies such as Lumen, Nanite, TSR or Virtual Shadow Maps, which simply required research and development to get the most out of their capabilities.
The biggest challenge, however, was to check what had changed or been removed. One of these elements is the lack of tessellation in Unreal Engine 5. Early in the development of Layers of Fear, we used tessellation to dynamically change the level geometry. At the time, Nanite didn’t support World Position Offset, which forced us to come up with another way to implement the effect without tessellation.
A lot of time and resources were spent on adapting existing content to the new features of Unreal Engine 5 and developing new pipelines. In the case of Lumen, we had to pay much more attention to the objects to have the correct and accurate Distance Fields. Another interesting case is Ray Tracing. We had a lot of experience implementing Ray Tracing during the development of Observer: System Redux on Unreal Engine 4. After switching to the new engine, it turned out that Ray Tracing is an integral part of Lumen. Nothing has changed on the content side, but we had to learn a new setup on the project config side.
In retrospect, the project’s transition from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 went smoothly. Most of the time was spent learning new features and adjusting the content.
The original Layers of Fear (2016) dealt with sacrifice, while the sequel dealt with self identity. What will Layers of Fear (2023) delve into?
Kocurek: We actually refer to this game, and every previous title in the series, as a game where you constantly make moral choices. The motive of sacrifice appears in both installments. In Layers of Fear, players choose between family or the pursuit of artistic greatness. Similarly, players have no simple answers to the in-game situations they encounter in Layers of Fear 2. We never tell players what is the correct or incorrect choice to pick. We want players to make their choices themselves — there will be no exception in Layers of Fear as well. This fear of the unknown, the fear of not knowing where your decisions will lead you to is what we call “hidden horror.”
Source: Unreal Engine Blog