You can check out how good Dreamfall Chapters looks now, being powered by Unity 5's Enlighten global illumination solution. On some days, it was hard to get out of bed and find the will to keep moving forward. Every new version of the engine would see improvements in one area, and break the game in two, three, ten other areas. The process was actually harder than Red Thread Games expected and costed the studio several hundred thousands of dollars, but the effects are worth it, says Ragnar Tornquist. Upgrading from one patch or point release to another would fix one serious issue - say, memory leaks - while introducing a completely different issue - such as broken real-time lights. Dreamfall: Chapters was successfully converted from Unity 4.6 to Unity 5.2 engine. And we had to deal with a large number of often crippling bugs, some of which persist to this day, requiring desperate workarounds. We had to rewrite all shaders and scripts to work with the new engine. In addition, with every lighting fix in the biggest scenes, we had to go through an eight-to-twelve hour baking process before we could see the final results. This was partly due to lacking, and overly optimistic, estimates on our part, and partly due to countless bugs in the new lighting system.
There was an enormous amount of work involved in re-lighting, from the ground up, dozens of enormous locations - more work that we’d initially imagined, more work than anyone could possibly imagine. Im currently playing Dreamfall Chapters and on the 2nd Book right now. Like Book 4, the classic adventure game puzzles take a back seat to delivering a lot of narrative exposition to the proponents of this series who have been aching for it since Dreamfall Chapters first made clear its intent to bring the overarching. That’s a painful amount of money for a small - and cash-strapped - studio like ours. If I had to summarize Book 5 of Dreamfall Chapters in two words, rather than the several thousand to follow, it'd be 'answers' and 'catharsis'. It ended up costing Red Thread at least $100,000 in production costs - and that doesn’t factor in the loss of income and added costs to Book Four.Īll things considered, the final price tag is probably in excess of $150,000. The port ended up taking a team of 4–5 developers four months, spending at least half their time on the port, working overtime to compensate for the mounting delays. It wouldn’t cost much it was a no-brainer.
We figured they could do this on the side while spending most of their time on the next episode. We’d originally estimated the port to take a couple of months for a couple of developers, working part-time on the project - primarily environment artists, who’d have to go over all the lights in the game to re-bake shadow maps.
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