Total Revamp: Steam Page, Socials & Demo (Chasmal Fear)

The Complete Overhaul

Hey there friends! Although we were active more or less on our socials (especially X) when it came to announcements and news, we decided to focus most of our time on something that would completely change the feel and look of Chasmal Fear. This decision was brought by YOU, the player community - players, streamers, and everyone who tried our demo on Steam Next Fest in February.

Now, this decision was not made because the game was performing badly. The demo itself did quite great! Over 5500+ Wishlists during the festival, we surpassed 10,000 Wishlists now and entered the Popular Upcoming and Top Wishlists lists on Steam. The main reason was - when we started Chasmal Fear, we said that we’ll listen to the player community, and time and time again with our past games, it turned out that listening to what the players want can truly bring the game to the next level.

Before we started anything, the first thing we did was go through all of our socials, do polls, read comments, check forums, Reddit, Steam discussions, and write everything down in an Excel sheet, categorizing them by priority. Then, we talked about which things are more or less aligned with our vision for the game and what can be added to improve it.

That’s how this idea came to be (an idea that made us work as if there was a crunch period, but it was worth it!).

This new “change” consisted of going through the entire demo, from lighting to optimization, to level design, sounds, music, VFX, jumpscares, and most importantly: New monster models and mocap animations. We’ll talk about more about it down below.

The Changes (starting with rebranding)

Looking at our socials, covers, and everything in between, we realized that these photos and videos/trailers are quite old and do not necessarily represent the game itself anymore. That’s why we decided to carefully think it through and do some new concept art, covers, photos, and videos as soon as possible. The social media pages were all changed, including the Steam Store page material with the new look.

The Demo!

Ugh, I hope I’ll be able to remember all the changes we made to the demo. There were so many things changed, added, and tweaked that even we barely remember what was done. But, let’s start and see how it goes (you’ll forgive us if you’re surprised to find something in the new demo that is not written here):

• Added NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 support

• Added AMD FidelityFX support

• Inverted mouse option

• Added option to turn off/on camera lag (inertia and slow down of player camera and arms)

• Option to turn off the bodycam effect

• Changed the IES (texture) of the flashlight and tweaked intensity

• Optimized Async loading between areas (goodbye you damn fps drop!)

• Added a filtered pass on the overall camera to improve graphics while having even better performance

• Significantly reduced the number of draw calls (for those who do not know what that is: tells the graphics what to draw, how to draw - and it can be a real culprit for frames per second)

• Completely rebuilt lighting throughout the entire demo

• Added 200+ horror sounds

• Added 10 music tracks (Ambiental)

• Added monster event variations throughout all levels

• Added environmental sounds like hull creaking

• Improved projectile spawn (bullets)

• Added over 50+ mocap animations and blendspaces that trigger randomly for the monsters

• Monsters tweak: they’re now faster, more dangerous

• Reduced the