Join members of the development team at Supermassive Games for a behind-the-scenes look at how they created Cedar Hills, a town haunted by its dark past, in this new video for the upcoming cinematic horror game, The Casting of Frank Stone. The Casting of Frank Stone will be available on PC, PS5 (PlayStation 5), and Xbox Series X/S on September 3, 2024.
The Casting of Frank Stone is set in the world of Dead by Daylight. In the summer of 1980, four friends set out to make their mark on horror cinema. What they capture will trigger the unthinkable. Decide their fate, develop their relationships, and guide their shoot of Murder Mill, a soon-to-be cult classic with an insidious influence.
The Casting of Frank Stone is set in the world of Dead by Daylight. In the summer of 1980, four friends set out to make their mark on horror cinema. What they capture will trigger the unthinkable. Decide their fate, develop their relationships, and guide their shoot of Murder Mill, a soon-to-be cult classic with an insidious influence.
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00:00The Casting of Frank Stone is set in an imaginary piece of north-western America, Cedar Hills,
00:11a town that's probably gone through a lot of regeneration.
00:15It was a town built around a steel mill, and that steel mill went bust, and it became repopulated
00:22and then become redeveloped in a careless kind of way, so you have a lot of clash and
00:27a lot of bits left over, so there are old pieces amongst the new pieces, there are people
00:32who've come here because it's close to where they need to work, and they don't have any
00:35of the values of the original inhabitants, and the original inhabitants' ideas become
00:39lost, but they're still there under the surface to be picked out.
00:44On the outskirts of the town is the Cedar Steel Mill, and it's a massive industrial
00:48complex, and we see it earlier in the game when it's still active, and you've got the
00:53giant furnace tower, which kind of looks like this industrial haunted house, and then
00:57later in the game, we revisit the same location, and it's since been closed, and it's been
01:01abandoned, and it's all overgrown for over a decade, due in no small part to the events
01:06that happened earlier in the game.
01:08One of the really great things about it is when the player, but also some of the characters
01:11are able to retread some of the same footsteps that characters do earlier in the game, and
01:16you start to see an echo of some of the tragic events that happened there in the past.
01:21There are particular locations where there's a real sense of death in the air.
01:25What is that?
01:29There's one particular location in the mill that's quite key, and that's the furnace chamber.
01:33Earlier in the game, the furnace chamber's alive and brimming with fire and energy.
01:38When you then find it again in 1980, there's been lots of overgrowth, lots of rust, and
01:43a sense of nature taking over, but in this particular place, anything that has grown
01:47here has since died.
01:50For whatever reason, there's just something that's off about this place, it's just killed
01:54anything that's tried to grow here.
01:56It's a place I'd like to go and make a movie.
01:58What do you guys think?
02:00I say we do it.
02:01Sounds good.
02:02We are using Unreal 5.
02:04We've been really focused on that from the very beginning.
02:07It's one of the first projects from Supermassive that's using that platform, which is very
02:10exciting.
02:11We've been able to harness lots of new technologies because of that engine upgrade.
02:16We're using Lumen for our environment lighting, which gives us a lot more flexibility and
02:21increased quality.
02:22We're also using Nanite for all of our environments, which allows our artists to include so much
02:27more detail in the final product than they were before, which is very exciting.
02:31Nanite's this new virtualized geometry, which enables us to have incredibly detailed geometry
02:37throughout all our environments.
02:39So whereas before we'd have to heavily optimize all of our game meshes so they can run efficiently,
02:44it also means that we can do our own scanning for photogrammetry, which is where you take
02:49a lot of photographs of something and you can generate a completely lifelike representation
02:53of whatever that object is.
02:54So with Nanite, we can just drop it in as is, and we keep all that incredible detail
02:59and realism in our environments.
03:02There's a particular road that's just about 20 minutes from the studio, and we went out
03:06and we scanned the verges.
03:07They've got these really high verges, and the road surface itself, because it happened
03:11to be the time of year that's correct for the games, we went out and we did it when
03:15we could, which is in the autumn.
03:17The leaves all looked exactly right, and that now appears in the game.
03:22I hope that's something that players start to look around and they start to see some
03:25of these nods we're making to Dead by Daylight, and some of the iconography of the entity
03:29and the lore and all that kind of stuff there.
03:32As they explore further, we're hoping to strike this balance where it's kind of scary, you
03:36don't want to press on, you want to just get back in the car and go, but there's something
03:40about the place that piques your interest and you want to go and explore it, maybe against
03:44your better judgment.
03:45I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but there's more than one way into that mill.