One-man development team Dylan Browne is working on his solo project Caffeine, built on Unreal Engine 4. This puzzle solving horror adventure has a ways to go, but a playable Pre-Alpha Demo is available to give you a taste of its unsettling atmosphere.
You’ll take point as a young boy wandering a caffeine mining station, and soon realize you’re not alone. Immediately upon beginning the game, the air is already thick with a feeling of disconnection. You’re not sure whether reality is reacting to you with hostility, or if you can walk these corridors unscathed.
Although there’s a lot more content than the last build we featured, there still isn’t a whole lot of interaction going on as of yet. However, the goal of the demo is to get you acquainted with the games’ atmosphere and it accomplishes this surprisingly well. You’ll find yourself wondering if your safety has been compromised, or if you’ll be able to get to your destination alive. There are notes from scientists left behind, particularly post-it notes attempting to convey a warning about a man who’s been watching you. There is a chance to include a lot of lore and back story through the methods already developed, and we should see a good turnout in the near future.
The indiegogo campaign raised a little over $3000, not enough to cover hiring and licensing expenses, but that hasn’t stopped Dylan from continuing production. We’ve reached out to the developer for some updated information on the project as we’d love to find out what happened in this eerily deserted space station.
After the above article, we’ve followed up with an interview with the developer focusing on the future of this game:
So you’re building all of this in Unreal Engine 4, have you worked with previous iterations of the engine in the past? If so what kinds of projects were you involved with?
I have worked with Unreal Engine 3 before the current version came out, as Caffeine was running on that for around 2 months!.
Have you recruited the help of any environment artists to help with the level creation or are you doing all that yourself?
Everything in the game apart from music has been created by me, I enjoy being a solo developer… most of the time.
What are your main development goals for this project such as hiring artists, recruiting voice actors, etc?
I plan to be pretty much self-sufficient, most of the voice actors i have lined up are students at my local universities and a few online, that being said I am not up to a voice acting stage of development yet. In terms of hiring others, the only spot I could foresee would be a skilled programmer to make some modifications to the engine.
I noticed your indiegogo didn’t hit its goal, so do you plan on crowdfunding again to make this project happen?
Sadly no, I am currently planning what to do next in terms of funding and I am deciding between finding an investor, putting Caffeine up for pre-order or doing a better planned Kickstarter, at the moment its early days and I am getting opinions of all of my backers on the subject.
The game atmosphere has an incredible structure already with the post-it note storytelling and its almost tension-breaking humour. What kinds of elements will we see in the future that will accentuate this?
Thanks!, well I think that adding in personal possessions of each character into the game will accentuate this very well and create the perfect atmosphere that I am chasing.
Do you feel like you have the support thusfar to continue on? And if not, what do you need to sustain this project?
At this time I feel I have a great amount of support and can continue, I will need more in the future but so far the community has been great and as a whole a heap of gamers have shown interest in it so that is great.
Mr. Dylan sounds like a self-sufficient developer, and for us that means his vision of the game will be largely unchanged, keeping to its’ original goal. Without a big team dissecting his concepts and having the community for feedback, this will be quite a unique title and we’ll keep you up to date should any new content be released! Again, the demo can be downloaded here.
