I started this project in the middle of 2021 after my computer broke and I was left playing old Xbox 360 games to pass the time while waiting for the computer to be repaired. I'd never played Dead Space before but playing it for the first time in 2021 I was hooked by the simple but effective design decisions that made horror and action blend together in a way that few other games manage. I'd been planning to work on a horror game utilising the throwback playstation 1 style for a while and so I decided that demaking Dead Space would be a fun project to learn the style.

This project didn't really have me doing a lot of design work on my own but the depth I went to to recreate the levels and mechanics of Dead Space helped me get a much deeper understanding of the design decisions made by the original developers. I learnt so much about how they had put the game together, why they made certain choices, and what tricks they'd used to lay out the level.

Beyond learning from Dead Space itself I also learnt a lot technically in this project. This was the first time I used Unreal and it was a really interesting experience learning a new engine, understanding the differences between engines, and how to apply concepts I knew in Unity to this new engine.

I also spent a lot of time learning the Playstation 1 style. I went pretty hard on trying to accurately recreate the feeling of a Playstation 1 game including all the graphical quirks like affine texture mapping errors and vertex quantisation. Making assets in the style was also a unique challenge sticking very strictly to pixel art texture restrictions and the low poly counts for 3D models.

Overall I'm very proud of what I managed to achieve and the accuracy I got in remaking the look of playstation 1 styled games.