Check out the game page here on the Nintendo Store!

GASP at our per phase optimisation!
SWOON at our totally reengineered lightmapping!
MARVEL at how we went from 100W to 4W in 12 Months!

“The Best Version Of A Genuine Classic.”
Upload VR

“Superhot VR is another game that feels even more precise and intuitive on the Quest.”
Stuff

“Just when we thought that Superhot VR could not get any better, the Quest port proves us wrong.”
The VR Realm

You can check out the game on Quest here!

Sublevel Zero Redux brings a remastered campaign, difficulty modes, new enemies and unlocks, and much more. As the definitive version of the game we couldn’t be more excited to get it to all of you. It’s a great moment to finally get all of this content out there, and to have the VR version done! It was back in 2014 that we first had the inspiration for this game, and it wasn’t long before we were dreaming big and imagining how awesome it would be on the (not-even-out-yet) Oculus Rift DK2. It’s been a long road, as covered in previous posts, and we’re so glad to have delivered something we’re proud of.

If you’ve not bought the game already, or know someone who might want to, check out the main page for links to buy from a store of your choice!

Here’s a looooong (but not complete!) list of new features:

Intro Campaign
Intended to familiarise new and existing players to the game. It’s shorter and easier to introduce the core game mechanics. Once completed, the regular campaign is unlocked.

Restructured Campaign
We’ve introduced difficulty modifiers that scale to a variety of different player skill levels and affect enemy health, drop rates, crafting costs and Nanite life. This provides an easier introduction, with an even tougher challenge for veterans.

As you progress, harder alternate levels unlock that add more challenge as you improve. You can track your progress through the game on the new Campaign Progression tab on the menu.

Expanded Procedural Generation
We’ve added over 70 new rooms to further expand the game and add more variety to levels.

Teleporters
To reduce backtracking, Teleporters are now available at certain points to help you get back onto the critical path through levels.

New Enemies
We’ve created two brand-new enemies that add deadly new twists to combat.

Elite Enemies
Progressing through the game will unlock harder variations of existing enemies. These guys take more hits and punch back even harder, adding another layer of difficulty for the most experienced pilots.

Enemy Bestiary
By destroying enemies, this unlocks trophies in the Codex tab. Each entry gives you more information about different enemy types as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

New Starting Classes
The Seeker class is specifically designed for players to take advantage of homing weapons such as the Homing Swarm and Smartgun right from the start. It’s also perfect for VR players.

The Reaver is an experimental ship bolted together by a dangerous madman. Even rumoured to indulge in cannibalism, his regard for the safety of others and himself was legendarily lacking.

Save and Quit
Leaving mid-game now gives you the option to continue from the start of your current level. One thing to note is that Hard difficulty modes disable this feature.

VR Support
Full support for Oculus and Vive. Weapons such as the Smartgun, Homing Missiles and Homing Swarms have lock-on capabilities which can be utilised with head tracking. There’s also a wide variety of different comfort options to suit your individual needs, including a novel “Comfort Calibrator” mode to help you quickly find the settings you want!

Optimisations and Performance
Levels load faster and gameplay is smoother thanks to a bunch of optimisations. There’s also an option to turn on banking which adds a great sense of weight to the ship.

Localisation
We’ve added French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian localisations so you can enjoy Sublevel Zero in multiple languages.

In finalising the VR version of Sublevel Zero Redux, we’ve done extensive research and development into comfort. Sublevel Zero is a perfect case study for sim-sickness – a game where players move and rotate freely in all directions, often with no well-defined up or down orientation, at high speed, while dealing with intense combat and enemies coming from all angles. Our work has led to a number of really useful conclusions, and we’ve presented our work at conferences such as Unite Europe and Develop:VR.

For many players, “tunnelling” makes all the difference

As a result, the VR and non-VR versions of Sublevel Zero Redux have diverged not just in aspects like UI design, but even in physics. The ship’s handling is actually significantly “twitchier” in VR, while maximum turn rate is decreased. This decreases the amount of time spent accelerating rotationally, and thus decreases the amount of force the brain expects to feel. Furthermore, we found these tweaks were needed to make the game feel the same – in VR turning felt uncontrollably fast despite being identical. Added to this is the “tunnelling” effect seen in the game. When the ship turns, this reduces peripheral vision, from which the brain gets a large amount of its sense of motion. We’ve found for many players this makes the difference between a comfortable game and an instant vomit-fest.

Taking inspiration from the work others have done in this area, we’ve expanded the tunnelling options even further. Google Earth VR introduced a novel twist, by not just blacking out peripheral vision, but replacing it with a “grid”. This can work wonders to give players a solid frame of reference, making the motion “on screen” seem disconnected from reality. Adding this mode has given us some really positive results.

Basic tunnelling

Cockpit tunnelling

Grid + cockpit tunnelling

We’ve also added a mode to exclude the cockpit from the tunnelling effect. Since the cockpit is already a fixed frame of reference, it makes sense to keep it visible. Finally, up til now the tunnelling effect has been driven only by turning the ship. Players can now select two other modes – turning plus acceleration, and turning plus movement. In the former, tunnelling also kicks in when the ship is accelerating, and in the latter, is always present whenever the ship moves at all. These modes can really help motion-sensitive players enjoy the game.

Tunnelling presets and options

Performance and Optimisation

Getting the game to run smoothly in VR has been a tricky task. While the look of the game is colourful and stylised, early decisions on the underlying technology to deliver that look have come to define the performance aspects of the game under the extreme requirements of VR.

Primarily among these is the procedural generation. Early on – well before the true performance requirements of VR were established – we decided to use deferred lighting for Sublevel Zero. This meant we could use fully-dynamic lighting, with hundreds of lights, rather than having to bake lighting into the rooms used in the procedural generation. Unity’s system of light baking was at the time impossible to use with procedural generation, as it linked baking to levels, not individual objects. So we either had to create our own baking system – infeasible with our team and budget – or use deferred lighting.

This decision served us incredibly well for the most part. It allowed us to create and control a unique, vibrant, neon-saturated look that perfectly complemented the feel of the game, and on regular systems, run totally smoothly. But it later became clear that deferred lighting was VR’s nemesis. It saves CPU time, but pushes the GPU hard. And in VR, the number of pixels to render, and the number of times per second they must be rendered, is enormous. Valve estimate that the average VR game rendering to the Rift or Vive at 90fps is roughly equivalent to running a game in 4K at 50fps, pushing about 500 million pixels per second. In Sublevel Zero – lots of deferred lights writing each pixel multiple times – this becomes at least a billion pixels per second. Suddenly, our simple, stylised game becomes a bona-fide GPU melter.

Optimisation visualisation. Turquoise boxes show rooms which can be seen from the current room, but the player isn’t looking that way. Red boxes are rooms that can’t ever be seen from the current room.

We’ve managed to get this down with lots of small tweaks and tricks, like using the procedural generation data itself to work out which rooms the player can’t currently see, and turning them off. Various effects switch to a subtly lower quality setting in VR, and we now have two separate config files for all graphics settings (and also settings like screen shake) – one for VR, one for non-VR. So tweaking your quality settings in non-VR mode won’t mess up the performance of the game in VR, and vice versa. Finally, if your GPU is struggling, you can reduce the resolution in your headset with the “VR Resolution” setting. And likewise, if your machine is a beast, you can increase it for supersampling!

Conclusions

We’re hopeful that all of this will help players of all stripes get the most out of Sublevel Zero Redux in VR. Make no mistake – Sublevel Zero Redux will always be an intense game by its nature. We won’t compromise the fundamental core of the game – free, fluid movement and hardcore zero-g combat. This is probably not the VR game to show your grandparents. But we’ve worked hard to make it the best possible experience, and we hope you get hours of enjoyment out of it!

The cockpit’s scale was closer to helmet than spaceship

We had continued tweaking Sublevel Zero in the meantime so by now, “version 2” was quite different to what we made over those first 72 hours. We were considering using the game as a prototype to pitch a full project to publishers, and so trying a whole range of variations on the mechanics to polish the core concept and flesh out a real game.

In this context, VR support worked perfectly. As a cockpit space shooter, even with the limitations of the DK1 and DK2, immersion was uncanny. This was of course early days for the technology – people were still figuring out how to use and implement good VR support, and we were no exception. While the effect was exhilarating, there were some major issues. For example, the cockpit’s scale made it feel closer to a helmet than a spaceship. Nonetheless, the VR version gained traction quickly, with many in the nascent VR community even saying it was their favourite VR experience so far.

The Ludum Dare version of Sublevel Zero running on a Rift DK2

When we started development proper in October 2014 we were determined to design the game, if not for VR, then at least with VR in mind. As a small team of 5 – with only myself on full time to begin with, and Gary full time from a third of the way in – and with the VR market small and uncertain, it was impossible for us to prioritise VR development the way we would have liked. Throughout development it was possible to start the game in VR mode, but only really to check we hadn’t completely broken it! Performance, playability and comfort in VR were not key concerns. But fundamental decisions were made to ensure that the game would work in VR. The design of the cockpit, 3D HUD and menus, even the way the camera was attached to the ship all took this into account.

Allowing differences allowed us to make the game feel great both in and out of VR

We quickly found that VR- and non-VR design often conflicted. The initial goal was to have an identical game in both modes, but this proved, if not impossible, at least infeasible. The design constraints are fundamentally different, and compromise usually resulted in mediocrity. In practice then, many aspects of the game now change subtly between modes.

For a few examples; most cameras in the game get moved backward to compensate for VR’s restricted field of view, and to perceptually match the apparent scale of the cockpit. Post-processing effects such as bloom are rendered differently to avoid feeling like they’re attached to your eyes. The crosshair, rather than being at a fixed distance, gets drawn at the same depth as whatever is in front of the ship to seem more accurate and avoid feeling cross-eyed. The ship’s physics are subtly different in VR. This freedom allowed us to make the game feel great – rather than mediocre – both in and out of VR. And Sublevel Zero, if nothing else, hangs on the feeling of its flight and combat.

Solving all of these problems – and many more – was unfortunately not feasible during initial development. We resolved to focus on the non-VR version at least until after launch (October 2015). We managed to iron out enough kinks to launch very rough beta support for the DK2 the following month, and had our sights set on launching the full VR version in line with the consumer version of the Rift in early 2016. Shortly after Sublevel Zero launched however, our publisher went bust, and all of our plans disintegrated. We had been planning to release the console port and the VR version within about 6 months of the initial release, but this soon looked impossible. Without publisher backing, we had to deal with PR, marketing, liaising with upwards of 3 separate distributors, and post-launch support all on our own. Prioritising VR development and console porting over this just wasn’t feasible. Work on VR and console support was pushed to the background and continued slowly at best.

In mid-2016 we partnered with Merge Games to bring Sublevel Zero to PS4 and Xbox One. We decided to not only port but extend it, tweaking existing features, adding new ones, expanding the content and reworking the campaign and progression systems. This resulted in Sublevel Zero Redux. We knew from the start that we wanted to roll all this new content back into the original for free when we got the time, and Merge were completely happy with this. As such, we decided that not only would we release full VR support alongside the new features and content, we would re-launch Sublevel Zero as Redux on all platforms to mark the expansion. We’re so grateful to Merge, as their support has allowed us to bring the definitive version of the game to all of you.

Since the console release in March, we’ve been working hard to roll the Redux expansion back into the Windows, Mac and Linux version as well as finalising VR support. Particularly in the last couple of months, all our efforts have focused on VR. We’ve been optimising performance, tweaking the comfort options, and even adding some new features. We’ll have another post soon with lots more detail on VR performance and comfort.

It’s been a long road, but we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved, and we’re really excited to finally get this out the door! There’s a lot of new stuff for all players to get their teeth into, whether you’re playing Sublevel Zero Redux in VR or not. With easier modes, harder modes (for veterans and/or masochists), new enemies, new unlocks, VR support and more, there’s something for everyone. We hope you enjoy it!

Two players control two characters each, on the same controller. Each player’s future character must catch the other’s past character to win. And we’re proud to announce that SYNCHROCIDE won the “Best Company Team” award! Without further ado, here’s some gameplay!

The game is fully playable and can be downloaded from its Devpost page, and you can check out the other 43 fantastic entries on the Jamchester Devpost page.

Shape the Future

The theme of the jam was “Shape the Future”. There were loads of awesome interpretations of this theme, ranging from time travel to recreating historical events. Our take was a cyberpunk vision of parallel realities colliding. In this scenario, your past and future selves have appeared in the same time, along with your counterparts from the parallel dimension. Unless one side is eliminated, time and space will collapse. To win, you must commit SYNCHROCIDE – killing your parallel opposite.

Early on we had the idea to make a local multiplayer game where players share the same controller, and wanted to see how players would respond to not only sharing a controller, but having to multitask. Each player has to simultaneously attack and defend, as well as manage resources (the sprint stamina of their “past” character, which must be refilled by holding a bumper and wiggling the stick), while also holding down the trigger at all times as a “dead man switch” to prevent them ripping the controller away from the other player. All in all – it’s a lot to deal with!

The result is surprisingly tactical. We quickly found people using a wide variety of strategies (once they’d got their head around controlling two characters at once!) and it’s given us a lot of ideas on how we might expand the concept.

Sound and Music

We were fortunate enough to work with Richard Evans on composition and sound. Richard’s speciality is dynamic and interactive music, so even though time is precious in a game jam, we were all keen to make a cool music and sound system for the game. This worked out fantastically! I worked closely with Richard the whole time to design and implement the system, and his composition fit the theme perfectly.

We devised a system with multiple layers of music which would fade in and out, and layer on top of one another, according to various in-game variables. For example, when both “future” characters were near each other, an aggressive beat fades in, while if a “future” is about to catch a “past” two separate layers – drums and then screeching strings – are added to the mix. With these and other variables being totally independent, the music shifts constantly to reflect the situation and really is more than the sum of its parts. Thanks to his efforts, Richard got a well-deserved special mention when the Audio award was announced.

Visuals

Once the three of us decided upon the core mechanics, Gary began working on the art style. We realised early on that, due to how players had to hold the controller together at 45 degrees each, the game needed to be isometric to feel right.

There were a variety of different inspirations for the art of SYNCHROCIDE and it took us some time to develop a visual style we were happy with. We started by looking at existing isometric games such as Tokyo 42 and Monument Valley. Both have a beautiful art direction and instantly started to influence the visuals of our game. Complimenting this was a phenomenal retro cyberpunk project by Sinclair Strange that’s really stuck in our minds over the past few weeks.

Gary created a flat, colourful, appealing yet dark look that harks back to classic cyberpunk art while looking fresh and exciting. With a little time to spare, he even managed to put hovercars occasionally going past the scene, adding a feeling of life to the cityscape.

Conclusion

It’s not all roses. Ultimately we realised that the idea of having both players use the same controller held the game back a bit, limiting the complexity that players could deal with and artificially raising the learning curve. While it was fun seeing people play with the system, we’ll probably make a version 2 which allows two separate controllers. That said, without the shared controller concept, we probably wouldn’t have settled on the core multitasking mechanic that makes SYNCHROCIDE such a thrilling, challenging and competitive local multiplayer game.

Overall, we’re really proud of SYNCHROCIDE. The level of polish we’ve managed to give the game in those 40 hours has frankly astounded us. Our past game jam experience has been a key factor in this; we work smoothly, quickly and decisively, with fewer mistakes and more time polishing the final product. As well as producing something awesome, it’s always nice to take a (really stressful and sleepless) break from regular game dev and focus on something new. Jamchester in particular is a fantastic event like this, with a perfect mix of competition and collaboration. The quality bar is incredibly high, pushing jamming to its limits, but with so many experienced and professional teams, everyone’s more than happy to help each other out. And on that note, peace out.

-Luke

Judges Si Lumb and Gary Napper (far left & right) awarding the team (Richard, Luke and Gary)

Redux is an expanded, enhanced and remastered version of Sublevel Zero, and we’ve taken this opportunity to improve upon the original. With a revamped campaign, difficulty levels, a teleporter system, new enemies and unlockable elite variants of existing enemies, we’ve refined and extended loads of the game. We’ve put a lot of hard work into it and we’re very proud of the result!

But if you’re not a console gamer, don’t worry – we’re not going to leave PC gamers behind! More news before long…

So – if you’re interested in playing the first Descent-like 6DoF shooter on console in over a decade, Sublevel Zero Redux awaits! You can find links to buy on the PS4 and Xbox stores on the Sublevel Zero page, buy a limited PS4 Signature Edition boxed copy with collector’s art book and remastered OST CD, or buy a boxed retail copy for PS4 online.

We can’t thank you enough for all your support thus far, and we hope you enjoy the fruits of our labour!

-Sigtrap

We’ll get right to it – We’ve been blindsided by a nasty, last-minute bug with Sublevel Zero Redux. This unfortunately means that we’re going to miss the 22nd February release date. We can only apologise to anyone who’s pre-ordered the game and feel that we’ve let you down. This is certainly not the situation we wanted to be in.

We’re now looking at launching on Playstation 4 and Xbox One on March 7th/8th, although this could still change. The reason for such a long delay is that the game has to go through certification again to finalise our changes to the game. As soon as we can confirm the release date we’ll let you all know!

Apologies again, and thanks.
-Sigtrap