A Sneak Peek on Visuals & Lighing Design in The Callisto Protocol

The Callisto Protocol team provided a behind-the-scenes look at the game's visuals and lighting and explained what it did to create the game's tense feel.

Ars Technica has released a new video that provided a short glimpse of how Striking Distance Studios works on lighting design for its upcoming survival horror The Callisto Protocol.

The studio's head Glen Schofield, along with art director Demetrius Leal and lighting director Atsushi Seo, showed Striking Distance's dailies room where the team goes through different aspects of the game and demonstrated the process of how the team comes up with the decisions regarding the game's visuals and lighting.

Schofield explained that the team always wants to make sure that the lighting is in the right place so that it could reflect the tense mood of the game.

"All due respect to everything else in the game, lighting, and audio are 80% of horror and so we spend a lot of time on them," Schofield said. "Lighting goes in before audio. So lighting is our first glimpse at how tense the game is. How scary is it?"

The team has also spoken about its work with Unreal Engine noting that the engine was the foundation for achieving a high level of realism in the game and showed off several shots which demonstrated how Unreal Engine renders look compared to real photos.

In addition, the devs spoke about the preproduction phase of the game revealing that at that stage, the team prepared an extensive art bible with visual examples which helped them make a clear vision of how they wanted the game's architecture and monsters to look as well as create interesting and effective lighting techniques for the game.

"It was a great benefit to come out really early on in this project, having a really strong vision from Glen and understanding what we wanted to go for. That allowed us to spend a lot of time doing a lot of research and getting references of modern-day applications, say of prisons or other things," Leal said. "We wanted to have that authenticity to make the game relatable. Like the game's supposed to be 300 years in the future. And immersion was so important for us, especially in a horror game."

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