Posted June 17, 2023 by Fraser Brumley
I've updated Dead Space Demake again. This will probably be the final update. It doesn't change any of the gameplay but it adds a little intro cutscene adapted from the original Dead Space.
I had the idea for this before I released the Demake but I didn't want to keep delaying the release so I decided not to work on it for the initial release. I wasn't even sure if what I wanted to do would be possible but once I had the time to look into it I worked out a way to get what I wanted. In Dead Space the intro section is all playable from the usual Dead Space third person perspective so I had to work out a way to get proper camera angles. It turns out that a while ago a debug PS3 copy of Dead Space leaked which had a debug free cam mode attached which made it possible to actually set up camera angles. This worked really well but I needed a way to effectively save and replay shots so I used cheat engine to find the memory location of the XYZ coordinates and rotation of the free camera and then saved out the values to hotkeys so I could keep re running save states and then switching to the angle I wanted. The only section that didn't work out this way was the hallway run scene and elevator shot towards the end. To do that I had to use this first person mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/deadspace/mods/37/
I'm really happy with how it turned out it's pretty much exactly as I imagined it. I think it doesn't quite hit the exact vibes of a PS1 FMV cutscene but It's pretty close. It also just makes the demake feel a lot nicer, there wasn't really any context to the demake originally but now there's this perfect flow from the end of the cutscene to the start of the gameplay.