Ascetic Experience
A downloadable experience for Windows
Take a short hike towards the coast in this realistic and cinematic gameplay segment that leverages many of the advanced tools Unreal Engine 5 has to offer.
You can play the game with keyboard/mouse or a controller. Headphones are recommended.
Ascetic Experience offers an immersive journey that includes seamless transition between cinematics and gameplay. The environment is filled with high quality assets and lush vegetation thanks to Nanite. There is also only one light source illuminating the whole scene thanks to Lumen GI.
Here is a playlist that includes videos related to the project:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvCJhqHvuC0T1D1HUCgyfl5F2Vu9vY5Ey&si=yTvobUNO...
Visit the ArtStation page to see more content (Progress GIFs etc.):
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OvPm5g
The game allows you to switch cameras in menus to view the environment from different angles.
There is also a slider in the main menu that allows you to manipulate time which rotates the light source (the sun) along with changing cloud formation giving you the ability to control a timelapse animation.
In the settings menu, you can activate Black Bars that will appear during the cutscenes. The settings menu also includes many Post-Process options that allow you to change the scene's overall visual style.
It took me around two months to create this experience and most of it was performance optimization. It was a challenge, but I managed to turn a render quality scene into a playable one.
I managed to get the game working on a 4090 system, but I wasn't able to test it on any other configuration. I added many graphics options to make sure that it would be possible to play the game regardless of your setup even if the visuals will see major downgrade.
WARNING: The game seems to have issues on most systems due to heavy toll on VRAM and RAM. It was able to run on a - i9 13900K, 64GB RAM, 4090 - setup. Please consider this before downloading.
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5800X3D, 16Gb ram, AMD 6900XT - after fairly long load/wait, black screen for a bit, then error dialog pops up "Fatal Error"
Any info I can get you that would help?
Thanks for the feedback! I was able to understand the issue. I could only test the game on one configuration, so I couldn't figure out the problem before. It seems like the problem is not related to any graphical setting. Regardless of the settings, the overall toll that the project has on the GPU's VRAM along with overall RAM causes problems.
I was able to optimize this experience to work on a top high-end PC (i9-13900K-64GB RAM-4090). I made a lot of compromises to do so, but at this point, I'm not able to optimize further since the point of the project was to turn a render quality scene to a real-time playable gameplay segment.
* I also learned that the project could not be opened on a PC with a 4070 graphics card (~RX 7800 XT).
I'm sure there are ways to optimize further, but it may negatively impact the overall quality. I'm also a solo dev, and I think I'm at my limits here :)
If I ever figure out a way to make the game work on a configuration similar to yours without major compromises, I'll let you know.
Sorry for not being able to help you out for now, but I will make sure to mention this issue in the description.
Again, thanks for letting me know!
Happy to help! I saw the video on uToob and wanted to find out how that would run on my system. Even if it's not at all - thanks for making it available to try! It's amazing what Unreal offers - it'll be awesome to see what things look like in the upcoming years!
Hi, so I download this game and tried open it its say some error crashed
Please let me know what the error was, and I'll try my best to help. There is a possibility that the project can be too much to handle for most PCs since I mainly targeted high-end systems. I was unfortunately not able to test the game on different configurations.