**Crafting Fractured Hours – A Sci-Fi Game Where Reality Bends
Have you ever played a game where the world shifts right before your eyes, revealing hidden paths, alternate realities, and secrets locked away in another dimension? That’s exactly what we’re building in Fractured Hours, a sci-fi adventure that challenges perception and gameplay mechanics like never before—and we’re doing it all in Unreal Engine!
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We are a team of undergraduate developers from VIT Bhopal, India, working together to create a game that redefines how players interact with their environment. Game development in India is booming, and we’re excited to be part of this growing movement! 
It’s been a wild journey so far, filled with breakthroughs, technical challenges, and late-night problem-solving sessions. But that’s what makes game development exciting, right? Let’s dive into what we’re building and the problems we’re tackling!
What is Fractured Hours?
Imagine stepping into a futuristic, dystopian world where physics, perception, and time itself don’t play by the usual rules. In our game, reality isn’t static—it shifts. The player must navigate a constantly evolving environment, unlocking new paths by phasing between dimensions.
Think of it as Half-Life meets Control, but with a twist—your environment, NPCs, and even enemies react to these dimensional changes. This means that puzzles, combat, and exploration are all deeply tied to how the world shifts around you.
Key Features We’re Developing:
Multidimensional Gameplay – Players can shift between dimensions to solve puzzles and escape threats.
AI-Driven NPCs – Enemies and characters behave differently based on dimensional shifts.
Atmospheric Sci-Fi Environments – Inspired by games like Prey and Bioshock, we’re crafting immersive, eerie landscapes.
Storytelling Through the Environment – Every object and location has a backstory, revealed through visual cues and hidden lore.
Challenges We’re Facing (And How We’re Solving Them)
Every game developer knows that big ideas come with big challenges. Here are some of the toughest problems we’re tackling:
Seamless Dimension Shifting 
In most games, environments are static, but Fractured Hours demands real-time changes based on dimensional shifts. Making this transition feel smooth and natural—without breaking immersion—is a huge challenge.
Solution: We’re using Unreal Engine’s level streaming & material shaders to load alternative states dynamically while keeping performance optimized.
Balancing Atmosphere & Performance 
We want highly detailed sci-fi environments, but we also need to maintain smooth performance. Too many dynamic elements can slow things down.
Solution: Instead of constantly rendering multiple versions of the world, we pre-load assets based on proximity, using distance-based triggers to optimize rendering.
AI That Reacts to Dimensional Changes 
How do you make enemies and NPCs react to something as unpredictable as reality shifting? If an enemy sees you in one dimension, but you disappear into another, should they remember where you were or behave differently?
Solution: We’re experimenting with state-based AI that keeps track of a player’s last known location and adjusts aggression levels based on time spent in each dimension.
The Road Ahead
Right now, we’re in full-speed development mode, working day and night to finalize mechanics, refine level design, and polish the gameplay experience. Our goal is to launch a beta version and put India’s indie game development scene on the map!
Game development in India is evolving rapidly, and we want to contribute by creating something that’s not just fun but also technically and creatively ambitious. We hope Fractured Hours inspires more developers in India and beyond to push boundaries in game design.