Silent Hill Demos by WayForward

Date: 2006/2011(?)
Developer: WayForward

In 2006, around the time when development of Silent Hill: Origins transitioned from Climax US to the UK office, WayForward Technologies pitched another handheld Silent Hill title for Nintendo DS. They built a rough one-room technical demo using imported James Sunderland character model and other Silent Hill 2 assets. Although the pitch failed to get Konami's attention, some years later WayForward was approached by Konami to develop a portable Silent Hill after all – this time for PlayStation Vita. This project would become Silent Hill: Book of Memories. Original demo for the game though looked very differently and was not yet a dungeon crawler which the final game came to be. It looked much more like a traditional Silent Hill demonstrating how normal and other worlds would look like in a single room. At this time "Konami was interested in doing something where it's more puzzly and it's got some isometric perspective to it", so the demo allowed easy switching between traditional over-the-shoulder and isometric camera views. The original idea was to have both perspectives in the game where you would use one camera type for combats and would zoom out to solve puzzles. As the concept didn't prove to be feasible doubling the efforts needed to model the assets, the isometric perspective became the sole one used in the final game.

Both demos were demonstrated as part of WayForward’s 24 hour gaming marathon to promote the end of their Shantae: Half-Genie Hero Kickstarter .

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