Rob Seres and Keith Leonard - developers of Dreamforge's classic horror game, Sanitarium - have formed a new company called Sword And Spirit and are developing a fully 3D psychological horror title for PC.

“We almost made a game like this a few years ago, and I've been looking forward to it ever since: mixing intense adventure game play with high-end 3-D graphics. ” explained Keith Leonard.

“Shades of Sanity is about a schizophrenic patient named Joseph Springer who moves back in with his ex-wife, only to one day find himself alone in a deserted house, plagued with visions of oppression, isolation and murder. “ said Rob Seres. “The game will consist of situational puzzles based on supernatural logic, as well as others relying on inventory or in-game physics."

The Sassafras engine was created using OpenGL, and has been modeled to make real time changes to speed up development. Light properties, particles effects, texture compression and updates, sound properties, materials, performance options, and game code and be changed on the fly to see instant results. These features help with rapid iteration which is a key to an efficient and happy content creation pipeline. 3D Studio Max integration allows for a simple interface to create visuals that do what the artist expects in a familiar tool.

Sassafras is a game engine , targetting PC and Mac systems featuring a modern light prepass rendering engine, PhysX (tm), 3d positional audio, multithreading, SIMD acceleration, a custom scripting engine, and more. The rendering engine supports eye-space reconstruted ambient occlusion, thin lens simulation depth of field, deferred reflections, an offline ray tracing light occlusion solver, deferred refraction, deferred subsurface scattering, anisotropic hair rendering, Cook/Torrence BRDF as standard, projection maps, shadow maps, volumetric light occlusions, and many more features. Threading support accelerates skinning, particle simulation and even some script functions on multi-core systems. Sassafras is constantly under development to increase performance and add new features.
(http://shadesofsanity.com/#engine)