Iron Lung is David Szymanski’s claustrophobic submarine horror game — you’re welded into a rusty one-man sub and dropped into an ocean of blood on a moon, trying to photograph nine points of interest and make it out alive. It’s small, it’s got a movie adaptation now, and I figured it’d make a perfect candidate for a full Unreal Engine remaster.
The Frog
Iron Lung’s fan-favorite monster started as a mirrored default cube in Blender, built off the game’s original frog texture — which turns out to actually be a mirrored viperfish. I sculpted the face, carved out an open mouth, and gave him some fat, juicy lips. My first hand-drawn texture came out too small and read as an obvious pencil sketch once scaled up, so I redrew it much bigger — half a face, mirrored for symmetry — and layered a colored pass on top. Add two rows of teeth and he’s done: thick, toothy, and reminiscent of the original.
The Submarine
The cockpit started life as a rusty oil tank, flattened into a cylinder and kitbashed with pipes, valves, and an industrial caged light. Almost everything inside is repurposed from something else — a walkie-talkie chopped up into a display, a military radio cannibalized for dials and a number pad, a round window reused as the sonar screen. I ended up building my own gauges from scratch with a gauge generator after nothing off-the-shelf fit right, and at the very end I noticed every single gauge was reading the exact same value, so I randomly rotated all of them to look natural.
The Level and Its Points of Interest
The ocean floor itself comes straight from the in-game map: I traced its shape, converted it to a vector, then extruded that into 3D geometry in Blender, sloping the walls to match the original. Scattered across it are all nine points of interest — bones, pipes, a building with spiral columns, skulls built from a reshaped pig skull, a curved spine made from snake vertebrae, a glowing emissive void, an obelisk, and two rocks that are apparently just called “IDK” and “the monolith.” There’s also a secret to find: the SM8, a broken-off wreck of another submarine.
Finishing Touches
The loading screen is oil-painted (a two-month drying mistake I wouldn’t repeat), the pickup note was hand-written and dirtied up in Affinity Photo, and the map got the same faded, water-stained treatment. As you explore, scripted events kick in: the sub floods with blood near the end, a fire breaks out that you fight with a comically undersized extinguisher, steam leaks hiss from three spots, and a fake radar blip orbits the camera to sell the illusion something’s circling you. Find all nine points of interest, flood the sub, and catch the eyeball — hand-drawn in pencil and charcoal — and the frog shows up to end you.
