today i want to share my thoughts about horror survival games and movies. yesterday, i watched "event horizon" on tv, dunno how often i did during the last years, but i like this film really much and i kept asking myself, "what did they do to create such a creepy atmosphere? how do they reach something neiter doom³ or fear managed to create?"

first, i made a sheet about the effects that were used:

- loudly shutting doors
- flickering light, few lights at all
- hallways that look one like the other with whispering voices
- sudden (dis-/re-)appearing of people
- general tensed situation, an evil that could be felt already finally breaks out
- being out there in a hopeless situation with nothing in your hands
- closed rooms
- fear of darkness, the unknown, death -> the confrontation with your fears
- sudden changes of environment & people
- the you-can-trust-noone-effect (multiple change of the good-bad-scheme)
- weird sounds, squeaks...
- connecting 2 normally unconnected things
- experiments with law and moral and the punsihment for that (try to outfox physics and you will create immense damage)
- exaggerate sizes (e.g. big&bigger evil machines)
- colours and their effect (associations with dark green, blood red, alert red, velvet black, deep blue)
- elemination of trusted rules and physical laws

what does a horror movie seperate from an action game? i guess it's violence. violence, blood and gore alone do not make you feel uncomfortable. you cannot experience fear with a gun in your hands, heavily fortified in your armor suit, i think that is what doom and fear do wrong. you do not get too deep into contact with your fears with a gun in your hands, you can shoot everything that does not belong to this world. but that contradicts one of the basic rules, you must be in a help- and hopeless situation, you must create an uncomfortable place in the player's head. with a gun in the hands you can hide behind it and suppress your real fears.


to what a kind of game would that lead?

i'd like to hear your thoughts about it.

Yesterday I bought King Kong the game. Im about 1 hour in. The first thing I noticed is how incredibly they captured the atmosphere of skull island. Its very scary. There's fog everywhere, its raining, lightning, etc. Great atmosphere. Then, there's the sound. Standing in the jungle for a few seconds will freak you out. You hear squeaks and scratches, and the jungle floor crack as creatures run around. On top of that, is the crazy 1 against 1000 odds that you have.

Outtake: You stand on the edge of a cliff, admiring the incredible scenery. A huge bat comes and scoops up your friend. More bats appear, and they dive unto you claws first. Youve got nothing. You run and grab a bone spear trying to shove the bats away. (30ft wingspan) Finally you aim and impale the bat, who plummets to the ground. Then its the chase. the cries for for help from afar. You run through thick grass trying to get to your friend. On the way you get confronted by raptors. Some more spear throwing gets rid of them. Then its onto "the peak". the scary edge of the path where scary creatures live. Its a dash across the ledge to get to the paradropped crate, which contains a shotgun in this case. On your way to it you take aim and break it with a spear, and quickly grab the gun. By now most of the bats are circling in for a kill. Now its a matter of "bring it on biatch!" You blow most of them out of the sky, but the big mother dropped your friend on top of the peak. Now you run to the top, and start shooting the big bat as he does low flyby's. You soon run out of ammo. Grab some more spears, and do some accurate throwing and then jumping out of the way. In the end a fatal spear makes the bat fall down onto the peak.

It was intense. And I really enjoyed it. Its about survival, not about taking on the creatures. But you sure do take them on. So far, I can reccomend King Kong. Im sure we can learn from it.

the peak

I pick up your "you have no weapon"!

That's what I'm interested in.
What can a player do, when he has no weapon. He can run, run away, run around edges, in hope that the enemy loose your track, you can run through a door and close it behind you, hold the door against the pressure of the enemy, against his hits.
Adding physics, you could grab the things lying around, throughing them at the enemy, building barricades, you can climb ladders, and kick them off the wall...

I don't know why Silent Hill and such games needed pistols and knifes...

because if the wouldn't had pistols and knives, it would be too hard, i guess. such gameplay just works with the right level design. but still an interesting idea, creating a horror game without weapons... maybe i'll speak about that with my team these days... apropos no weapons: do you know "penumbra"? pretty interesting... maybe you should have a look on it. (ok, you use dynamite, but thats all...)

I think the way in which players acquire weapons is still quite unrealistic. Some games do not allow you to pick up the weapons of fallen enemies, which in my opinion is rather silly. Another thing that seems quite common, is that you start the game starting with already a weapon. I don't like this. In Half-life they did a good job at this though, but it's not like you have to earn weapons, you just get them at some point. In prince of persia 3d or Sands of time, not sure, there was an interesting intro into getting your first weapon. You had to push a crate onto an enemy and then pick-up his weapon. Thát kind of things should be implemented more in games. It's silly to start a game with already 2 weapons...

Cheers

Has anyone seen the movie Into the blue? With Jessica Alba? um anyway... Something I picked up in that movie is the way they expressed chaos. Everything seems under control, then slowly it starts to spiral out of control. I thought about using this concept in a game. What if you give the player a gun with 2 magazines in the beginning, but no ammo throughout the rest of the game. He will feel confident, safe behind his gun. As he realizes there's no more ammo pickups on strategic places, he will start to get uneasy and be more use the gun sparse, until he is all out of ammo. He then flips the gun around, and swings it around at the barrel to hit the enemies. Until it breaks. Then he has to make use of all the objects around him, and use the terrain to beat the foes. But the emotion of fear and panic should make him do crazy things. Then, a whole lot further give him a gun again, say as he rendezvous's with allies, but this quickly turns into a nightmare again. This roller coaster ride type gameplay could work. Each time he gets knocked down, it should be worse than before.

hm...

NO weapons doesn´t mean: no chance...(wepaons defined as physical/psychical tools wich allow yo to destroy your opponent or enemy...)


you can construct some traps (with objects you collect)...and catch your opponents;
you can earn skills by doing trial of courage...for example: a hurdle-race with burning hurdles....if you survive: the "great beast of fire" has no more chance to kill/torture or beat you.

and so on...and so on...

greetz roald


roalds home: www.playpublic.com

I really like pseudo time limits when it comes to shooters. A vault that you're in and you need to escape before the bomb blows everything up. Of course you have unlimited time but the red alarm lights and a voice telling you "all personal is to be evacuated immediately" is certainly picking me up. Max Payne did a great job in the first game. There's the restaurant which is prepared with bombs and everything's on fire while you're trying to escape. The escape route is pretty obvious but the feeling that you can die the next second is cool.

In my opinion its important to use the player´s imagination: you will never create something which really scares the player to death, but if you give him just hints what COULD be hunting him his imagination will do your work. i think if the player doesn´t know exactly what is happening, but you give him hints that will do best. of course this is quite inpracticable when it comes to design enemys, because you can´t model something that doesn´t exist, but implementing this would be a huge step towards a very good horror game.