Development Log: Horror Game Part 3

Today is another post of design notes like Part 1, random thoughts and so on.  Sooner or later they'll be solidified and put in order.

This one mostly tackles the idea of monsters and player death.  It also gets into some questions about how to make things scary, what horror means, and considers videogame and movie examples for justification.

Scraps and Notes and Ideas for Horror Adventure

5/9

Consider how monsters truly work.

Should there be many, or very few?  Should they work basically as bosses only, and most of the world is puzzles?  Perhaps a monster roams the "year" freely, and gives chase when it spots you.  That way you are always running?

Perhaps that is that case, where there is one monster per year, and can't be defeated just by fighting them. Throughout each year, the player slowly learns some skill, or perhaps discovers how to defeat the monster near the end of the year, and once the monster is defeated, the player can move on to the next year.

Perhaps some years there is more than one monster. Maybe +1 monster each year? Although no two monsters can be defeated the same way.

The point of the game, of course, is survival, or part of it anyway, and you feel far too in control if you can easily defeat lots of monsters.  And even if you can't defeat them, and all you do is run, the more there are, the more actiony the game feels, and less scary.  Alien was scarier than Aliens. The fewer the number of monsters, the more weight each one gets.  Hence, Zombie movies aren't scary.

But there also needs to be an ebb and flow to danger, and I'm not sure if that's taken care of by safe zones.  Maybe you always want to be a little on edge outside, but you shouldn't necessarily be fearing for your life at all times.  Having too much of that is draining and overloads the player.

Gotta be very careful about overloading, because that's the biggest problem with horror games and movies that aren't scary.  After all, every great slasher flick has ONE killer, no more.

So, heck, would one monster a year be overdoing it? Considering how by the time you get to monster #10, you aren't scared at all?

Perhaps, each player gets ONE monster that chases them throughout the entire game, one monster that represents a culmination of all fears, and it's the puzzles the player has to solve combined with that one monster giving chase that create that sense of panic and fear.  "I gotta get this done and escape the level before the monster gets me!" etc.

Perhaps in year one and even two, you never see the monster, but it's alluded to (you hear it in another room, you see evidence of it destroying stuff in its path) which leads up to a creepy, chilling atmosphere.  So that the player DREADS meeting the monster long before he sees it.

Hmm... if each monster were unique, or unique enough per person, how do you kind of prevent too much metagame chatter? "My monster is blah blah", because that might ruin the illusion.  Unless each player has a "personal demon" which is more part of the world lore.  That may work.

It especially works with the yearly separation, because players in the same early year shouldn't KNOW about their demons for a little while, so they have no way to compare notes.

By the time the player gets to later years, there are fewer players anyway, because many of them have died.

MAYBE.

Seriously consider what death means in a videogame.  I play permadeath, but many players would HATE to get far and die, and throw a tantrum.  Not to say that's the core audience, but I would hate for any player to get frustrated by dying.

How can we make games that are horror and even SURVIVAL horror without ever truly being in danger?  Perhaps there is always an escape route, and the game is always fair to you, and you can even be injured without death? There has to be a solid way of freaking out the player, bringing them to the edge, even dangling them off, without dropping them.

Perhaps, as danger approaches, drop the player hints about how to escape.  Lead the player on to get them to survive, without making it completely obvious.  If they can't take the hints...?

Because this game is so high tension, it's no Dwarf Fortress, and losing is NOT fun.  I can't see how I could die, have to create a new character and start all over, and think it's all in good fun.

And there is NO WAY this is not permadeath.  If the player dies and can resurrect easily, there is no scare.  How often has the mood been completely killed in Silent Hill by dying?  Lizard boss in SH1, Apartment meeting with Pyramid Head in SH2, dying in the mall in SH3. All of these suck because you die from the slightest of errors, and then you suddenly come back.  How is the fear of death scary if I just saved?

Now also multiply that feeling of annoyance from because it happens later in the game.  Just like any awful MMO, death is a waste of time.

So instead of thinking about what the character goes through, let's take a different tack:

What does a reader go through when reading a horror novel?  Sure, sometimes fear for the lives of the characters happens, but the bigger fear is what? Tone and setting things up creepily?  Wasn't one of the scariest Stephen King moments in Bag of Bones when the protagonist is talking to his dead wife through knocking?  It made me shiver!

So it's best to make everything as subtle as possible.  Make the WORLD itself less fantastical.  Perhaps the more "normal" the better?  Which was scarier though, in Silent Hill, the "normal" or "nightmare" world?

Quite frankly I don't know anymore.

I think perhaps the scariest moments were the places where it wasn't quite nightmare world, but was rather the real world tipped a bit.  Like the "nowhere" level of SH1, which was real-world, but the map was messed up.

So is it perhaps more that I should be making the world less creepy than I think, or much more subtly defined, rather than full of blood and macabre atmosphere?  Because the randomized nature of the world takes care of a lot of the "messed up" nature of scary worlds.

Remember that Terminator was scary because it took place in "present day", and that only those brief glimpses into the future were necessary, because any more and we'd be flooded with post-apocalyptia (OMG "Apocalyptia" is an AWESOME word!), and that was part of what made Terminator 4 suck.

Similarly, Road Warrior was a great action flick, but Mad Max was closer to "normal" and it was more dramatic.

Remember there is horror is silence!  A lot of the best drama is visual.  Consider giving the world character through subtle detail but imagery that is realistic yet creepy.  And find a way to make safe zones feel safe but only in a subtle way so as to keep the overall tone with only slight shifts.

Crap, the biggest test for this game sounds like my literary skills, not my programming skills!  Oof.