But A Dream

We all probably have had nightmares as a child, know the uneasy feeling of the dark. But for that to really hit home, having the same level as your new home during the day is a major tool. Having the beautifully crafted story, including the diary and all the items that make the house look like something a family has only just moved into, helps to platform the gameplay very effectively.

But A Dream

P.T. was and is still iconic, so since we couldn’t have a bombastic amount of level variety to feasibly create within our time, having a repeatable place was the solution, whilst not going completely abstract.

I watched a bunch of horror gameplay and added films/shows to watch and rewatch. One of those shows would be Locke & Key from Netflix. More of a teenager aimed scary, but it had one particularly cool ingredient, shadow monsters!

Creating a trailer, which we discussed in the team and with our industry mentor, was a helpful thing, because there are different kinds of scary things and they are perceived quite differently by other people.

Netflix: Locke & Key

One option would have certainly been a more narrative walking simulator, where all you can do is move and close doors. But giving the player a tool that’s both essential for navigation and as a weapon makes you be on your toes differently. Sure, some people are just too cool to be scared, almost no matter what you do, but those who can be scared now have a motivation and reason to be scared that if they don’t perform x, then y happens.

Being able to pace and let tension build, with environmental scares and audio sounds, makes the experience for some even worse.

Upon playing, you might hear the coughing of your sickly sibling, or an uneasy familiar sound from Stranger Things. The scares are varied, perhaps depending on luck, too frequent for my liking, but since it is a degree project, the idea was to show off a bit.

Although AI and Midjourney were still quite new, not having the amount of monsters, I’d have liked the idea of a cliche portrait that changes or the eye follow was something I wanted. And from there, mixing it with giving credits to the whole team of designers and our mentor was a really nice touch, I thought. Our UI designer used his artistic skills to make this fantastic interactive art.

But A Dream

Since death is unlikely, but possible, knowing where a scare already was would make that amount of time less scary or not scary at all, bringing an emotion to the player that might pull them out of the experience entirely.

In order to avoid that, the technical designer and I came up with this very neat solution that I am most proud of. We might only have a small cast of differing monsters, but they may be spawned in for one player or run, but not the next.

So seeing the players bravely moving around the corner in anticipation of eradicating a monster, just for it to spawn from behind or not be there at all, was very satisfying.