I know I may come across as an FPS fan, loving anything that’s in the first person and shoots a gun, but my favorite genre is horror, and the one thing I know about horror is that it’s a difficult challenge to take as a developer. You have to cross new grounds to be able to make your game interesting or remotely scary. If it’s not done correctly the intended scary moments are laughed, and not in a good way. This can be troubling for a developer and his team because of how stressful it is, making them question whether the things they’re creating and coding are even going to do what they intended to the player. It’s a lot of hard work that can go to waste or do some damage to well known team or company. It has happened to the greatest I mean look at Monolith, they basically given up on the genre as far as I can see. Well, I want to talk about what makes a good horror game, listing off the ingredients for a truly frightening and fun game. Hello and welcome to this Game-Making Challenge of the Month.
Hinderince
Horror never makes you feel comfortable with your situation even if the monster is gone or out of reach, the game makes you worry and the one thing that makes the player worry even more is his incapabilities. In terms of movement, anything athletic is gone. All those things you’ve learned in CoD or Titanfall should go out the window once you start up a horror game. You aren’t an experienced soldier or Parkour runner, you’re a run-off-the-mill character that needs to get out of a killer’s situation. Running is an ability, but how fast you go is very slow, the player mustn’t, and I mean mustn’t be able to easily run away from a monster or something of that nature. That’s one critique I had about RE7. Being able to get away too easily from anything is going to be a utilized ability in the game, you want the player to use other mechanics in the area like hiding under the bed in a diseased ridden hospital room or behind a toppled table against a corner, these can easily be ignored if the player can just run circles around the monster. That just makes the monster look stupid. If you look at the game Alien Isolation, the player is not faster than the Alien nor is she faster than the survivors on the colonial vessel, she is an engineer like her mother and only knows the basics of tools and tech around her. That made the game very intense having the Alien spot you release this never before felt fear, watching that thing, in seconds, jump so fast at the player making him scramble to the next room. There was a sense of vulnerability in that moment that most games seem to ignore.
And on top of that, the game made guns feel like garbage. Why? Because that would have made the game easy. That’s another way to hinder the player, just make any sensible thing you can think of in that type of situation and make it feel like a Nerf Gun. Bringing out a knife is a risk, a gun only pushes or stagger the monster, even a freaking explosion doesn’t do Jack Daniels to the monster. Of course you can have a monster die in the game, but it would take lots of resources or ammo to do so. If you ever played Dead Space, the game makes the most awesome-looking weapons in the game feel so weak against the Necromorphs. Of course the player is able to kill them in large numbers, but they still stand as a difficult enemy. In that game there was also a low supply of ammo for each gun. You can be stocked up on ammo, but that takes up space for some other potential items like health kits or money to upgrade your weapons and other abilities. You can to think about what you should keep and what you need to protect yourself. There was also an ability that helped you when you didn’t have ammo to fire, you could pick things up and through it at them like a bullet, but it was difficult and slow on doing so, so there was a benefit and consequence. It made you vulnerable even though it was suppose to help you.
Difficulty
A lot of people think that a horror game should be hard in order for it to be scary, but that’s both true and false. If a game like Dead Space made you die constantly because it was suppose to be hard, it would be more annoying than scary. The difficulty would have to be regulated to the player’s ability, not being too hard, but still difficult. Not too easy because the game would be boring and funny instead of the intended feel of the game. That’s one thing that developers have a hard time with sometimes, making a game with some difficulty, but can still be passable is very hard to think about. I know it seems like a simple concept, but it takes up a lot of time to play test and see if it can be what you intended it to be. A lot of times the string of code that cues this and cues that will mess up and not happen. This puts many developers in time constraints and most likely have them stop trying. Not saying this is the case in a lot of games, but when you have a schedule that will happen just to shorten the work effort. This kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier where you would have to make sure everything is working right or even bypass with a smart AI. As I mentioned before about Alien Isolation, the player is given a lot of things to think about and the Alien AI is just something to be feared. If you ask me, most of the events (maybe almost %80-%90) of the game was not scripted. I mean the AI intended to scare you and kill you, but there is another AI that terrorizes you in that game called the Overseer. The Overseer is a master AI that watches and learns from the player and transfers that data to another AI smart, fast learning and quick AI. This can be harder to implement, but it’s easier to fix since it’s all there and the AI has no real presence in the game, so there won’t be much to be careful over, just making sure it does what it’s intended. No worrying about model glitches, AI bugs or even amped AI glitches where they do too much of what they’re suppose to.
For the short of it, you must make the game easy to learn and to bypass for the player, but still make it difficult. You never want an easy game because that seems lazy to your team and the company, nor do you want to have a hard game and become ignored in the marketplace from any new player or inexperienced players.
The Monsters
In a horror, the monster or monsters have to see feared in some way. They’re always disturbing, but you would have to make sure you put the right kind of disturbing on them. I know that seems kind of limited, but there is a lot of room for just one word. A monster can be anything disturbing: a pedofile can seem very creepy and have you want that person as far away as possible. It can be a Spiritual Demon that represents the character’s inner guilts and thoughts mortalized as this creepy looking freak of a monster. Anything disturbing can be anything you would find in nightmares, literal nightmares painted in a picture.
If you ever played Silent Hill or games by that developer, the monsters symbolize something about the character. Reason why they did that was because Silent Hill was their personal hell, trying to reveal all the wrongs they did in the past that they forgot or just have them try to figure out what they’ve already done to be there, creating this kind of sharp twist in story. I think the best way they did it was in Shattered Memories. The game had you answer deep questions that would change the game entirely and most importantly, the enemies appearance. They would look like destroyed feminine beauty that attacks you from behind if you chose to be a little sexual during the questions. Sometimes they would look like disgusting blobs of flesh because you chose strange answers to some questions. They made these enemies awesome in the game, always changing when you took the psychosis test. Impressive for its time and I’m surprised no one took advantage of it.
Besides their look, they would have to act very strangely. In Dead Space they made some move so… Weirdly for a lack of better words, and that movement was so inhuman. They would shake their heads like as if they were from Jacob’s Ladder, convulse their bodies making it seem like they’re breaking their backs and bones. It’s strange to see them do that and it builds the creepy factor in the monster. If you strive for something realistic, like a killer, trying to make the killer look large or just have him more capable than you are. You can hide his face or build some character in him, but the most effective thing about the killer is that he appears to be void of emotion. I can never see how that’s frightening, but it just creeps me and a lot of people out, just a man with a blank expression barrelling towards you. If you want to go realistically unsettling, you can have them be crazy, being able to bend their double jointed backs or remove something human off of them, like lips, eyelids or normal facial features. Something that seems unnatural for a human, but seems possible to the human body will convey the right image for the crazy killer look.
Audio, Music and Atmosphere
For the main finale, the most important thing about a horror, the feature that makes or breaks the experience: the audio. A lot of people forget about this when they think about a horror game, believing that the feeling comes from the experience alone than the music that builds it. I mean, monsters and atmosphere is one thing, but the sounds and orchestra that follows it helps build the both of those things more than you may believe. If you ever watch a scare in a movie, it’s mostly silent with a faint violin playing ear-rape in the background and once the scare comes in, the entire orchestra plays this maddening song that just frightens you and fills your mind with this intent anxiety. Imagine if all of that was gone, just the creaking wooden floor and some footstep, just complete silence that prepares you for the scare. Once that jump comes in, you just brush it off, no added emotion, nothing to keep you in that feeling. It just goes away and you go on with the next few scenes. In a horror movie, it matters more with music and slightly amped sounds, but for games, a special sound team has be present to make every feeling right and every cue convey the right emotion for the player, it takes more audio from your surroundings and more music to build that emotion even further. There was one old PC game I played when I was a kid that my dad loved watching me play. I wish I knew the game’s name, but whenever you knocked into an object, it would fall and a small team of violins would play for a few seconds, building an uneasy feeling for you. It had amazing sound design and every piece of it was a masterpiece to horror. Back to the subject, when you want to make the player feel on edge, make every sound loud. I know that sounds dumb to most, but it grabs the player more than a faint thud, make sure the player can hear it and see it, make sure that the player can get jumpscared by an empty paint can falling on the floor. Maybe follow it up with a pluck on the violin strings, just a simple pluck to get the player worried. Of course, you don’t want to do this frequently to the player, because it’s going to get old, only do that in an extended period of time just to worry the player later.
I know most indie horror games abuse this option a lot, but you have to trust me, if done right it’s gold. You don’t need to make it ear-rape either, just plucks on strings and small blows in the trumpets. You just have to make the music short and easy to listen to, but still convey the feeling of the situation. When the moment’s right, you can make a full song on a chase, boss battle, etc., just don’t abuse it. And a clear rule on this is to make sure it’s not some audible cue that’s just there to scare you for no reason, that’s just won’t make sense for the player and acts as conditioning for the player, so the planned scares won’t do as much as you may want them to. There is one rule before I go on, don’t use stock sound effects. I know it’s cheaper and requires little work to use them, but they drag the atmosphere done to the floor. It’s easier to make one person to do many sounds and mix them together to make a unique monster sound identifiable or jumpscares feel largely more refreshing. Now to the next part!
Atmosphere in a game is the canvas to a painting, it’s easily forgettable and can go without it, but it’s what makes the painting there. The Audio and the Music are what paint the on the atmosphere. The place around you has to convey this worried emotion in you that anywhere in this building, forest or area is going to bring out some danger. If you were to take out all sounds in a horror game like Amnesia, playing deaf for a second, the atmosphere is dropped down because there’s no sound to bring out this certain emotion, no small creepy moments of silence that take you off guard, just the room and the monster in it to bring out this emotion you’re suppose to feel. The atmosphere is important to the game and needs to be brought out in some great way so that the emotion can be exaggerated. Suspense can be a sudden push on the player, which both mediums I listed can used in. Music can be loud and sound like noise that brings the player in a disarray, the sounds can be loud, having crashing noises overlap the music, giving the player a warning that the monster is near. This can be used in chase scenes, boss battles or fights that take place, making the player not want that to happen again. You can also make the player gain anxiety through lots of audio cues in the game with music playing faintly in the background, having him go paranoid as he plays the game. I think Condemned has made that apparent in the game, having AI hide in corners just so they can whack you on the head with a 2x4. Through the entire game, you would check corners and watch for anything that sounded like footsteps. Music played very abruptly when that happened too, having the player panic for a moment as they adjust to the crazy hobo in the room wanting to kill you. You just have to create some kind of layer of music or sound on any proper moment, it really makes the moment better than it would without it and makes the game somewhat memorable.
Well, that’s my idea of a great horror game. I hope you enjoyed this entry and the challenge (if you’re doing it) and don’t worry, if you’re late you can still do it by the end of the month. It is a monthly challenge after all. The next challenge will become public around the beginning week of November, so be ready when the time comes! Again I hope you enjoyed this and ‘til next time…
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