DadGun wrote:

So let's talk about the design of horror games. What makes them scary?

I think it is the sounds and the room design. This freaks out the player and see what the monsters (or anything) have done. This gives a "I have to get out of here!" or a "I need a weapon!" feeling to the player. Although if a horror game has multiplayer, it will not scare the player so much because a friend is right by you helping you kill people.

All else aside, there are two elements important to making a horror game scary: Tension and surprise. Because the player knows they're playing a game, they have to be drawn into identifying with their character enough for those aspects to have any influence. One reason text games can be immersive is that they force the user to apply imagination to visualize their surroundings, and stoking the imagination makes anything you do to produce tension and surprise a heck of a lot more effective.

One of the better horror games I've played was a point-and-click adventure called Darkseed. The artwork was done by Giger, so it was exceptionally freaky, and the soundtrack had a jarring quality that after a little while could set your nerves on edge and have you looking behind you. Adding to the immersion was the mystery aspect: You wanted to know what was happening to the main character.

While first-person shooters can be good for horror because they have the advantage of limited POV, lighting, and 3D sound, I don't think the genre has been used to its full potential for this purpose. So many games have become burdened with their own flashiness that I think gamers are getting jaded to FPS. It's a lot harder to influence them emotionally.

In BYOND, you have a few crucial weapons:

• You can make parts of the screen impossible to see because of obstacles.
• 3D sound is available to you. I've made a pretty decent horror game without it, just using a 2-level volume effect, but with 3D sound you really have the power to be scary.
• Mod-format music is available. Hop over to modarchive.org and peruse for anything that you think might inspire a creeped-out mood, or compose your own.
  
  Another important piece of advice would be to keep the player in a constant state of vulnerability. There should be few or no truly safe zones, and anyplace that's actually safe should be so far removed from the action as to discourage anyone to stay there for long--and it should be someplace they can't easily duck into, to use as a base. The defining aspect of all horror is that no place is safe.
  
  Lummox JR

I'd also mention the use of (friendly) NPCs here. They're convenient because, not only can you kill them off to show the power of the 'monster' the player is facing without touching the character, but you can control their reactions to the monster, something you can't do with PCs. If you do them correctly, the player will empathize with them (and that's a big if, because it's harder to do in a video game than most other story-telling mediums), if the player empathizes with them and you kill them with the monster, you've managed to raise the emotional stakes.

Spielberg (although not the tremendous genius some think he is, IMO) used his characters well like that. Check out Jaws or Close Encounters, etc. and you'll see the characters reacting to the thing he's trying to get you to react to. Long shots of people looking (something made fun of sometimes in MST3000, IIRC) at the shark, UFO, etc. and through their reactions it heightened the mood he was looking for.

The main problem in trying movie style suspense is, in general movies are made from the 3rd person. The audience is often a (more) omniscient witness of what's going on than the characters. Hitchcock used to show the audience a character's impending doom ever so slowly, with the character never knowing what was about to happen. That's how he built suspense, as far as I've heard. Since vids are usually in some 1st person, I'm-a-character thing, there's no great way to pull that off. Something new has to come in.

I don't think there will be on that will give you nightmares, but I can see creepy and surprising.

I'd like to point out that when I was 13, I couldn't play Half-Life for any significant length of time because the aliens and such scared me too much.

After getting a few years' maturity, however, the game didn't scare me at all.


I was scared by the Oblivion realms in the game of the same name the first time I went in, especially when an insect-shaped claw sprang out of the ground with a mix of sticky-slime noise and rustling dirt.

To adequately create a horror game, you need to play on existing aspects of the player's personality. If the player doesn't have much personality, he's not going to have much to play to, but if he has a deep-rooted fear of falling, for instance, even a falling trap can be made quite scary, especially if you give a "roller coaster" feel to catch that demographic as well. Easier done in 3D than 2D.

In 2D, you have to rely on our simian-derived instincts, particularly our fear of turning our backs to a hostile being and our fear of being able to sense but not see a predator. Though the Blair Witch Project didn't do much for me -- I completely "got" the story, but it just didn't worry me too much -- that was because the acting was too forced so I felt rather unattached to the characters. Fear has to build within the player... the developer himself can't create it. The developer just creates the stimuli to create it.

People are also instinctively afraid of confinement. Say you're making your way through a crypt scattered with completely inanimate skeletons while you slaughter zombies right and left. You get to the end of the level and kill the last zombie in a room littered with bones. The player breathes a sigh of relief. Suddenly, the bones start joining together and rising up... what was a simple fight that got more and more difficult when coming in turns out to be a simple fight that's getting more and more difficult to get out. All the better if it's accompanied by sounds of animals that can kill humans (what's scarier than a skeleton that hisses like a snake when it looks at you? not much, but a skeleton that roars like a lion might throw in some more terror too, as long as it's done tastefully).

Finally, play off of the player's pre-existing beliefs. Zombies are slow, shambling, weak monstrosities in most movies and games. But in your game, they're deadly fast and because they feel no pain they know no fear. Instant terror the first time someone encounters one (assuming they don't cry foul and just think that it's a bug in your game).

I'm scared to play Resident Evil on a big screen with sorround sound...so scary. And in the suffering, if you look in the security camera, a monster comes by... I was terrified!

One horror game that gave me some nice chills is Penumbra. You can do a google search for it -- they have a downloadable demo that I still haven't finished, so it's quite playable. It's supposed to come out in stores later this year or something. It does a really nice job of setting the mood, and there is a lot of realism. What makes it even more panicky is that there are no good weapons -- you have to improvise as you go, because the game never gives you a pistol or a shotgun. It does give you dynamite, though... quite useful. :-)

Are there any free 3D horror games out there? :)
I feel like being scared.

You might want to grab a cup of Joe for this one...


Well, I was going to avoid this topic, but since my name was mentioned....

I am planning on creating a 3D version of Playing with Roses, with a bit different of a theme, gameplay, and made to be scary in 3D, and so I wrote a design document to help me remember what makes things scary in a game. Note that I don't consider the 2D PwR scary, but it was sort of going in the right direction. Can a 2D game be scary? Yes, but never as scary as a 3D game. You can still play your cards very well, however, and make a 2D game scarier than some lower-quality 3D games.

Note that this is a little choppy as it's indirectly from my personal notes where were not meant for publication, but the points here still apply for 2D games, you just have to offset different aspects of it to raise what scariness 2D can have, and try not to overload on what scariness 2D can't have.


Basically, making something scary is all about psychology. Being scared is a safety mechonism to heighten your senses when you're in danger. How scared you are is determined by how much danger you perceive, and how logically you're thinking. Scaring people through the use of a form of media requires you to trick some part of their mind to think they are in danger.

Most movies nowadays aren't scary because they rely on time-tested methods for scaring people, instead of coming up with new ways to do so. These older methods no longer work and are the mark of a bad movie. But that doesn't mean they never work, hollywood just has no idea how to change them to keep up with the times.


There are two main aspects of horror:

Surprise -- Triggering an immediate and overwhelming sense of danger, resulting in a fight-or-flight response. This gets a bad wrap because it's been poorly done too many times. People often laugh because they are so poorly done.

Suspense -- A good surprise requires good suspense, but suspense doesn't necessarely have to end in a surprise to be good. This means a game/movie should be mostly suspense, and a little bit of surprise that is highly complimented by suspense.


I am following a list of rules with PwR to try to make it as scary as possible:

1. Target your players -- You have to profile the player by figuring out what is scary to him/her personally, and what isn't. If a person doesn't believe in something, they are far less inclined to be scared of it. A child is going to be more inclined to fully believe in something supernatural, when an adult would require a lot more persuasion for a lot less reward. So figure out what is scary to him using some clever techniques they can't detect, and play on your findings.

2. Keep the game fresh by using as much dynamic content as possible. A game is no longer scary if a player knows what is going to happen and when. Unless you want to spend millions of dollars developing a non-dynamic game that is consistantly scary for what is considered good gameplay time, then you have to scare players with dynamic content. Part of what I am going to do with PwR, is I am going to make the thrills come from both dynamic player generated content for it's infinite supply of unique content, and half-dynamic half-pregenerated content for the pretty special effects.

3. Realism -- The game has to be able to reach the player's sense of fear, and that is virtually impossible without some sort of realism. This doesn't have to be realistic graphics, but realistic graphics do help out the most. When you can't go 3D, you have to rely almost solely on sound and ideas, as anything visual isn't going to be especially frightening.

4. Relation -- The more the player can relate, the more suspense it causes because it causes the player to think and tricks them into indirectly triggering their sense of fear.

5. Care -- One thing that a lot of movies do horribly is that they don't make their audience care about the character. A game does this a whole lot better because you don't want your character to die because you want to win the game. Nobody cares if the slutty, stupid teenage girl dies, but nobody wants an innocent child or kind, loving person to die.

6. Care for others -- A player associates themself with the player they control, so they automatically care about that character. However, you can also make them care about other players and not want them to die either.

7. Empathy -- When other people are scared, you become scared too. If people are making fun of your game through text or voice, it sets off a chain reaction that hurts the chances of making others scared. You have to scare them all, or you're going to scare nobody.

8. Use voice, not text -- Now, BYOND can't really do this, but there is no such thing as a scary font. You can cleverly scare people with ideas generated from the text, but text itself cannot be scary. When you use voice, you are using a medium (sound) that can potentially scare a player.

10. Ambiance for realism -- To help make your game realistic, you have to add ambiance to it's sound. In real life, we hear things to determine what is where, but the beauty of sound is that it is much more vague as to what and where it is than visuals are, and (as explained below) mystery is important.

11. Mystery -- The unknown and sense of a possibility of something being a danger to us is a huge part of what makes things scary. This should probably be number one in terms of suspense. When you don't know if something is lurking behind you, or in front of you in the darkness, but you have a slight hint that there might be, it sends you into a defensive, possibly scared state; unlike games where you just see some big gooey green monster and know exactly what the danger is and how to handle it, if the player doesn't know what the scope of the danger is, he's inclined to think it's greater than it is. A player is walking down a dark hallway and right as he passes a door to the left, he hears the door creak open. Curious as to what is watching him, he turns around and investigates, but this room isn't on his route, he doesn't need to go in and possibly be harmed, so does he? No, he turns around and leaves it, not letting his curiosity as to what might be behind the door rest. Congratulations, you've just made that hallway 10x scarier and more inclined to scare the player later, because he knows something is there, but doesn't know what and will probably overexaggerate in his mind the danger that exists. Now, this does have to be done right, a player has to think that something might actually happen the first time for it to work.

12. Darkness -- As mentioned above, mystery plays a large role in suspense, and Darkness and Mystery go hand-in-hand. It's very scary to think something can be hidden right in front of you, right where you might pass or walk right into.

13. Weakness -- The player must always be weaker than what is dangerous to him. A lone zombie is not scary to a person weilding a chainsaw, but a group of zombies can be scary to a person weilding a 6-shot revolver. When you make the player a force to reckon with, it becomes an action game. You need to trigger mainly flight responses, not fight responses.

14. Confusion -- Confusion can be used to create mystery where there normally wouldn't be any, and therfore creates suspense. If the player can make a lot of sense of what's going on, he's more inclined to think logically. When a player is confused, he is thinking illogically and can't make a logical decision, so he makes the only decision that can be fully thought out: go into a defensive/scared mindset because it might protect you from what you can't logically scope the danger of.


[edit] I forgot one thing:

DON'T use music. Music is a cheap trick that offers only subtle rewards. If you want to raise tension with sound, do it cleverly with ambiance and you will end up with a potentially much scarier result. Music can built tension, but it absolutely demolishes a sense of true realism.

Kunark wrote:

Surprise -- Triggering an immediate and overwhelming sense of danger, resulting in a fight-or-flight response. This gets a bad wrap because it's been poorly done too many times. People often laugh because they are so poorly done.

In these cases, the fight-or-flight response has to be real. There have to be good chances of dying if you fight and good chances of living if you flee. For instance, it's one thing if a low-level monster suddenly bashes down a wall beside you and starts chasing you. It's another if three walls of the room all come down and they're all massive monsters which can kill you individually, let alone in unison. The player has to use an indirect method of killing them or he'll die.

DON'T use music. Music is a cheap trick that offers only subtle rewards. If you want to raise tension with sound, do it cleverly with ambiance and you will end up with a potentially much scarier result. Music can built tension, but it absolutely demolishes a sense of true realism.

Music is good in its own right, but only if done spartanly. It's one thing if you're playing something epic and John-Williams-esque during the appearance of the monster. It's another if you're playing subdued, slow music (I'm picturing one of the fights against someone in a console game I played, where it stopped playing strong music and started playing weak music... scared me a little, but RPGs aren't known for being able to do anything better than that). The music does, of course, absolutely have to be context sensitive. If the "horror" music plays through the whole level, with no regard to whether there are monsters around, it won't do anything. But if a "foreboding" theme plays through the level and then suddenly when the player enters a chamber, some "horrifying" music plays as soon as the monsters attack, the player will be sweating big time. The music has to be surprising too.

Gooseheaded wrote:

The basic "reason" of fear on us is not understanding things.

Eh? Hell no. You fear things because you DO understand them and understand what may happen. You may not know what is going to happen, but that isn't whats scary - some of the possible situations may be. etc.

You arrive at the other end, and you see that she actually ran to a dead end. That is scary

No, its unrealistic. :O

• You don't know who she is.
  
  Why should you even care, not to mention be scared by that...

You don't know where she went.


You do know, thats a crappy unrealistic game, she just disappeared because she was deleted.

You don't know who is screaming.


The fact you don't know who is screaming isn't scary either, but the screaming itself. Actually I find it also breaking the realistic feeling of a game when it has stupid random screaming, especially when its the same voices over and over - its annoying and unrealistic. You should be able to actually track down/find/notice the screaming people.

You don't know why she is screaming (extra factor: you imagine why! :) )


Well, she's a little girl, she might have lost her toy. :P