GreatPirateEra wrote:

A horror game without music isn't a horror game :/

Have you ever walked through a creepy forest at night where all the animals have gone to sleep and all the bugs have frozen to death? And all you can hear is your heart pumping? Intense horror without sound U.U. Intense horror with atmospheric music like dracula serenading your girlfriend isnt horror at all its terror :P

I've been a thousand miles from any other living person in the dead of night. You can still hear a lot of things. I doubt there is anywhere on this planet that is naturally perfectly silent.

Anyway, music in a horror game isn't important. Sound is. Infact, sound is probably the most important thing for getting that terrifying atmosphere correct.

The sound of pudding in a boot being punched, and the sound is a lone duck quacking sadly on a windy lake.

What you probably want is enough ambient sound to make the player's surroundings seem immersive, and then play with it when you want the mood to change.

For instance, consider a haunted house. You'll hear your own footsteps and (subtly) breathing. You'll hear your heartbeat when it's quiet, and you can play with that to increase the heart rate in-game when things are tense or scary--and even vary it by small amounts at random, to mess with the player. You'll hear a lot of house settling sounds, maybe some wind pushing through cracks or rattling thin glass panes from time to time. You may hear a door or floorboard creak just at random. What you do not expect to hear is a door opening or closing on its own, or other footsteps in the house. So if the heartbeat and breathing sounds are very subtle, you can increase the heart rate briefly on any unexpected noise, and keep it up (plus make it and the breathing louder) if something seriously jarring happens, like footsteps downstairs where there should be none.

In an outdoor environment, you'll have a lot of nature sounds. Twigs snapping could signal something moving around. Your most effective sound weapon here is sudden and unexpected silence: the voices of the forest going quiet in response to a perceived threat. If the crickets and peeping frogs are out and over a couple of seconds their sounds die down, that's bad news. So too in daytime when birds are chirping and stop. There's a pretty deep-set scare factor ingrained in that.

Most importantly, you want lots of little sounds and lots of lesser scary moments to happen at random, so that the player doesn't truly know if this time is the time the monster's coming for them. Early on, you'll want more of those cases to be fake-outs.

If your game has any way of letting players think they know where the danger is, this is something you can use too. For instance if by the end of the first act (if it plays out like a story) they think the ghost is only keeping to the cellar for the time being, you can use that to give them freedom to explore the rest of the house. Anything they hear that suggests the ghost has left the cellar will be jarring, because you've taken its location from the probably-known to the unknown. Giving your player little bits of knowledge, which helps maintain a sense of safety, and then snatching it away can disturb the heck out of them, and sound is an excellent tool for knowing certain things at a distance.

Ghost of ET wrote:

o.o

Yes, that's right.

Gaze in disbelief at Lummox's overwhelming brilliance.