I think you need to make the game dark, Shadowdarke's Dynamic Lighting will help a lot. Also random spooky sounds, the floors creaking, and have doors randomly open and have a ghost like figure suddenly run out of it. If you can have recordings you could have a spooky voice saying stuff like, "Help me", "Ahhhh", ect. You also need to be able to interact with your environment like in Murder Mansion. Have lamps falling from the tables and breaking randomly which suddenly makes the room a little darker.

Yeah that is basically what a Horror games need. I know it would be hard to do a horror game with BYOND but it can still be done.

Cavern wrote:

Revenant Jesus wrote:

I don't think Horror can be well done ever on BYOND.

Not true at all!


Revenant Jesus wrote:

I have yet to play a single BYOND game that has scared me or freaked me out.

http://games.byond.com/hub/Zilal/NF - This is a text game, but it is pretty scary. I guarantee it will give you alittle scare. Yes, that is right, I just said it, a text game.


http://games.byond.com/hub/Kunark/PlayingwithRosesdemo - This is a very good game as well. It is pretty scary too.


Just because BYOND is 2D does not mean you cannot create a scary game. If someone really wanted to, I bet 100% they could create a game that could scare the hell out of you. There are so many things you can do to a game to make it scarier.

Already played them both. I own the source to Playing With Roses. Neither of them scared me. Text mode doesn't surprise me in the least, you are talking to a graduated mudder. But you are also talking to a kid who was raised on horror movies. To hell with Barney.

Man, whatever, there is never going to be a BYOND game that will scare me. I have watched almost nothing but scary films in my life, that didn't scare me. I read almost nothing but scary books, they don't scare me and Doom 3 was the first game ever to frighten me and that was more of a jump effect.

Scary is in the eye of the beholder and because those movies didn't scare me, they wouldn't be considered scary, but I consider them by what other people do. Which is down right sad for the most part.

You know what is really scary? Reality. That is scary. The stuff that could really happen in our everyday lives, that is the most terrify thing in the world. BYOND, Pixels, Sound Effects, get off it, that isn't scary.

What your pissed because I said BYOND can't be scary? Boo-Hoo for you man. Go get on the cry baby train.

Funnily enough last night me and my friend were talking about this.

I think the reason why it seems intuitive to think that 2D games can't be scary is because of the layer of abstraction that seperates them from our real experience.

A 3D FPS can often be scary because it is so similar to our own lives- it's how we see things, how we look around, how we move about. Scary films are made up of footage from real life- thus we are easily drawn in, we feel as though we are there. Even books, which are made from text, can be scary. They are describing a realistic world which we can then see in our mind's eye.

The further something is from our own experience, the less we feel we are there and the harder it is for us to be scared by it. That does't mean all is lost for 2D games, though! It simply means that you have to make the other factors of the game exra specially good.
You'll have to delve into the psychological if you want to scare players- especially on BYOND, where action is often limited.

Some of these are:
Psychological aspects- building tension, freaking the player out. In my opinion the ultimate goal of a scary game is to make the player wish they'd never been born- that to not live at all would be better than having to continue playing through the game (obviously I mean that in a scary sense, not a Superman 64-sense.). I'm talking dead babies, here (seriously though. Dead babies are freakin' scary.). Remember the Delta Labs in Doom 3? Remember how there was absolutely NO monsters for ages- just things you'd see moving in your peripheral vision. It was scarier than when there *were* monsters. If you can scare players with no content then you're on the right track. Think 6th Sense.

Sound- music and sound effects can create different moods. Load up a scary game (say, Doom), then turn off your speakers. Notice how it's approximately 1000 times less scary? Really, music and sound in a game is just another facet of psychology; freaking the player out. Screeching violins are freakin' scary- I know Resident Evil 0 on the Gamecube made me pretty upset with those. Weird choir singing and the like. Even weird breathing or voices in your head- remember in Doom 3 when you'd just be walking down a corridor and you'd hear "...my baby... they took my baby!", or "...this way..." and you'd spin around and be like, "what". Also consider slow/silent music for a safe, uneventful part of the game, then a super quick track that hammers along for that sudden escape-from-the-demon sequence.

Colours and lighting - flickering lightbulbs, flashes of lightning, sudden changes of light (red is a scary, violent colour)- even no colour and lighting is scary (darkness in real life gets us all. Me and some friends were hanging around a graveyard a few nights ago and it was really creepy.). Consider using something like Shadow_darke's lighting library (I think it's his, anyway). This will be even more important with BYOND 3.5++/4.0 when we can have cool alpha levels. Everything suddenly turning dark is scary. Monsters that have glowing red eyes is scary. Blood stains are also pretty scary, but don't always rely on gore to get a scare as it gets old quickly.

If you want some ideas, watch some of these: http://www.lostdestinations.com/ghostvids.php

Remember that horrid monsters and such are not a prerequisite for a scary game! Think of all the horror classics- Hitchcock films, etc. All the scary bits happen at the end with a long build up, and sometimes there isn't even a monster/bad-guy/horrid thing at all!

The moment you shotgun a zombie into little bits and peices, the less scared you are of them from now on. You've achieved dominance over them. Think about all the stuff that might scare you in real life- stuff like ghosts, or weird stuff that you see when it's dark. They're all supposedly immortal; you couldn't just whip out a gun and shoot them dead. And *that's* what makes them so scary. So don't destroy the scary sanctity of your in-game creatures by letting them die (at least not that easily).

Try making a game where the player is very vulnerable (Playing Lummox JR's Stickster game scares the hell out of me. That horrid thing can bash through walls and all you can hear is its roar before it's on you- you have no chance.) or even where there's no combat at all!


Also: consider using the perverse or taboo in your scary game. In Psycho, the killer dresses up as his dead mum. That's weird, and is partly why it's so scary. The unknown, something weird you can't quite figure out. I'm not saying you should stick a bunch of gay or lesbian monsters in your game (Hedgemistress scares the hell out of me anyway, but that's besides the point), but cross-dressing psycho transvestites are fair game.

Weird sexual stuff is a good idea to put in your game if you want to freak people out, though. There's a lot of messed up stuff in the brain that revolves around sexuality- so if you can tap that in your game, go for it.

Er, yeah. Sorry for the mega-post. And sorry that even though I started off talking about scary stuff I gravitated yet again towards just talking about sex. :(

I would say sound is a major component.

Especially if certain monsters (particularly the ones that are fast and deadly) have "warning sounds" they make when you get in their area, but it's not always a case of "hear the noise, get attacked ten seconds later."... either it's a random delay, or the noise just means you're getting close... stepping within a certain specific (but not markeD) area will trigger it. A great example of this would be the poison headcrabs in Half-Life 2... the design team gave them a sound like a rattle snake because they wanted the players to have fair warning, but in play tests they observed that the majority of players had a very real panic response to hearing that sound.

As for people who "can't be scared" by 2D games, text games, scary movies, etc.... that's actually a failure of imagination rather than a triumph of courage. The most you can do is to help the player put themselves inside the position of the game character. If they're not willing to actually do that, you can't do much about it.

Oh I see, it is quite easy to blame the player instead of the developer for sucking. I have a fantastic imagination, you just can't suck at trying to bring me into your realm of reality. When I say that, I mean the developer of a book, of a movie or a game.

You said it's impossible for a text game, etc., to scare you. That means what's going on is independent of the developer... the only factor that's the same in each and every case is -you-. What else could be to blame?

I probably wouldn't have put it so bluntly as a "failure", except you seemed to be bragging about it, like the inability to be scared by a work of fantasy/fiction is some testament to your personal abilities.