NEXT-GEN Nescot Year 3 HND - Horror Game (Part 1) Research and Design

For this assignment we were tasked with creating a game based around our Splitface posters. For my project I decided to create a horror game set in a dark woodland surrounding an abandoned town.

Before creating the game, I started making a design document to keep track of ongoing game ideas in response to the brief.

For my map design, I wanted to add a set of houses, a church and a manor house isolated in the woods. This was where an underground 'dungeon-like' area would be and where the monster was going to spawn. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties with computers, I was unable to create the underground area in time. This was because I wouldn't be able to complete other key aspects of the game on time and instead just settled for the manor house.
Alongside these, I first intended to have one monster (my split face character) chase and hunt down the player. Also due to technical difficulties, I was unable to complete the monster on time and had to resort to using more generic 'zombie-like' monsters instead. At the end of the game I wanted to spawn in my original idea of the monster, however ultimately I did not have the time to code the other monsters, the players weapons and to add the associated animations to each asset.

I started by researching similar games and the techniques they used such as using glitch effects once the monster is near or attacking the player. This was to give the effect that the player character is using a camera, similar to that of a found footage film. This can be seen in "Slender" and similar techniques are used in other horror games like "Amnesia The Dark Descent", both of which became incredibly popular. Unfortunately, I decided not to implement this later as I had concerns that the glitch effect I had created could cause epileptic fits or perhaps be misconstrued as a computer error.

I also looked into the use of darker lighting and flashlights, possibly having a battery life to make it harder or more risky for the player. I implemented the ability to turn it on and off when needed, as well as having a set battery life, shutting off when too much energy is used. I also added batteries littered around the map inside the houses to allow the player to add more power to their flashlights.

I initially wanted to add a pixelated effect to the project to allow the game to be played on lower quality computers. However, it had very little effect on the performance of the game and I became unsure of the quality after I began adding more detailed textures. I still added it into the game, though, because I intended to make it a changeable setting later on.

After creating a terrain, I used terrain altering brushes that I got from the Unity asset store to add a bumpy, slightly hill like incline to the map. Then I added a mix of dirt and grass textures to the environment using the terrain's paint tool, allowing me to draw dirt roads and cover the map in grassy textures alongside normal mappings, so the textures would stand out to the player more effectively.

Once the terrain was finished, the houses and trees could be added. The houses were individually placed around the map in small clusters. Meanwhile the trees were added through the use of a tree terrain paint tool, allowing me to pick from a selection of prefabs I made, to place at random spacing and frequency.

Eventually, when the map was created, I began creating monsters to chase and attack the player. This was done by creating a Nav-Mesh-Agent for the creatures to easily traverse the map. I then coded different actions for the monsters, such as the ability to attack the player and take damage themselves. This allowed me to make it so that the player can loose, showing a flash of red each time the player is hit and showing a lasting glass crack as if the game is played through a camera.

While I was doing this, I created weapons for the player to use against the monsters, these weapons included a handgun and an axe that the player could find in certain buildings.

I then coded the weapons so that they were able to be picked up and used, with animations I created alongside this. For the axe I made a simple swing using rotation and transformation changes for the animation. While the gun had individual parts animated with physical bullets and bullet casings being launched out of the gun.

I also added a tracer to the guns bullets as they would move towards the left at close range, however this was not entirely finished and shows a untextured line following the bullets.

Finally, I created a way to win the game. This is done by finding a weapon in either the church, manor or a smaller house and killing all of the monsters before then moving back to the car at the players spawn point.

What I decided to create was good, however, it is similar in premis to many different existing games such as the "Slenderman" trilogy and "SirenHead" games, but also varies greatly in execution. In the end it is an enjoyable short game despite not finishing with my original intentions and designs.