If you do make a horror game, I'd be all up for that. :P I suppose the first thing would be to decide what sort of 'source' produces the horrific things in the game. Off the top of my head, I can think of:
- a blatantly supernatural force, like Silent Hill or the Chzo mythos. Variant subgenres include demons and the undead - amoral science, like Resident Evil was initially (although it seems to have drifted away into nonsense as it's become more action-orientated) - simple human cruelty (some slasher movies, also q.v. anything vs the Nazis, although they're used so frequently as bad guys, the horror element is often lost) - alien (not necessarily invaders from space, but anything the human mind can't understand - q.v. a lot of Yume Nikki, for example). Crossovers possible with the supernatural (Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos) and science (AM from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream) - psychological (depends on the person involved, but stuff like being trapped, falling, darkness, spiders, water and threat of drowning, body horror and so on) - plants get organised No! Bad M. Night Shyamalan! Get out of here!
From there, you can work out some basic stuff like setting and plot, and techniques to draw players into it.
(In case you can't tell, I have a distinct taste for creepy games; my friend John got me into them a while back, and I've got a small library of them. Or at least, did have; the move to Linux has meant a lot of them fell by the wayside, and Wine doesn't seem to support a lot of indie stuff, sadly.)
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Date: 2010-09-16 09:52 pm (UTC)- a blatantly supernatural force, like Silent Hill or the Chzo mythos. Variant subgenres include demons and the undead
- amoral science, like Resident Evil was initially (although it seems to have drifted away into nonsense as it's become more action-orientated)
- simple human cruelty (some slasher movies, also q.v. anything vs the Nazis, although they're used so frequently as bad guys, the horror element is often lost)
- alien (not necessarily invaders from space, but anything the human mind can't understand - q.v. a lot of Yume Nikki, for example). Crossovers possible with the supernatural (Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos) and science (AM from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream)
- psychological (depends on the person involved, but stuff like being trapped, falling, darkness, spiders, water and threat of drowning, body horror and so on)
-
plants get organisedNo! Bad M. Night Shyamalan! Get out of here!From there, you can work out some basic stuff like setting and plot, and techniques to draw players into it.
(In case you can't tell, I have a distinct taste for creepy games; my friend John got me into them a while back, and I've got a small library of them. Or at least, did have; the move to Linux has meant a lot of them fell by the wayside, and Wine doesn't seem to support a lot of indie stuff, sadly.)
D.F.