Hello to everyone who is reading this. I don't think anyone will read this, but I am a game developer. I am an ordinary teenager, but with a lot of programming experience, and little experience using unity (about 1-2 years). I'm trying to create my own game, and I have a good idea. There will be a lot of fears in this game, from which you can choose several. Based on the fears that you choose, a world will be generated, and you will need to survive and not die from monsters. For example, you will choose darkness, caves, spiders, flesh and blood, and there will be dark caves of flesh in the world, with webs, blood, and a lot of spiders. I also came up with an idea for multiplayer and for the story too. Do you think such a game could become popular, and would it be scary for you?
I am making my own horror game, and i want to know your opinion.
cool game,it's innovative because it let's you choose your worst fear instead of throwing some monsters expecting the players to be scared
PrefixFang said:
I don't think anyone will read this
Wrong.
PrefixFang said:
I have a good idea. There will be a lot of fears in this game, from which you can choose several. Based on the fears that you choose, a world will be generated, and you will need to survive and not die from monsters. For example
Game ideas are a Game Design topic, not a Programming topic. This thread has now been moved to the appropriate forum (Game Design and Theory).
PrefixFang said:
Do you think such a game could become popular
It could, if it's executed very very well.
PrefixFang said:
would it be scary for you?
It depends on how you execute the idea.
PrefixFang said:
There will be a lot of fears in this game, from which you can choose several. Based on the fears that you choose, a world will be generated,
PrefixFang said:
For example, you will choose darkness, caves, spiders, flesh and blood, and there will be dark caves of flesh in the world, with webs, blood, and a lot of spiders.
This sounds like a lot of probably unnecessary work compared to random generation with a single coherent style.
You would need to create many more assets than can appear in an individual game, and then worry about making all the combinations of themes and objects logically and aesthetically acceptable (for example, spiders are a good fit for rocks, ruins and buildings like a haunted mansion, but a soft and wet flesh cavern would be an unreasonably bad place to build webs).
PrefixFang said:
Do you think such a game could become popular, and would it be scary for you?
It's not enough i'm afraid.
Although i like horror, i would just pick the theme which scares me the least.
Or i would look at it like ‘Oh, i can choose which world to play first - grass world, sand world, islands or lava world. But i will play them all.’
Either way, the ‘innovation’ in your idea gets lost somehow. There is nothing new. So it's not enough to claim innovation, but that does not mean it can't be fun and working well.
To turn it into something new, i would propose something similar to dynamic difficulty: Observing the player to make some assumptions about him.
Can we e.g. figure out if a player is scared about spiders, just from analyzing his interactions with our game?
And if so, can we use this to tailor the experience so it is better? E.g. more spiders to scare him, less to give him a rest?
I guess such things have been tried, but i don't know examples.
@PrefixFang Sound cool in concept, I feel like the first step should be narrowing down the list of fears. Not that I have experience with world generation, but having to come up with worlds for every combination of fears will definitely get overwhelming.
Horror depends on uncertainty. A sudden spider when I wasn't expecting it can be scary. A place where I expect a spider but don't find one can be scary, because it means that the threat is coming from another direction I haven't expected. If I can choose if there is a spider or not, then the spider is not scary at all.
a light breeze said:
If I can choose if there is a spider or not, then the spider is not scary at all.
Up to a point; there is fear of the unknown, but also fear of known and expected bad things.
If you venture into a spider-infested attic you should expect unpleasant contacts even if the whole scene is your choice.
Scaring the player with a spider-infested attic depends on different factors like setting up jump scares or letting the player spot spiders in advance, necessity and opportunities to fight or run away, more or less repulsive representation of the spiders, etc.
LorenzoGatti said:
Up to a point; there is fear of the unknown, but also fear of known and expected bad things.
Yeah, but fear of known and expected bad things is usually tied to being powerless to prevent these bad things, which is at odds with choosing the bad things.
