Signs was a pretty good "dark" movie. It gives a nice feeling of helplessness and foreboding. Plus everything ties back together wonderfully.

I don''t know, the subject matter within Diablo 2 (in the cut scenes, anyway) was extremely dark. I haven''t seen any movie deal with those subjects in such an in-your-face way. How Tal Rasha was transformed into that tragic and hideous creature, Diablo''s transformation, how the old guy was killed at the end, and the beginning of Act 5 when the barbarian guard pops... pretty dark!

To answer the original question:

I do think the concept of higher beings adds to a game setting, though. In the tabletop game D&D, you may start dealing with other worlds and their denizens around level 10 or so, and that makes it kind of a graduation point. Almost as if to say, there is a new category of issues and problems and opportunities to deal with, and you are ready for them. If the entire game was purely earthbased, it might get kind of monotonous. It would depend on the variety of challenges. The concept of higher beings and other worlds at least offers new ideas of different kinds of enemies and environments. And not all other world beings need to be dark, by the way.

Deus Ex is pretty dark. Not to mention the whole game takes place at night. (hey... there was dawn in one place...)

These types of ideas (demons, gods, magic) have been around since the beginning of time (Romans, Celts, Fairy Tales) There are always room for new tales (as JRR Tolkien showed with The Hobbit and LORD OF THE RINGS... and as Robert Jordan showed 40 years later with his rip-off WHEEL OF TIME series [although I recommend it ]

The trick is to do them well and try not to make them seem trite.

If you think your idea is trite, give us a sample and we''ll grade you

-
and you can make a dark story without any of those features, it just takes literary ''tricks''

[I''ve been writing for about 5 years so I have ''some'' experience here ]

you can always present your character as the evil force - that usually tends to a darker plot, though some games still manage to screw it up...

create your game where very little good happens, and the good people tend to get overrun... this certainly ought to add some darkness.

and yes, max payne was a dark game. wow.

of course, there is always a line. you can add violence and more, but there is a line. i dont really want to see people in pools of blood the whole time im playing a game... but, it could certainly add an effect. ever see the movie unbreakable? the guy in the red that bruce willis kills would definitely be dark. in fact, the whole movie. if you could mix unbreakable and signs into a game, that would be quite dark.

incidentaly, m night shyamalan is an awesome director.

and the wheel of time series was good... im just wondering if it will ever end!

-geo

A "dark" game would most certainly, undoubtedely be defined as a game literally thick with things we would call "evil".

What is evil, you say? Well, most would define it as

-Dark (usually demonic) magics
-Demons galore
-Cold-blooded killing rampant, loaded with all the gore to match
-Evil gods with master plans to implement horrible carnage... and seeing much of that carnage come true

You get the idea.

To have a truly "dark" game, however, I believe the main character must have a personal struggle with evil. I don''t just mean heroically destroying evil things - I mean the main character must be tainted, and internally battling, evil. Perhaps some outside influence is twisting his mind, trying to force him (or her, for that matter) into performing evil deeds. Perhaps his very roots are in evil; for example, what if the hero was a Dark Elf turned from his ways, but still haunted by his past and his race''s dark tendencies? Or perhaps a character has turned to evil at some point, perhaps even some point he turns to evil within the game, and is ''brought back''. This, I believe, is a great story element - see the rise and fall of Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker as portrayed (and soon to be finished) in the Star Wars movies.

But most of all, I believe a dark game must ooze with a dark ATMOSPHERE. This is more than all the elements above; Warcraft 3, for example, could, if you made a list of things that go on in the game, be considered a very dark game. But it''s not. Why? It doesn''t feel dark. It''s loaded with very light humor and silly puns - the look is cartoony and bright-colored.

But if the game took a different tone - if it had a more sinister, more evil look, and the ''silliness factor'' was removed, and if the ''dirty deeds'' that the different races do was upplayed a bit more, it could be considered a very, very dark game.

Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter...

What type of graphic is it? 2d/ 3d/ ?d ^_^.

If it must be a real dark, unreal and phantasy game, you should make it in 3d like "Thief- Dark Project", boah it''s very cruel isn''t it? The dark, demonic atmosphere and the loud voice of the appearing guards, Whaa!!! But if it should be a 2d game, you can look back to the very- very ... old game "Fallout". Because there the story was as cruel as possible for a postnuclear RPG.

I think there can''t be enough cruel and dark games, with lots of demons and monsters, but don''t forget the undeads!

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~the hammer is watching you~
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Since I believe you cannot learn game design from games, I suggest watching the movie, Wizards , by Ralph Bakshi.

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0076929

It manages to be both magical, Dark, Evil, Sad, cruel, and funny. While having rocky and Bowinkle style Animation...

No to mention elfs!



[edited by - dede on August 20, 2002 1:32:38 PM]

I think there are multiple definitions of "dark" circulating around.

Kuroahiru says: Usually, the more powerful you make [Demons, Gods, and Magic], the more "lighter" the game becomes. If demons are people wearing goat masks, gods are crackpots, and the old man is a con man, you are well on your way to making a "dark" game.

This is a good point, as far as one definition of 'dark' is concerned. A game like that is not about pure destruction (as with powerful demons); it's just a sort of depressing and emotional game... the characters would be very human in a game like that.

In something like Lord of the Rings, that's about good and evil. Evil guys are bad and you want them to die. Good guys you want to live. I don't consider that a dark plot at all, because it's easy to know which side you want to root for.

Diablo II had a lot of evil, as Waverider pointed out, but you knew what was evil and what was good; the demons were supposed to be pure evil and thus clearly deserving of death. This, to me, makes it a light game.

The problem is that pure evil does not exist in the real world, but darkness does. The situation in the Middle East is grim and dark, but it's not about pure evil. The terrorists were raised in a xenophobic culture that reveres martyrdom, and they are very poor and uneducated. If raised in a middle-class educated family, the overwhelming majority would be normal.

To be honest, I think the magic in the Discworld series of books by Terry Pratchett was sort of dark, even though the books are very humorous and light-hearted. But magic in those books is no substitute for actual non-magic things - magic is chaotic, its effects don't last (turn a man into a frog, and it reverts to a man later), and high concentrations of magic can cause random unwanted effects. Also it takes hours to memorize a spell, for just the simplest ones, and when you cast it you forget it - like D&D. So magic is not an easy way out in that world, and a wizard is not necessarily superior to a fighter.

That's important, to me. In Baldur's Gate, you can cast a spell to instantly kill someone, or turn them to stone, which to me seems too simplistic to be "dark".

~CGameProgrammer( );

[edited by - CGameProgrammer on August 25, 2002 7:13:00 PM]

A severly twisted version of Alice in Wonderland would be a dark game, not Alice her self, but a situation like alice in wonderland, Vanilla Sky, and fight club.

If you can get a hold of the Song "Painting on the Wall" by Edguy off of the "Mandrake" album, you could probably get a better feel for what I''m fixing to portray:

Have the main character have somesort of mental illness due to some extreme tragedy (again, like max payne). In American McGee''s Alice, she was in a mental institute.

When I listen to the song above, I get the image of the Second Wizard of Oz movie, where Dorthy has excaped a mental institute and is found face down in a mud puddle at the end. Then I imagine Alice as being in the same situation, only she''s in the rain, and when she looks up, she stares at a painting on a wall that depics wonder land.

Next add in the Vanilla sky theme, where the main character''s mind starts to degrade and bad things happen making them do even worse things to avoid detention (which would be death in their mind).

Throw in some fight club twist to where the bad things were done by an alternate personality bent on destroying the main character''s perfect world.

Classic Man Vs. Himself theme with a dark over tone. Nothing magical, try to keep things to one theme that isn''t over done. Down to earth.