Horror/Thriller Game Design Document

Day 28 - The Results / Conclusions

The beginning So the idea for my project started out as a game idea I’ve had for quite a while now. I wanted to create a horror game with an open-worldly kind of hub area and the main focus of the game would be exploration and mystery. I wanted the player to mainly get a feel of wonder, adventuring through a beautiful Swedish forest and along the way solve a mystery of a story that have never been told before. But… all of this was just vague ideas, but I know that those kinds of feelings are sought after in games. So on this 30 day challenge, I decided I would build a strong foundation for future development of the game! I was gonna begin to write a Game Design Document.

And oh boy am I happy with the results so far.

The GDD I started out with doing some research of how a typical GDD is formed and quite quickly I realized that GDDs can be formed out almost however you want them to. But it all depends on what you are gonna use the GDD for. Some people write GDDs for investors and people outside of the developing team, trying to sell their ideas. Other GDDs are more focused for the team, to make the project more transparent in the sense that everyone knows what the end result should be and how to work together to get to reach that result. My GDD was going to be more of the latter kind.

You can find the base of the GDD here, where I got sections and titles ready for people to use and a slight description of each section as well!

Sadly, for my own sake, I can’t share you my filled out version as I do want to keep the details a secret. However, I do have a lot I can share that won’t ruin the entire game!

The Results So as I mentioned earlier, this project started out on almost an empty slate. So my results page will mostly bring up the interesting things I found along the way. To start off with, I should mention a little bit on where my project is now and how I worked.

Feeling Design The first and most important thing to mention is that I am trying to design my game through feeling design. What I mean with that is I’m trying to design elements of my game with a feeling at its core. For example, I base my ideas for elements in the game through feelings and then try to use mechanics and other means to push those feelings. These ideas mostly come from my own experiences and I want the players to experience a similar thing. Like the wondrous feeling of walking around in a swedish forest during a beautiful summer day. How would I enforce that into the game through mechanics, story, pacing, narrative, level design and sound design? My ideas for events in the game comes from feelings first, mechanics later. I personally think this is the best way of designing a horror experience as it ties so well together with our primal reactions of being scared of things. Horror is one of few genres that FEELINGS are in the genre name and defines it.

This way of designing a game is a new one for me but it’s something that I always have been doing on a subconscious level, it just feels natural. With this said, I’m a huge horror fan… so there haven’t been too many other game ideas in different genres that I’ve worked on hehe. So during this project I decided to focus hard on that aspect.

First Person Perspective So, the game is going to be played in a first person perspective as I think it is the most natural way to go if I want a realistic point of view. It also makes sense on a technical level as it makes it easier for me to keep the immersion of the player, seeing as I can’t model a good character nor animate it with the quality that I would want. It also makes it easier for the player to act as the character with me going for the silent-protagonist approach.

An Odd But Great Feeling To Invoke There is also this other idea that I’ve had for this game… and it’s a feeling I want the player to feel that is quite unique and I haven’t seen many games been able to do this. To be able to describe this feeling I need to give some background: In the game, the protagonist is there to explore a secret and abandoned military base. Obviously being a horror game the natural progression is obviously finding it and it being awful down there. However, I want the open world-y hub to be big… but not too big so that navigating and traveling is a chore for the player. As the game is focusing on exploration, I want the player to find this entrance, go into the military facility and after a few hours down there realize:

“Hang on a minute… I barely explored ANYTHING above the surface!”

THAT is the kind of feeling I want to be able to invoke in the player. And I also want there to be more things that will lead to perhaps yet ANOTHER feeling like that later on. So that’s where the level design of the military compound comes into play. I will have different sections of this massive complex being able to be entered from different areas in the forest.

From Feeling To Level Design With that main feeling in mind, this whole idea spawned many ideas for the overall story of the game as well as shaped my idea of how I want the level design and pacing of the game should be. The forest will act as a big hub area and I will make sure to point the player towards coming back to the forest every now and again. To find new ways into the perhaps locked off areas of the military facility they might otherwise not have access too from the inside. There is so much you can do with this idea alone, how to tackle it etc. But I can say I have an idea of how I want it to be, but I don’t want to spoil too much!

From Level Design To Research… To Story? To keep this realism in my game, I do want to try my best to try and make the military facility to feel like it’s possibly been used before. So I spend some time doing research on how research oriented military bases are mapped out. This is where I found out about the wonderful thing about BSL and how I can implement that in my story and level design. This also spawned a lot of ideas of what could’ve possibly have happened in this facility. I mean… it is a horror game… and the military base was kept both a secret from the rest of the Swedish public and it was abandoned for some reason… perhaps it had to do with the kinds of experiments they were doing down there…?

To make the whole thing a little bit more fresh and unique I want to tell a story about how us Swedes viewed the Cold War from a military perspective as well as how the everyday man viewed the whole thing. I think it could be very interesting for people around the world to experience a little bit of that point of view! So with this military base being from the cold war era, I looked up some blueprints of research facilities that was running during the cold war. I found some interesting things that I should absolutely keep in mind designing it. The facility had these areas:

• Virology
• Bacteriology
• Animal Assessment

And then I want to add an area that will be the main focus point of the story… Human Assessment. I won’t go into detail about it more than I have done research regarding chemical warfare using hallucinogenic chemicals… I think it’ll make for a great horror game setting! On top of that I also need to keep in mind what specifically military facilities needs areas for:

• System Maintenance
• Logistic Supports
• Facilities and Base Support
• Personel Support

Moodboards Ok… now to something I can at least show you! Like I’ve said a few times now, I’m doing feeling design so I wanted to create moodboards early to get a nice feel for the overall feeling of the game. As the environment in the game is very important for that, I started making some moodboards for general areas of the game. This is not all of them as I have yet to come up with more areas, but it won’t spoil anything either.

I started out with making moodboards that focused on showing how I wanted things to look in a more broad way. I would highly recommend that you open up the images in a seperate tab so that you can see the high-quality version of the moodboard, they come with some descriptions.

The Forest

The Lake

The Cottage

The Bunker Entrance

The Bunker

The second batch of moodboards was more focused around the feelings I want the environment to have. So I made an example of this for the forest, which will be semi-dynamic throughout the game! I finally got to use my photoshop skills a bit!

Morning

Misty

Night

Short Story Prototype So… with all of this said, I wanted to actually try something that I haven’t done before. I wanted to write a short story based on all of the ideas above. But I needed something to actually write about. So I came up with a very basic idea of an event I wanted to happen in the game, and then wrote it as a short story.

This was to try and see if the narrative would work to set up an eerie atmosphere as well as build some tension in the game, with the world rules I set for the game. And I got to say… this is probably the best thing I did during this project. I got some great feedback on the short story and people actually really loved it! I know now, for sure, that I will be trying to implement a similar event in my game, but in a different way!

The short story took me about 3 hours to make and is in that sense a very quick way of testing out some of your feelings-focused game elements on other people. You don’t even need a playable demo, just use your words!

The base idea was very vague and it started out with these interest points:

• Long lit corridor
• Sudden ending
• Turns around
• Suddenly darkness

It turned into a 3 pages long short story and you can read it here!

From Short Story To Mechanics…? Going into designing a game with feelings as its core I was always afraid of what kind of fun mechanics I would have to implement in the game. And during the writing process of my short story something clicked. In the short story, the character is digging through his backpack and that’s exactly what I want. I want an inventory system like the old school action RPGs where you have to try and make everything fit like a tetris puzzle.

Not only does this keep enhancing the feeling of realism in the game, but it also brings some interesting situations for the player to experience. What if the inventory space is very limited? You could set up a scenario where the player would have to leave powerful items behind in order to take other important (but not powerful) items with him. To keep with the realism, I was also thinking if opening up the inventory would actually take some time to do. The player presses a button and it takes about 2-3 seconds for the character to open the inventory up, showing an animation where he puts the backpack in front of him (much like in Metro: Exodus, but slower). This could lead to very stressful moments when the player desperately needs to use something while trying to hide from threats.

The inventory system could also have “quick access slots” which basically is the outer side of the backpack that usually fits water bottles and such. That way not every item could fit, but they could act as a traditional “hotbar” for the player to quickly access certain items. Perhaps you can play with this a bit further and let the player use his pockets as well!

Three Themes This leads me to the last bit of the results, the main themes of the game. Previously I’ve tried to work towards a single theme in my games, but this time it was just way too hard to keep it as a single one due to it being so focused around feeling design.

I had to really sit down and think what kind of themes I wanted and I have to this point come up with these:

• Exploration / Documentation
• Cold War Sweden / History
• Paranoia / Delusion

That Leads Us To Now… If you actually read through everything, I just want to say thanks. Because if you have, it means that there was something in there that hopefully kept you interested. Even tho the 30 day challenge is over, I do want to keep working on this project. I’ve already done a lot of 3D modelling and I’m working in Unreal Engine 4.

If you have any feedback or are just interested in following my project moving forward, send me a PM on discord. All the feedback that I’ve gotten so far have been great, and it is usually all the kind words that keeps me wanting to keep chasing this mini-dream of mine.

This challenge have been great, the game that was just an idea… is now something much more AND I have learned so much.

Thanks again for everyone who followed this project. It means so much to me that you’ve taken your time to follow this silly little thing. It really does mean more than you think!

Day 25 - Writing down the outline for a “results/conclusion” for the project

So because I’m leaving on a mini-vacation the 26th I’m gonna try and get this project “done” the 25th. So today I’ve been writing some things down for the final update on this project here! So there isn’t too much to say more than the next update SHOULD be the final one :)

Day 23 - Keep updating my GDD

So today I kept filling out as much as I could in my GDD. Even tho last post I said I was probably gonna chill a bit with the GDD bit, but thanks to the lovely community I figured out there is not point in doing that. Just narrow the scope a bit! So instead of trying to make a complete GDD at the end of this project, I’m now instead focusing on trying to just fill out as much as I can in whatever time I have!

So today I filled out some things in the document and while doing so, it kinda forced me to brainstorm some things regarding the layout and progression throughout the game. Which was fun! I came up with a new area and how I kind of want the last bit of the game to play out.

I also had to TRY and wrap my head around what kind of theme or keywords the game should have. Like I’ve stated many times, I love designing my games from feelings first, and then grow a game out of that later. So I came up with three separate “themes” that I’m somewhat happy with describing my game. They are as follows:

• Exploration / Documentation
• Cold War Sweden / History
• Paranoia / Delusion

They are all key focuses that I want to push forward in this game. I want the player to feel like an explorer. I want them to learn about the Swedish perspective of the cold war and what we did in our military. I want them to experience the feelings of slowly going delusional… to the point where they get paranoid of small details in the environment.

(Did you know the Swedish army was one of the bigger armies during the cold war? We had 800,000 soldiers ready to be mobilized and the entire Swedish society could set its focus on war in a very short amount of time!)

I know the themes need a bit of a polish. I wonder if I should change the themes from single words to a descriptive sentences instead for each theme… hmm…

Another thing I had to write was a short description of the characters in the game. Right now there is only two characters that I feel is relevant to the game and this is what I’ve written so-far:

Main Protagonist

• Young adult (20-23 years old)
• Urban explorer
• Introvert (Not many friends, but few great ones)
• Photographer
• “Gamer” (Most friends are online friends, knows internet culture etc)
• Believes SOMEWHAT of the paranormal but haven’t experienced anything himself
• Likes things organized
• Good physique but could get some more muscles on those bones! He will be a silent protagonist throughout the game. This is because I want the player to react to the scares rather than having a molded reaction handed to the player. The only times he have a voice is when he talks to his friend in a call. His “reactions” will be shown in the form of text, almost like objectives.

Protagonists Friend

• Young adult (25-30 years old)
• Massive military history nerd due to his family’s connection to the swedish military
• Loud online but quiet and socially awkward
• Gamer. Pure. Gamer
• Is sceptic but open to paranormal phenomenon
• Few friends
• Impulsive acting on feelings
• Slightly overweight, but is careful about what he eats. This character is only being portrayed in phone calls. He is there to help the player and give them helpful hints and tips as well as giving some more color to the story every now and again. He will be there to discuss briefly the crazy things the main protagonist experience throughout the game.

The thing I’m trying to focus on right now is to get a good overall view of the story-arc in for the game as well as looking into more about how the player can progress in the story. I need to also try and figure out a good layout for the military facility and how to connect all the different areas in both narrative, mechanics, level design and… well everything! I want it all to feel natural and realistic.

I think thats about it. I’m glad that there are so many supportive people in this community. Without it I would’ve given up 3 weeks ago. Hehe. Thank you all who supports me and tells me not to give up! You guys know who you are :)

Day 22 - Slow progress last few days…

So today I tried to fill out my GDD with more info regarding some story elements. I gotta say, I don’t know if I want to continue to fill out the GDD any more and just focus on these smaller prototypes for the game instead. I feel like I’m getting more out of these experiments rather than forcing me to write the GDD in detail. I wonder if it is because I’m way too early in development to write one.

I think I’m gonna continue with doing more of these feeling-focused prototypes and just write down my results and have the GDD as a side thing. I will keep posting here tho as it is very fun to do! I feel like I’m failing something here…

More prototypes and different ways of designing a game in pre-production is probably my way to go, rather than writing a full GDD!

Day 19 - Watching some UE4 tutorials

Today I have been looking into how Blueprints works in UE4 as well as how to create a custom UI. This is because I really want to see if I will be able to create my own UI for the backpack mechanic as well as making another prototype in the form of a main menu. This idea is taken from the developers of Subnautica and I think it will fit perfectly with my whole pre-production GDD style of feeling design.

Sadly not much more to report today!

Day 17 - Brainstorming mechanics around the short story prototype

So after reading the short story and thinking of how any of the story elements could be implemented into my game… I actually thought of a few things. I do want this person to be realistic and I want the story itself to be based on reality. However, I do also want to have supernatural elements in the game that is mostly tied to the horror and what is going on in the game. I want the protagonist to feel like any unlucky person that would be in this horrible place and with that I want to find realistic mechanics that can make the game interesting!

One of those ideas I came up with was making an interesting inventory management mechanic by using a backpack. The idea is that in order to access your inventory and manage it, you would have to physically remove your backpack, put it down and then actually see what you got. This would be shown in an automated animation and when the backpack is down a sort of UI would show up where you can manage the inventory. Another thing I want to do with this inventory management is to go back to the older RP games like Diablo 1, where items take up different amount of space depending on their sizes. I feel like this can be tied in together with the natural feel to the story and feel realistic.

You can also with this have very stressful moments when you really need to bring up an item while being chased. Or put the player in a weaker position forcing them to leave very valuable items behind for a moment to bring big and heavy items somewhere else. I feel like it have a lot of potential!

Another aspect of this mechanic could be that some smaller items can be easily accessed from the outside of the backpack, just like modern backpacks do. They usually have smaller pockets to easily access water bottles and the likes. So in the game certain items can be in easy-access slots.

With this, you could also argue that you would be able to use your pockets for the same reasons… which, you know what… is NOT a bad idea! I need to brainstorm more about this!

I just want to thank everyone who took their time to read my little prototype short story… it worked absolute wonders for me! It worked out so much better than I thought it would! Maybe I was just lucky and I had a good idea…? I don’t know, but it sure as hell did help me set an atmosphere I kind of want my game to have :)

Day 16 - Some feedback from the short story yesterday

I got a lot of feedback and even a few people who stated: “I can’t wait to read the next chapter!” Which was… a very good reaction, to say the least! I wrote the short story as a kind of prototype for an event I wanted to try out in my game. The people who were unaware of this thought I just wrote a short story. So getting those reactions is great! The prototype shows that such a “simple” event can invoke a lot of feelings in the player and so it should absolutely be doable in a different medium like a game.

Seeing as this short story prototype worked pretty well, I think you could read through it and perhaps come up with fun mechanics that is tied to certain parts of the story. It’ll be fun to see what kind of mechanics I can come up with and write about in the future!

Day 15 - Designing Through Short Story Prototyping

Ok! After a few days of not feeling the best… I finally wanted to test a new way of designing events in my GDD (with focus on feeling design). Basically, I had a vague idea for an event in my game that went as followed:

• Long lit corridor
• Sudden ending
• Turns around
• Suddenly darkness

I wanted to basically enhance that idea with building and writing a short story around it, almost like a prototype for the event. And here is my result…! A 3 pages short story that tells that event!

The Short Story

Urban exploration have always been a hobby of mine. My love for it comes from the beauty of watching mother earth slowly morph and change these man made constructions, to be part of itself. It’s especially beautiful when the grey concrete blocks gets colored bright green by all the leaves and the rustic brown of what once was silver steel. Brown, green and grey… The colors of mother nature. It is as if she is slowly turning everything back to what it was before us humans were walking around. These “scars” we leave behind, that’s the eerie beauty that reminds us of how insignificant we are.

Today I set out to explore a supposedly secret and hidden structure out in the woods. Rumors have it that it’s of some sort of military facility, built during the cold war. After just an hour of driving the road stopped and I had to walk for another 40 minutes to reach my destination. I had almost forgotten how much I used to play in the forest as a child, this trek made so many memories flood back to me. It’s been many years since I last took a hike into the forests. Usually these adventures tended to be in industrial regions with nothing but concrete around. The fresh air, the lush green nature, the summer breeze… A feeling of freedom went through my mind, I felt like a child again.

The old radio tower stood alone in the midst of all the trees. It looked like nobody had been around to take care of it for many many years. The overgrowth had slowly taken over the radio tower, even a tiny sapling had decided it’s center would be it’s home. I took a quick glimpse at my compass, I needed to head north west. “I guess I see you in a bit”, I cheered at the trapped sapling as I stumbled passed the overgrowth, past the radio tower.

After a couple of minutes I reached my destination. I remember it felt like my backpack was slowly getting heavier and heavier. A perfect time to have a quick breather and pick up my gear. I took out my phone and was surprised that all the bars were visible, it is quite rare as my phone could barely get any signal in the city. The camera was next, it had a few years of scars on it, but worked perfectly fine. My way too tight head lamp as well as my trusty mechanically powered flashlight. I’ve lost count on the amount of times my main light source decided it had to take a break and my extra flashlight saved me. I never do these explorations without extra light sources, one time was enough for me to learn that important lesson.

The sun kept shining its bright rays onto the lush greenery around me and I got reminded that it was time to start the exploration. In front of me was a very small, mossy covered concrete structure leading into the mountain side. A rusty old gate was barely covering the door opening and the big metal lock had seen better days. As I reached for my small crowbar it was almost as if the lock pleaded for me not to do it. With a quick bend the lock crumbled into million pieces. I smirked as I let the poor fellow know how I felt. “Sorry bud, you did a splendid job until you met me: The Lock Exorcist! You had no chance from the start.”

As I pulled the rusty gate it let out a small screech as I was suddenly introduced to the darkness in front of me. It caught me off guard as I took a step back to make sure to turn on my head light. The cold white light quickly created the familiar contrast of black and white concrete compared to the lush green and blue outside. I took a quick look back and caught a good photo of the nature behind me. The door opening created a natural frame for the photo. This is when I realized how much colder the inside of this bunker was, compared to the outside.

Inside the concrete beast was a smaller room, an old rotten table with the accompanied chair next to it. Dried leaves covered the corners of the room and you could feel how the humidity started to rise the further you went in. As my light slowly traveled from cold concrete wall to wall it suddenly faded into nothing. A corridor opened up on the far end of the room. It was almost as if the light itself was absorbed by the darkness emanating from the opening. As I walked closer towards the dark corridor I realized that all the noises of the forest outside was completely silent. No breezes in the trees, no bird calls, nothing. I was experiencing a silence I had never heard before. Looking outside the tiny doorway it was like watching a silent film.

At the start of the corridor on the cold concrete wall was a light switch. It had lost its fine white color and was now yellowed and dusty. I had a feeling that the plastic was so old that it would break if I tried to pull it. Thinking back on the lock I brutally broke earlier I quickly realized that I shouldn’t worry about breaking things. Even though my number one rule on adventures like these was to leave everything as it was when I arrived, sometimes you got to bend that rule a bit. I flicked the poor old switch and everything around me was blasted with a bright yellow light.

The old yellow lights that covered everything around me turned this otherwise cold and eerie concrete building into a warmer, more relaxing feeling. The room at the entrance looked much smaller now that I could see everything at once. I turned off my head lamp as I no longer needed it and I looked down the corridor. I saw a very long corridor before me that was ever so slightly turning to the right. There was no end in sight, it just kept going. With the light turned on I felt more confident about venturing further into this construction. I couldn’t wait to figure out what kind of facility this would end up being as this long turning corridor was highly unusual to say the least.

As I took my first step into the corridor the ground beneath my feet let out a loud CRUNCH. I looked down and to my surprise the old dry leaves had slowly merged into a bunch of flakes from dried paint. I took a quick look along the concrete wall and realized how badly damaged the paint was after all these years. As my eyes kept going along the wall, the paint was in better and better quality. I could only assume this was because it was better protected from mother nature outside. The crunching from my feet slowly diminished the further I ventured in and eventually I was just stepping on cold smooth concrete. My footsteps were a good company in the eerie silence that this space was creating. I took many photos along the way down the corridor and I had measured at least 30 meters in when I could no longer see the room I that came from. On the other side the corridor kept going, no doors, no pipes, it just kept going deeper, slightly turning. After a few more meters it started to feel like the corridor was actually leading downwards as well. I could however not visually see the slope and the photos could not help either. It was an odd feeling.

I walked for another 30 meters and in the distance I could finally see something: an iron gate. I picked up my pace a bit and I couldn’t help but smile for this unusual architecture I had stumbled across. The closer I got to the gate, the more I realized that the humid feeling I had in the exposed room earlier was completely gone. It actually felt really dry down there. The gate was made out of iron, had very little rust on it and the green flaking paint revealed its clean silvery shine. On the other side of the gate was another set of table and chairs,which were in much better condition. They looked like they’ve been there, untouched for many years. The corridor split into two just behind the table. The setup made it look like a guarded entrance to whatever is inside. This gate also had a lock on it and The Lock Exorcist had its name written all over it!

No use. After 5 minutes of trying to open it there was no way I could get in. I let out a big sigh and I admitted defeat. However, the feeling of victory swept across my face as I was so happy to have found something so incredible as this place, out in the middle of nowhere! I took my camera out and started to take a whole bunch of pictures. After a few minutes of trying different settings I decided it was time to leave. Perhaps there are more ways into this place? It felt like I had stumbled across a big complex, and all the details around me lead me to believe it is military related. I put my camera back in my backpack and I leave only to be met by complete darkness.

I jumped back into the gate in shock, in front of me was that eerie darkness again. The corridor I came from was gone. How come I didn’t realize that all the lights turned off? Behind me the light still shone as if nothing had happened, the table and chairs were still there. That’s when I made the discovery that the darkness WAS absorbing the light, there is no way the light at the gate would softly dissipate just a few meters from its source. That silence. At that point all I could hear was my heart beating and my heavy breathing. This was not normal, I had to get out. But there was only one way out. Through the darkness.

I dug through my backpack and found my headlamp. My heart kept beating faster and faster and my heavy breathing got louder… my heavy breathing? I held my breath and realized that the breathing wasn’t coming from me. It was coming from the darkness, I was not alone down here. My legs started to give up on myself and the thought that I could not see what was in the darkness, but it could see me, send shivers down my spine. Panic slowly crept through my entire body and my hands started to shake uncontrollably. As my shaking hands reached up to my headlamp, I slowly pulled on the power switch.

The light from my headlamp was very weak in the thick darkness. An old wooden door stood in front of me. As the heavy breathing in the darkness stops, the door slowly opens…

I got some lovely feedback on my english from @WittyAdrian and some other feedback from other people as well. Thank you so much for that! It feels like the prototype was a success as a lot of people liked it!

Day 12 - Worked on the side-project for a bit…

So, I took a day off from the GDD and I focused on another side-project that I got. It is part of the project of how to design games with a feeling as its core. So I’m gonna post my first draft regarding how we designed our horror game demo. PLEASE let me know about any sort of feedback, I do want this to be taken seriously… and it’s my first ever “serious” text I’ve written in english… so all feedback is good feedback! Positive or negative. Keep in mind that I’m going to also make illustrations with this text in the future.

prepare yourself… this is a long text!

Notes on our way of designing our demo, basing our design choices around the theme of “Claustrophobia”.

Start out with doing some research of what this feeling should be at the core of the game. In my example this was claustrophobia. Why do you want to try and design using this feeling? Do you think this will enhance a certain aspect of the game? Do you think it’ll invoke certain feelings? How would other people explain this feeling you are trying to use as a core?

When I’m talking about a core, I mean how would you implement this feeling into areas like level design, mechanics, character development, narrative structure and other areas than atmosphere? For us we started out with the word claustrophobia and we worked ourselves outwards. Get a nice description of the feeling you’re gonna focus on. Find different explanations for the word, start with the academic way of describing the feeling. Then go into technical, is there something there we can find? How about psychological? How do other people explain the feeling? I promise you that you will find interesting aspects of that feeling that you can use in various areas of your design.

“If you have a fear of tight spaces, a fear of being trapped, or a fear of elevators, you may have claustrophobia. A form of anxiety disorder, claustrophobia is defined as an irrational fear of small spaces and of having no way to escape; the feeling of being closed in without being able to get out can actually lead to a panic attack. Feelings of claustrophobia can be triggered by entering an elevator, a small, windowless room, or even an airplane. Wearing tight-necked clothing may also cause feelings of claustrophobia in some individuals.” - Psycom

With this we can start to reverse engineer what claustrophobia means and what it could be used for thinking in game design and mechanics. To do this, make sure you check some sources that explains how they feel, experiencing the specific feeling you are looking for. We found something that we felt would work great with our game.

“The most common experience is a feeling or fear of losing control.” - NHS.UK

The key theme we focused on while designing our demo was the feeling of losing control. How far could we potentially push this? We focused a lot of this in the level design but as well as mechanics. This is sort of how our demo went about achieving this:

After a brief introduction to the story and why the character is where he is, the game starts. It is pitch black, the only light source around is your flashlight. The player is free to move around and explore a staircase leading down. Descending further down into the darkness leads you to a bunker entrance of some sort. At this time we are building up an atmosphere that is very heavy. What I mean with that is that it is completely dark, very little amount of light and you got a constant low tone background noise to make it feel like you are deep underground. Almost as if you can “feel” thousands of tons of concrete above you. We didn’t want the game to be completely silent, we always want something there, so that we can take it away from them… THIS is the base idea of claustrophobic game design, as we used it. A way of introducing patterns and then changing them for dramatic effect.

After entering the bunker the player are “welcomed” inside by a pitch black corridor, no longer can your flashlight guide you or identify what to come, it’s almost as if the light is absorbed by the darkness. With less information for the player to gather about his surrounding, the player starts imagining what could be around, starting to push their own imagination. This darkness is there to give the player a feeling for what true darkness is and for a future release of this tension.

Only a few meters into the hallway a doorway leads into a room on the right. In this room there is a power switch that will turn on all the lights in the bunker. We release the tension that have been building up and we introduce the player to a more relaxing atmosphere. This is what we focused our “claustrophobic design” a lot: Light. As they pull the switch they hear a loud clunk and the lights around him turns on. Together with giving them this comfort, we also take away that daunting low background noise as well. All of a sudden REAL silence is presented to the player, this is to brings a feeling of uncertainty and unease. Usually complete silence is used to build up for jump-scares and similar events, here we keep that silence for a while. Making it so that the player might think something will happen.

As I mentioned previously, we played around with trying to implement a “claustrophobic design” in our light elements. At a later stage the player will slowly start to realize that there are certain areas where the light is not as lit up as the rest, some areas are still not getting power. We gradually introduce the player to more and more darkness gradual taking away that comfort of being in lit up areas. The player is forced to explore rooms that are pitch black, and eventually he have to travel through pitch-black corridors again, with only his flashlight to show the way.

We went from very light areas of the bunker, invoking a sense of safety in the player. We then gradually under a few puzzles slowly take that safety of light away. Now all he got is his flashlight. We are here in the environment, as that feeling of claustrophobia invokes: Fear of losing control. For us with claustrophobic design meant: making the player gradually lose control of light.

While exploring the deeper parts of the bunker, we set up a chase scene in order to bring up the pasing a bit by introducing a threat. Now the player have to navigate this labyrinth-like maze of corridors and rooms while only having his flashlight at his disposal. This segment is there to invoke a feeling of stress on top of everything else. At the end of the chase scene we calm the atmosphere down by giving the player with a little bit more light, to be sure he knows the threat is over.

At this point I need to inform you about the overall puzzle the player need to solve: The only way out is through a door that needs power. So in order to escape, the player/character needs to find fuses. So after the chase scene make the area lit up and make it feel a little bit comfortable. The door ahead in a lit hallway leads to a kitchen. At the corner of this kitchen is a very welcomed fuse box. However… it is time to take that relief away. This is where we force him to pull out the fuses in this area (which he needs to escape this bunker), which in turn… covers the entire bunker down in darkness. This time we are making the player lose control of the light again, only this time it is on “his own terms”. As he pulls the fuse out, all lights are turned off and we introduce the same heavy atmosphere we had in the chase scene earlier and now he have to backtrack through the same area he just got chased in.

We push this feeling of dread as the player have to navigate through the hallways yet again, knowing that the previous threat lurked in this area, there might be a threat around any corner. At this point, we will do one final push to the whole claustrophobic-based game design: We take away his flashlight. As the player stands in complete darkness, the character remembers that he got a camera, and from this moment forward a new mechanic is introduced. The player can take photos which leaves a bright light with no visual epicenter that quickly gets dimmer and dimmer. The light is bright enough to leave sharp shadows as the player can only take a few steps at the time due to the lack of vision. This mechanic have made so many people scared for the fear of the unknown, the anticipation of a scare that awaits for each time they take a photo.

The most important part of the introduction of this mechanic, is that we don’t ever have any explaining text on how to use it. We wanted the players to figure it out themselves so that when the picture is taken, it is a more natural feel for the player. As they stand there in the darkness, they struggle to figure out what button to press (left-click, a very common button to test) just as if they where to struggle to navigate the photo-button on a camera in the dark. The claustrophobic design regarding how we slowly but surely take away control from the player when it comes to navigation (light) is now at its peak. We made sure that this would not be a frustrating experience by not making it absurdly hard for the players to navigate through the maze-like bunker. It’s a fine balance in game design to make sure that nothing frustrates the player, unless that is what they are going for. We did NOT want that to happen as it would ruin the immersion in our game.

We got some really good feedback on the demo and many people pointed at the camera-flash mechanic and said that it was by far the best part of the whole experience. I really hope that other game designers saw this and was in some way influenced by this idea, because not long after quite a few games picked up on the whole using a photo camera flash as a light-source to create a similar experience.

This build-up in pacing, environment design and mechanics all pointed towards the overall theme of the project: Claustrophobia. We tried to implement that feeling of losing control in as many aspects as possible while also balancing it so that it wouldn’t be frustrating. Because of this, I still to this day believes that working from a feeling first and then build a game around it absolutely is a valid way of designing a game. Especially in the horror genre.

Something to end on: While designing with claustrophobia as a focal point in this project, one question remains: Did we manage to make people FEEL claustrophobic? I do believe we did, but not in that extreme way that makes us feel awful, that feeling of having a panic attack due to certain circumstances. It is important to say that while the core was claustrophobia, the FEELING of it was not what we wanted to invoke in the players as a main feeling. It was just an inspiration to design a game in a different way.

When designing a horror game that is supposed to invoke certain strong feelings in their players, you need to keep them engaged and immersed. If you “do too well” with invoking feelings of terror the player might stop playing. Yes, you might’ve achieved to scare the player, but isn’t it somewhat a failure if they never get to experience the full game? You should try and make sure that you balance the feelings you want to invoke, just like you balance your pacing of the game. That being said, if you manage to make your players stop playing due to being too scared: Be proud of that achievement! Not many people have managed to do that. It’s a fine line between stopping playing due to frustration and out of pure fear.

If you actually read everything up to this part… I thank you for taking that time. I hope that it was somewhat of an interesting read. But do you have any feedback? Do you feel like something was missing? Was the explanations too vague? Again, thank you so much for taking the time to read it, game designer or not!

Day 10 - Another project and more moodboards!

How ironic that I missed Day 9… lol!

So, I missed making an update yesterday, that’s because… Well I took “a day off” I guess. But I’m doing awesome progress to both this project and another project I just started. So before I show you guys some moodboards I just want to shamefully plug my side-project! It’s a document I’m currently writing my thought process of designing a game where feeling is the core focus, rather than a fun game mechanic. Here’s a little excerpt from the document, just after I’ve talked about desiging a game with atmosphere and story! Toss me a message if you want to read the whole thing :)

"At this point many of you probably think about the ever growing numbers of “walking simulators” that’s been coming out recently. Personally I enjoy a lot of them and I don’t see that tag as a negative. The kind of experience they bring is usually focused around evoking certain emotions through atmosphere and the story (narrative). However, they do indeed usually lack a certain drive to push people to keep playing.

What most designers tend to do to break this pattern of… “just walking” is to have some sort of gameplay that breaks it up with other gameplay elements. This is very common in majority of other games due to the fact that you need to control your pacing in the game. In Sweden we have a saying that goes “Kaka på kaka” which directly translates to “cake on cake”, basically it means that something is superfluous. It works really well if you think of it in game design terms. A really good feature (a cake) usually gets really boring and repetitive if you keep pushing it onto the player. Sometimes having too many cakes can be a bad thing! Just like lesser item drops in ARPGs makes the more powerful drops FEEL better: mixing your gameplay up is just as important.

This is where a lot of the games focusing on just telling a story fails, in my opinion. Not that the story is bad, but it is really hard to keep someone engaged with just a story. There are good and bad examples of this. Moving forward I want you to take whatever I say with a grain of salt. The games I will talk about briefly are good games on their own merits and I enjoyed them all for what they are!"

It is still a work in progress so I know there’s a bunch of spelling issues as well as other problem in the text, hehe. Anyways! Off to the moodboards!

If you read the last update, I just want to clearify: The moodboards for that day was mostly for giving me a good idea of how I want the different areas to look, rather than feel. Today, I’m going a little bit deeper into what kind of feeling I want the player to have walking in the different settings. Today I’m focusing on the forest in general. Enjoy!

Forest Moodboad - Morning

This is designed for how I want the forest to look and feel at the very start of the game. A very warm and welcoming feeling should present the player to this beautiful forest. I don’t want the forest to feel hot and dry tho, so I have really tried to keep some blue in the shadows for this reason. I think it worked out great!

Forest - Misty

Later on in the game the forests feeling will turn more cold and slightly more threatening. I don’t want the forest to feel overly threatening to the player at this point. I just want the fog and colder colors to push a feeling of loneliness and mystery.

Forest - Night

Obviously there would be a night part of the forest… It might be a cliché but it works wonders to set up a highly threatening environment where the players mind can go wild, scaring himself… Compared to the other two, red is the “dominant” color at this point of the game. The forest is very saturated at this point and there is a faint fog lingering about. I really want to play around with really black things lingering in the darkness, so I’m going to make the forest very lightly light up so you can barely see details, then have entities around that CAN be even more dark than it’s surrounding. This will let me play around with the idea of showing things “in the corner of your eyes”. I look VERY MUCH forward to playing around with that! Anywho: moodboard!

So… I know it’s quite the update. I feel much better about these moodboards because they actually try to push atmosphere and feelings this time around rather than just look. I finally got to use my photoshop skills to alter a lot of the images! If you wanna see how they all looked before those edits, toss me a message! ^^

Day 8 - Moodboard work!

Ok, finally I get to actually post something visual with my work! Again I didn’t have too much time to find the exact images I want, but I have a start. Each image in the moodboard got at least something that I really like. Make sure to open the images separately to get them in higher quality :)

Forest Moodboard

The first image sort of shows the kind of feeling I want the player to see when he looks out from the lookout at the beginning of the game. I want the player to FEEL like it is a massive area to explore. Image six and seven I like because they show a “natural” path in two different kinds of forest types. The rest just gives an alright feel for a good swedish forest.

Lake Moodboard

There is not too much to say about the lake. It is going to be a very important part of the story. But I sadly can’t get into details… hehe. So the moodboard is kind of smaller compared to the other ones. The third image gives us again a good feeling for how I sort of want the lake to be viewed from the outlook.

Cottage Moodboard

There’s going to be an abandoned cottage (or house… I’m not sure yet if I want it to be bigger). in the forest that again is going to have quite the importance to the overall story in the game. Image three and eight mostly gives me the kind of eerie feel of what I want the cottage to bring while image one and two shows more how I want it to look (very swedish!). Four to seven basically gives me a good idea of what an near destroyed cottage can look like.

Bunker Entrance

The entrance to the bunker is very important. I think the images speaks for themselves but I guess I can explain what I like about the images. Image two and five clearly shows how I want the exterior part of the entrance to look. This way I can hide it away a little bit more due to it being so “close to the ground”. However, I also want the “inside” of the entrance to look kind of clean, not too badly damaged to give the player a somewhat “welcoming” feel.

Bunker

To be clear here… These images only covers a certain area of the bunker. What you see here is most likely gonna be connected to the very first bits into the bunker entrances. So a bit darker than what it will be further in. Keep in mind that the military bunker is going to have several big areas with different focuses for the people who did experiments in there. So yeah, this is just showing ONE part of the bunker. It’s going to be a massive complex…!

I hope you guys have enjoyed a more visual update to this GDD. I am honestly so happy to finally get a short break of writing and just focus on the visuals again. I love to work with invoking certain feelings in the player, experiment with atmosphere etc! I want to create a unique experience for a lot of players. I don’t think many people across the world have any idea what it feels to be in a lush green swedish forest! Not to mention… know what kind of view Sweden and its population had on the Cold War!

Sorry for writing so much… it’s just really great to vent your ideas sometimes! Even tho I do tend to leave out way too many details… Thanks for reading and following this project :)

Day 7 - Moodboard for the bunker

This will be yet another short update regarding my work. But today I spent about 30 minutes to look for nice images of what kind of feel I want the bunker to have in my game. I have saved a bunch of photos and I will look for even more.

My idea is that there are several different areas of the military base that you can explore, so I want them all to have somewhat a different feeling. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done regarding this, but I do need to start somewhere!

I will post a link tomorrow with a full fledged moodboard so there is at least something to see in my progress, instead of just boring texts every day :P Now, I need to get some rest, 4 hours of sleep is not good people!

TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES

Day 6 - Research regarding chemical warfare agents

Today was another short day of work on this project. I dedicated at least an hour to do some more research for my story and what interesting things I can toss into it. I want the reason why the military base exists to be at least believable. So today I looked into some things regarding chemical warfare agents, more specifically what kinds that can cause hallucinations in their users…! Sadly so-far I have only found the more famous ones like QNB, LSD and PCP. I want to find something that might be less known, making it less likely that the player knows about it (making it a little bit more mysterious hopefully).

I’ve written down some key-words that will help me do more research in this area in the future. I also have found some really good information from the WHO regarding some psycho chemicals.

I’m sorry that these updates are so boring… I wish I could give you guys more details and I honestly think this will continue the rest of this week. Week 3 is probably gonna be more about trying to fill the GDD with stuff I found during this week. Depending on how much research and info I have gathered.

Let me know if you guys got any questions! I know these updates are vague, but whatever!

Day 5 - Some more research regarding the military base

So today I didn’t have too much time to work on my project, BUT I managed to do some quick research regarding how different military bases are built up and formed. I need this in order to make the military base in my game feel real.

Looking up the biggest military bases in the world I stumbled across Fort Detrick, US, which then lead me into “Class 4 Biosafety Laboratories”. Which would work pretty well for my story. I won’t go into details why that is… but I guess you guys can kind of figure out where this military base is going…!

After looking into the BSL-4 type of bases I found out that Sweden already got one of those. The only one in the Nordic region and only one out of 6 in Europe! I can absolutely play around with that info and tie it together with this made up military base.

On top of all this, I have also started to do research what kind of different areas that could be in such a base… so far I have only found certain english key words and would love it if some of you had any more ideas! \t* Virology \t* Bacteriology \t* Animal Assessment \t* Human Assessment wink wink

And I also wrote down more basic areas that should be included and thought about: \t* System Maintenance - Vehicles, Tanks, Aircraft, Weapons, etc \t* Logistics Support - Parts, Fuel, Chemicals, Supplies, Transportation, Ammunitions, etc \t* Facilities and Base Support - Civil Engineering, Utilities, Security, etc \t* Personel Support - Medical, Administration, Services, etc

There is so much more interesting things I want to keep digging. I don’t know if this means that I will have to postpone the targeted goal hehe. Let me know if you guys got any interesting examples of just awesome military bases (secret or what not) there are in the world! Any suggestions will absolutely encourage me to keep writing!

Day 4 - Apparently the first week is over D:

There have been no real work towards my GDD today. Instead I have done some more important stuff and worked on my online portfolio. I thought that I had lost all of my portfolio I worked on back in Sweden, but luckily, I saved a copy of it on my uni server! Seeing as I graduated over 10 months ago, I’m so incredibly happy that I managed to connect to the unis servers and get my copy back! haha

Looking back at the first week (which was only 3 days for me) I have now written down the second weeks goal:

This week I will focus on more brainstorming regarding the story of my game and try to connect everything in the world together. I feel like world building and atmosphere is going to be my main drive to design my game. So that most things makes sense and ties together with the main theme.

I can’t wait to keep going! I hope I can make the updates here a little bit more interesting by writing down my thought process.

Day 3 - Brainstorming and a somewhat synopsis

Today (and a few minutes yesterday) I decided to focus on brainstorming some story related things for my game. I should start off by telling you a synopsis of what my game is about:

The game is set deep in the lush Swedish forests in the middle of the summer. The main protagonist have just left his car as the road ended suddenly and have decided to do the rest of the trek by foot. About an hour in he gets a phone call from his friend, a recurring character that will phone the protagonist every now and again. He will let the protagonist know that he is almost at the agreed destination.

The duo have been planning this trip for months and they are here to find a secret military base that was set up during the Cold War. The friend doesnt want to join due to the long trek required (out of shape). There are little to no information about it online, but the friends grandpa was part of the whole ordeal. With the small amount of info he managed to get out of his grandpa, they decided that this SHOULD be the place to find the base. It is here the game starts, you are free to walk around in a huge open area to find whatever you can about the military base. Let’s just hope that you ARE alone out there…

For me today I had to figure out some points of interest in the forest area. And write down what kind of conversation the protagonist should have with the friend on the phone, in order to make it feel more natural in the way of pointing the players to these different points.

I think my brainstorming worked pretty well! There is a TON of things to keep writing about, I have barely scratched the surface of how I want the narrative to be etc. The story is quite loose at this point but I’m already stoked about the environment and atmosphere I want to build!

Sadly I don’t want to spoil any of the story here, if you REALLY want to know just send me a PM on Discord and we can talk about it, hehe.

Day 2 - More research and expanding the GDD base

You can read, comment and follow the GDD base here!

Today I started off by showing my GDD to other designers and asked for feedback. It was quite clear that I had left out some important headers that made me quite frankly face-palm… Like, how could I have missed them? hehe

So my day consisted mostly of doing some research on other games GDDs and see what kind of headers they used and what is important. This was also the moment I realized that when a lot of people talk about GDDs, they think about Pitch Documents. Documents that are mainly created in order to sell the game for future customers or potential investors. Knowing this, I created a new section to my base that is basically a disclaimer. In this disclaimer I presents the main usage of this GDD base and so certain headers that usually goes into a Pitch Document won’t be part of this GDD. This is what I wrote in the disclaimer:

This document is based around the idea of having a source that your indie team can look on before and during the development of the game. The GDD will be structured around the genre of my current game idea that is a first person horror game with a heavy focus on exploration, story and atmosphere. So certain headers in this document might be more fletched out than others. For other games you might want to add other headers that you feel is important that your team or you yourself need to know. This document is also not a pitch document where you try and sell the idea to other people in order to get some sort of support or funding.

After some well needed feedback and research I added these headers to the document:

• Disclaimer
• USP
• Inspiration
• Current Market / Competition
• Story Progression

I swapped the orientation of the section Characters and Story to make sure that you present the characters before telling the story. This makes it easier for the reader to understand some of the situations some characters might be in, potentially making it more dramatic in some areas. I also added some suggestions to sub-headers within some headers in the document.

I will keep tossing this GDD around to look for more feedback around the community to see if there are more points that needs to be added or changed.

A really good source I found today was another article from Gamasutra written by Leandro Gonzalez. It is called “How to Write a Game Design Document” and you can read it here! It is very detailed and have some really nice examples with each section description.

All in all: a very good day 2!

Day 1 - Making a base for the GDD

So the first thing I’ve done is to create a base for a GDD (Game Design Document). I looked up some information on how to structure the GDD and what segments are important to the document. This varies a lot of what kind of game you are making. Some sections of the document is not as needed as others in certain genres.

There are three main sources I used when creating my own GDD base. The sources are as follows:

• The Anatomy of a Design Document - Tim Ryan
• Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design
• Fundamentals of Game Design - Ernest Adams

I have now created a base for my GDD to be filled out AND I’ve actually made it available for others to use as well! People are welcome to comment on some of the sections to give feedback.

You can find the base for the GDD here if you are interested in seeing what I will base my work around for the next 28 days!

Feedback is more than welcome :)

I want to try and make daily updates on this project as well as sharing the sources that I’m gonna use during this adventure! To begin with I want to say that I’m basing a lot of my GDD (but not completely) on the “The Anatomy of a Design Document” series on Gamasutra. You can read it here!

I will do my first things tomorrow and hopefully have a lot more to talk about regarding my process!