Design

Idea 1

When I moved onto coming up with some idea's it was important to take my research into account. So while trying to pick an interesting scenario I did keep in mind what type of interesting unique mechanics I could bring into these.

Initially I tried to come up with a home invasion style scenario, using being trapped in doors at home and something chasing you. I felt knocking out the power to house and having an entity moving through the electrics and using the TV's and radios to enter and exit rooms could be a scary thought.

I did slowly move myself of using anything supernatural though, as most horrors have some sort of supernatural element too them, and while they are slowly becoming more realistic, I couldn't think of a game that directly used a realistic scenario of a home intrusion, or anything similar to scare the player.

Films such as "The Strangers" showed that super natural elements don't need to be there for it to be scary. I needed to be able to create the same suspense and fear within a realistic situation and that made me push to use realistic fears instead.

This also got me looking into mechanics that would help make this scary, things that people would feel are real and would happen within this type of scenario.

I began looking at movement such as how someone moves in the dark, how we reach out in front of ourselves when we can't see so we don't hit a wall, and how it's easier to trip over things when you can't see. I believed this would be a good mechanic to help bring the player into the game like they were really there.

I also wanted to be able to bring multiplayer into my designs, but without losing the fear, isolation/ vulnerability that you get when playing on your own. To get round this I considered sticking the second player in another place, where only contact via distance was possible. Therefore using a scenario from a neighbours point of view I believed would be a good idea.










Idea 2

While that idea began to form I also chose to look at doing a more action orientated horror like Left4Dead, but obviously standing out differently. Previously in my research I had looked at how the trust was difficult to bring into games, I had also seen the film "The Thing" recently and had taken to thinking of ideas to how that could be changed to work in a game.

To get round this I came up with idea of making "Insanity" within the game. But realistically, no one knows they are going insane. So I came up with a mechanic that could make the players see different to other players, and maybe cause chaos between players.


This needed to be weighed up against needing to be together, so besides just having more firepower, they would also have more team work skills by working together so they could take shorter and safer routes to the end of the level as they try to survive in a similar style to left for dead.

Meanwhile players turning insane could also at a certain point turn against players by mutating into one of the monsters that they were all trying to escape from.

Idea 3

Here I tried making an alternative to either of the previous ideas by involving 2 player co-operative, but needing to reply on each other as the players had different skills that they would need to progress.

I also thought that basing this on police could help bring the idea of using reality TV into the idea, and how I could turn the third person camera into an actual camera man who was filming the police do there job during a case with murder.

This camera would act like a 3rd person camera, but be rooted to the floor like a reality camera man, you could hear him breathing and panicking while you fight, and also it could generate that fear of whats round the corner much like the old Resident Evil games did from set cameras in rooms, but this time be more realistic from a different point of view.