[SEMI-SANE] Concept and Introduction
Hi all, for those who didn't meet me in person here is a brief rundown of myself:
My name is Daniel Esterhuizen
I've been playing around with making games since about 2007. I'm currently studying at the University of Pretoria and hope to become an active member of Make Games!
A short rundown of my skills: Adobe Flash, After Effects, Photoshop as well as programming in C++, Javascript, Java, Actionscript and GML.
My idea for the challenge is less of a game right now and more of a concept. It's also opportunity for me to learn how to use Unity.
I'd like to make a simple 1st person horror experience similar to that of "Slender"
The player wonders through an environment (a suitably scary environment) and at semi random timed intervals the game goes to crazy as the character's sanity is lost.
When in the insane mode, hallucinations appear, the screen tears, controls become unresponsive etc. before finally switching back to a sane state.
So I'm hoping to use this to force me to learn how Unity works!
Any advice and criticism is welcome!
My name is Daniel Esterhuizen
I've been playing around with making games since about 2007. I'm currently studying at the University of Pretoria and hope to become an active member of Make Games!
A short rundown of my skills: Adobe Flash, After Effects, Photoshop as well as programming in C++, Javascript, Java, Actionscript and GML.
My idea for the challenge is less of a game right now and more of a concept. It's also opportunity for me to learn how to use Unity.
I'd like to make a simple 1st person horror experience similar to that of "Slender"
The player wonders through an environment (a suitably scary environment) and at semi random timed intervals the game goes to crazy as the character's sanity is lost.
When in the insane mode, hallucinations appear, the screen tears, controls become unresponsive etc. before finally switching back to a sane state.
So I'm hoping to use this to force me to learn how Unity works!
Any advice and criticism is welcome!
Comments
The game feels very much like a mix between Amnesia and Slender.
As for scary environment you can go really minimalist here. Early Silent Hill games made excellent use of fog, and @TheFuntastic used darkness in Toward the light
If you use obfuscation well you can be very light on your art requirement, and make a rather interesting horror game.
One thing you could do is change set environment pieces once it recedes out of vision, so the player will be really confused, and scared.
The one thing I feel slightly off about the the semi random timing. There should be a reason why the character goes insane. Is there some kind of gas in the fog (like scarecrow from Batman) are you and escaped mental patient. The event it's can occur at a random time, but it still needs a reason: otherwise it might break the fourth wall.
So I didn't get to demo my creation at the meeting but here it is for anyone who'd like it:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/77656343/SEMI-SANE/SEMI-SANE.zip
A few notes about it.
This is my first attempt at using Unity so most of my time was spent doing tutorials and just messing around with the different features. There isn't really a goal of any sort or anything that actually ends the game so just ALT-F4 to exit when you've had enough random wandering about.
Also, you can fall off the edges of map, best avoid that.
Overall I had a great time! Hoping to just build onto my knowledge with each monthly challenge.
There isn't an event for the monster to appear, it sort of just moves around and you might or might not see it.
I found it scary that you never know when it might come out of the fog. This too was also a downfall as you could go walking around and never see anything.
Happy to know it gave the creeps. I tried to get the atmosphere right and it seemed to work well. Overall it was a fun little experiment :)