When making a horror game an important ingredient is the darkness. When in a dark place people tend to be more easily spooked and have a more vivid imagination, a genetic heritage passed on from our ancestors who were hunted by predators at night. Taking advantage of this is important and just changing the light level of an environment can make a huge difference in the scare factor.
The dull side of it
An update on how we work at Frictional!
Amnesia entered into the IGF competition
During the weekend we finished a demo build of our upcoming game Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
“Amnesia? What’s that?”
Oh, Sorry, “Amnesia: The Dark Descent” is the final name for our project that has previously had the work title Lux Tenebras/Unknown.
The Haunter Of The IGF
After lots of work and little sleep Frictional Games have entered into the IGF, an international competition for indie games, with our upcoming horror!
Puzzles in horror games Part 7: Penumbra puzzles
Now it is time for the final part in these series on puzzles in horror games! This post will be about some puzzles in Penumbra that I personally find especially interesting. Because of this, the post will be filled with puzzle spoilers so if you are planning on playing any Penumbra game and have not yet done so, do so before reading!
Time for a smallish update
This time I won’t show a new tool, but a new feature for our good old Level Editor: Decals. These are used mainly to add nice details to the level without much sweat. Here is a little video demonstrating how these can be used.
Puzzles in horror games Part 6: On “brain boosters” and hint systems
In most adventure games, the player takes the form of some type of Sherlock Holmes character and here one runs in to a problem: How does the player become Mr Holmes? How can she be given Sherlock’s wit and problem solving abilities, just like she is given Kratos’ strength? That’s what the rest of this blog entry will be about.
Horror Tip: [REC]
This is a spanish little gem in the “first person documentary horror” genre, same as the first Blair Witch movie (which I have not seen by the way).
Parallax trix
Since many seemed to enjoy the parallax mapping showed off in the material editor, I just wanted to show off the more advanced way of doing it and also giving some explanations.
I’m a Material Boy
Here’s the HPL Material Editor, our latest addition to the tool suite. This is what we use to create, edit and preview materials with. In a nutshell, a material is what’s gonna determine how an object is going to look like in the engine.
