Ritual Build 11-03-2015

This is the build for "Ritual" as of 11-03-2015.  Excuse the dodgy frame rate, my laptop apparently can't handle screen capture software.

I'm pretty disappointing with it to be quite honest.  I feel like my art hasn't improved at all since first semester and if anything has gotten worse,

Forest area

I got some feedback from a friend who saw a previous build who pointed out the trees are too bright for a horror game.  I've darkened them here but I feel like they create too much contrast now.  Perhaps a sort of dull, greyish purple will work better.  I'll have to experiment.  It also feels a bit too cluttered so I'll play about with removing some assets and see how it feels.  I also still need to tweak one of the tree assets that looks unnaturally straight.

A few people have pointed out the flickering overlay is uncomfortable on the eyes, however these folks have only seen the video with the temperamental frame rate and everyone who has played the game so far has found it appropriate.  However one person who played the game did say the flickering isn't random enough so I'll try work out a way to have it randomly flicker.

Hallway

Obviously quite bare at the moment due to being a work in progress however I feel it would really benefit from some blurred foreground assets in order to give a better sense of enclosure and isolation.  I've also thought about adding a letterbox frame to the game for a similar reason.  Won't be too hard to mock that up to get an idea. The floors are also maybe a bit too bright and should at least be darker nearer the top of the asset to give a better sense of depth.  Perhaps I could add a bit of subtle perspective to the asset itself too.  I also find the doors don't exactly scream "school" so more iteration is required.  Also not sure if that purple colour is really working, seems too "pretty"... May have to rework my colour palette for this area again.

Basement Corridor

I think the flickering works well here and could maybe do with being totally dark at certain points to take more visual information away from the player as they're being chased by the enemy.  Also need to make it more obvious you have to press space at the ends of the corridor to enter and exit.  The neon graffiti should have a glowing animation or something just to give the room a bit more life.  Might be interesting to experiment with tilting the floor at an angle however I'm not sure how this would work via code with the player walking horizontally.  The pipes in the background also seem a bit "stuck on"  will have to create a bunch of other subtle assets to integrate them better.

Ritual Room

Really not happy with this one.  The entire scale just seems a bit off.  I showed the concept art for this to Ryan a couple weeks ago and he pointed out the composition as a whole needs more diagonals to break up all the straight lines.  I feel the skirting board I've added to the bottom of the wall is a major part of the problem as it's too big for the scale and thus visually confusing and also breaks up the image too much.


I think the portals look nice though!

Next Steps for art asset creation
- Finish hall assets/tweak current layouts
- Play about with character scale
- Polish overlays
- Feedback animation/tutorial for Ritual area
- Bespoke animations

Gameplay Storyboards

One of the main challenges I've come across so far on my venture in to game design is getting across gameplay elements to other disciplines on a team.  As an artist I'm obviously a very visual person so I thought I'd try storyboarding my gameplay.  They're pretty basic but speed and clarity were the priority here and (hopefully) this gets the job done.  

Optimising my Art Assets

One of the responsibilities of a game artist is making sure all your art is optimised for the game you're working on.  In my experience so far this has involved making sure all my assets are an appropriate size for the resolution of the game, utilising tricks like flipping certain assets via the game code or level editor etc to add a bit of subtle visual variation without taking up any more memory, creating modular assets etc etc.  However, one of the great things about Game Maker is the freedom it gives you as an artist.

I've found it's generally good practice to stick to powers of two for the sizes of art assets however when implementing 2D art Game Maker doesn't restrict you to this.  Upon discovering this I admittedly went a bit, well, mental with it-  I immediately chose a resolution of 1920 x 1080 for the game and created some pretty massive assets as a result.

So, not wanting to sacrifice any quality I finally got round to optimising my assets in game last night thanks to this very handy blog post by Yo Yo Games.

Game Maker stores all the graphics for the game in texture pages - images with several sprites stored on them that sprites will be pulled from whenever they appear on screen.  The first step to optimising my art was to create a texture group for each room (scene) in my game.  

I then went through all of the sprites in the game and selected the appropriate texture group for them.  After doing this all the texture sheets were more or less ordered with all the sprites for each room/scene in chronological order.  This already sped the loading speed up quite a bit as it shortens the amount of texture sheets the game has to look through.

Finally for each room I created a "create event" for an object there and added the code:

draw_texture_flush();

Which clears the texture memory.  This was followed by the line(s) "draw_sprite([sprite name], 0, 0, 0);" for one sprite on each texture sheet for that scene (the forest scene in the above example has A LOT of sprites).  As I understand it, this way the game now instantly knows which sheets to load up for that scene, rather than searching through all of them for each individual sprite.

I've also had to scale down the scope of my game due to time restraints, so the current map looks like this:

However quality over quantity, and the game is running a lot faster now!

Semester 2 - Week 3 - Progress Presentation

A couple weeks ago I had my second last ever un-graded progress presentation!  It's absolutely terrifying how quickly this year is going.  I also just realised I forgot to post my second progress presentation, however it was mostly just concept art I've already posted on here and going over the design of my game.

After playing a lot of 3D horror games for research I've personally found that hyper-realistic first-person 3D games tend to be scariest.  There's something about having that ability to move around freely in 3D space that's just really immersive.

However, even if I can't make a 2D horror game that's as frightening or immersive as 3D it's still possible to create a scary 2D horror game.

So the cognitive science theory of the Two Factor Theory of emotion states that in order for an emotion to be felt there must be a physiological change in the person, such as an elevated heart rate and something in their surroundings for them to associate with that physiological change.  Game designer Dan Cook applied this theory to horror games and suggested that it's not actually fear a player feels when playing them, it's actually stress.

Players might feel stressed due to a high difficulty level or jump scare and because of the horror imagery in their surroundings they mislabel the stress they are feeling as fear.

Therefore a horror atmosphere is essential in creating fear in games, which is something 2D horror games are more than capable of, making them a valid platform for the horror genre.

Even though there's not exactly a formula for creating horror atmosphere, we've already established that horror imagery and stress are essential in creating atmosphere.  However pacing and anticipation also play a major role.  It's important to build tension and suspense through little things like bespoke animation the player will see out the corner of their eye, eerie sounds, horror imagery appearing for a single frame on screen etc - subtle things that will help build the tension - then add a bigger scary like an enemy appearing, before giving them a bit of breathing room, a calm before the storm, before building the tension again.

Another important factor which I briefly covered in my last presentation is the monster design.  The enemy needs to look threatening and epitomise death through it's looks and sounds.  However it's also important to not reveal it to soon.  The second the player gets to know the enemy it looses that mystery and fear of the unknown.

There's also the concept of "nothing is scarier".  This trope is the idea that the player will fill in all blanks with their imagination which will always be more twisted that what the designer can come up with.  The idea is to take visual information away from the player for example through thick mist or sudden darkness to confuse them.

Project wise I've been working on some concept art for the portals and the design and animation for the main character.

I also created this map of the game level for my audio designer however I thought I'd show it here to give you an idea of the size of the map.

"Ritual" build as of the 4th of February.

Dissertation Plan

Ryan asked us to create a diagram of our dissertation layout so I created this mind map of everything my research is covered so far:

I then used the results to create the content of a rough contents page:

Creating a Horror Atmosphere in 2D Games

Contents

1. Introduction

2.  Contextual Review

 2.1 Art and Stylisation in 2D Games

2.2 The Horror Genre in Games

2.3 Two-Factor Theory of Emotion

2.4    Influence of horror film on games
2.4.1  Camera angles
2.4.2  Gore
2.4.3  Narrative
2.4.4  Use of overlays

2.5. Use of player Point of View in Games
2.5.1 1st Person Perspective
2.5.2 3rd Person Perspective
2.5.3 Player Point of View in 2D Games

2.6. Pacing and Anticipation

2.7. Character Design
2.7.1 Player Character Design
2.7.2 Monster Design

3. The Project

4. The Results

5. Conclusion

Appendix A:  2D Horror Game Analysis

Appendix B:  3D Horror Game Analysis 

--

For my project I'm using a methodology of video cued recall with semi-structured interviews. I'm keen to avoid anything too data heavy like questionnaires so I'll be looking to find around 15 people to casually play test my game.  I will then interview the testers about whether they felt the game successfully conveyed a horror atmosphere and use this information to come to a conclusion in my dissertation to determine whether my proposed framework for creating atmosphere in 2D horror games is suitable or not.

Colour Script

After stuggling with colour schemes for my game and creeping on my friend Jess' honours blog I've been inspired to create a colour script for my game.

I really liked the example of the Journey colour script she posted and how it portrayed the colour palettes along side the basic shapes of the environment to help really push the mood that area was trying to achieve:

I also really liked this example of the colour script for The Incredibles and how complicated scenes are simplified in to geometric shapes:

And this is my first attempt at a colour script for Ritual:

I wanted to start of the game with a relatively "safe" colour scheme of light greens and purples mixed in with gritty darker shades to create a sort of gritty, grungy look.  In the school area there will still be "safe" light blues however the colours will start to shift to a darker and more sinister palette.  The corridor on the way to the ritual room will be very dark with lots of black overlays to obstruct the players view, literally keeping them "in the dark", with breaks of neon graffiti to serve as uncomfortably bright warnings.  The ritual room itself will be dark and red to symbolise danger and rooms with portals hidden in them will also make use of dangerous and dark palettes.  Finally, the alternate dimension which the climatic event of the game will take place in will make use of unsettling, saturated colours set off with grim black and white tones.

However I want to experiment a bit more with the colours before I finalise the script so here's some alternate thumbnails:

Hallway and Forrest 

For these I just played about with the hue of the overall thumbnail.  The first thumbnail for the hallway here looks a bit too bright and surreal though.  The other two look a bit more gritty and menacing in comparison to the original light blue thumbnail however, which is a lot more fitting for the game.

A rusty, red forest looks pretty cool however might be straying away from the relatively "safe" colour scheme I want at this point.  I also really want the initial forest to really contrast with the weird and jarring colours of the "limbo" forest environment at the end of the game so sticking to a relatively normal colour scheme might be a good idea.

Limbo

I really want the limbo environment to have a super uncomfortable colour scheme for the player, so lots of over saturated colours mixed with sinister blacks is what I'm going for.  I can't decide which one might work best though.

The inverted colour scheme idea came about when I was messing about with overlays in the game and accidentally broke it.  I took a quick clip of it which you can view here.  I really like the idea of glitching the game at this point as it messes with the relationship between player and game - the horror of the game is so real it reaches beyond the player character and messes with your graphics card!  A mechanic along the same lines as this was used in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem where the player character was given a "sanity meter" and if it became too low the game would act as though it was deleted all the saves off the player's memory card.  This is a concept I'm really interested in and it would be really cool to explore it in my own game.

More Art Inspiration

Ian Wilding

I really like the colour scheme in this poster.  I feel the use of different shades of one colour across the entire piece is really effective, especially the subtle replacement of black with a high chroma purple.  The palette just feels really unified yet interesting.  

"JEBEDAI"

I also felt like this colour palette was really interesting.  I really like how the orange background contrasts with the black, greys and whites of the foreground and middleground.

Lynn Nguyen

I also found the subject matter of this piece by Lynn Nguyen really interesting.  The facial expression of the centre character is just so sinister and having the top area of his body completely inked with the exception of his chilling eyes and sharp teeth is really effective in creating that creepy focal point.  I also love how the characters in the background have thier faces eerily smudged out - causing the viewer question who or what they are.  The image just has a sort of creepy, cult-like feel to it.

Jon Klassen

I absolutely love this art style.  The use of simple, sharp blocky shapes with more complex gritty textures is really appealing.  Jon Klasson's use of colour is also excellent at conveying mood - I love how unsettling the blacks bleeding in to the gritty greens make the scene on the top right feel.

Francis Bacon

I've also been looking at the work of Francis Bacon a lot lately.  I read somewhere that the creature designer for the Silent Hill series took direct inspiration from his work - particularly the twisted humanoid imagery you can see in the first two images here - "Crucifixion Studies" and "Portrait of Lucian Frued".  I personally really like the last image here; "Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X".  I love the chaotic lines streaking across the entire composition and the contrast of the cold purples, blues and blacks with the golden yellows and how distressed the subject appears, gripping on to his chair.


Ikumi Nakamura

Although I haven't played The Evil Within yet I've been really inspired by the concept art for it.  I love Ikumi Nakamura's loose lines and use of contrast in her work.  I've been particularly intrigued by the design for the character Laura - A friend recommended I check out the monster she turns in to in game (sorry for spoilers) as it's particularly scary.  I found the second image here of the silhouetted monster really striking.  The lighting is just so well done as the player sees enough of the monster to know it's going to hurt them with its threatening pose and long sharp claw-like nails, but it's full appearance is still a terrifying mystery.  Imagine that thing crawling towards you in real life!  As I've mentioned before it's the human characteristics of a monster (in this case the limbs and hair) mixed with inhuman qualities (the mutated arms and the animal like posture) that really trigger the fear factor in people, myself included.  In the feedback for my own monster design there was a few people suggesting I should add more limbs, perhaps I should make them a bit more prominent in the design.