![]() ![]() This is not always the way we do it in our games, but this time it fit very well. It was actually not until all of the above was determined that I started to figure out the story behind the creatures. By making sure that most of the game's elements where familiar to us, we could much easier assure that we kept to the timetable and could spend time on polishing other parts of the game instead of trying to find AI bugs. It was crucial that we did not want to have too many unknown factors when making the enemies. Making sure implementation of the enemy is simple ties into saving resources. Something we wanted to avoid that this time around. For the first Penumbra game, we had dogs as the main enemy which, because they where four-legged, caused tons of issues. This because we wanted to have a base collision that could easily fit into a cylinder, making it easier to code. ![]() Gameplay-wise the main constraint was that it had to walk in some human-like fashion and not crawl or move on all fours. For example, when building one of the game's maps, there was a vast difference in perceived horror between using an old, familiar enemy model from Penumbra (our previous game) and the new one discussed in this article. It is when we are unsure about something and not able to predict or makes sense that true terror really emerges. It is vital that the player does not feel familiar with the dangers faced as it drastically decreases fear and tension. This mean that I wanted the creature should look and feel stupid, yet still be as far away from a zombie as possible.Īvoiding clichés is usually something that ones does to keep things fresh, but in horror games a lot more is at stake. Usually this means making something zombie-like, but I really did not want have something that cliché. Hence, we had to have something in the design that hinted of stupidity, making it part of the immersion were the enemy to do something silly. Having enemies do simple tasks like opening doors, avoiding obstacles and investigating strange noises in a believable human-like way is very hard to do. Because game AI is notorious for doing stupid things, this could easily break immersion. The problem with having a creature which gets the characteristics of a human projected on to it, is that the player will also assume it is intelligent. Because of this I decided that we use some kind of human or at least humanoid entity, which is a shape that is easily recognizable (no other animal walks like a human) and which we all assume have feelings, desires and motives. I also wanted some kind of character that the player could easily project agency to and believe it has motivations, imagining it more alive than it might actually be. My favorite way to go about when creating a creature is to take something normal and then add a disturbing twist to it. Having these three guidelines in mind I will now walk through the process of coming up with the core requirements for the enemy codenamed “Servant Grunt”. Finally you need to make sure that it is within the constraints of the available resources, something that is really important for small company such as ours. Certain movements might be required and it needs to fit, size-wise, into certain environments and situations. Another important aspect is to make sure that the enemy fits with gameplay. One wants to make sure the player faces something that feels frightening and works with the game's atmosphere and story. ![]() When creating a horror game, making sure that the antagonistic creatures are properly designed is an extremely important issue. Before moving on to their work though, I will detail the thinking that went into the basic design of the creature. For this work we used two extremely talented external artists and they have themselves outlined how their horrific creations came about below and it a future part. It will go through the basic thinking that went into the design of the enemy, how the concept images where made, how the mesh was built and finally how it was put into the game. The following article outlines the process of creating a creature model from scratch for our first person horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Jonas and Olof were working as contractors for Frictional Games at the time. It was written in June 2010 by myself, Jonas Steinick Berlin and Olof Strand. So because of that, I decided to post it on the blog instead. (The following was supposed to be an article in a Russian magazine, but was never published. ![]()
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