“Nine doors out of 10 don’t have anything behind them, but every door becomes a scary experience because you’re expecting something to happen. Early on, it introduces a mechanic that lets you open a door slowly before fully committing to entering a room. Jon McKellan, founder of Stories Untold developer No Code, cites Wii game Silent Hill: Shattered Memories as the best example of this in action. And then when I didn't I was like, where did everybody go? What’s happening? That was one of the inspirations at some point.”Īll the developers I speak to talk about the importance of allowing space for the player’s imagination to do the heavy lifting. It was just because I was the last one, but I expected that when I turned off my shower I'd still hear a bunch of showers.
“I went in to take a shower and when I turned off my shower, they were all off. “In the gym at work at the end of lunch, there’s a line-up of people to use a shower,” says Ian Milham, who was art director at Visceral Games when the studio made Dead Space and Dead Space 2. But how do developers create those feelings from scratch? What are the tricks that developers use to scare us, and create a sense of atmosphere? How do they go from imagining a lion in a studio, or an empty bathroom, to moments that will scare the pants off us? I spoke to four of the top minds in the industry to find out.Ī lot of the best horror games start life as these imagined scenarios in a developer’s head, and inspiration can strike at the strangest times. Most of us know the feelings of dread that accompany playing a horror game. If you are confronted by it, what do you do? What do you know about it? What do you know about what it knows about you? That felt pretty cool, and it wasn’t relying on scripted events.”
Maybe I’d move desk to desk and distract it. “Then, you’d need to get to the fire escape. The inspiration for Alien: Isolation came from a simple thought experiment: what if somebody let a lion loose in developer Creative Assembly’s office? “I’d get behind my desk and make sure it wouldn’t see me,” says the game’s creative director Alistair Hope.
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