MORTIS 101: 'FAITH's' Horror Design Toolkit

[Music] howdy uh my name is mason smith and i'm a game developer and on the internet i'm known as airdwarf and welcome to my gdc talk mortis 101 faith's horror design toolkit so i spoke at gdc in 2019 and i gave a shorter talk on the art style or visual design of faith and um i really enjoyed it and i'm really happy to be back and recording and reaching out to y'all virtually this is a virtual conference but you should still probably silence your cell phones you know be polite while you're while you're sitting there watching me i guess so bear with me i'm still nervous even though this is just a virtual conference and i'm literally in my home office talking to myself as i usually do and so i'm still a little nervous so bear with me but we're gonna get through it so right mortis 101 faith's horror

design toolkit so i've been involved in the indie horror game space uh developers designers fans since like 2015 that's when i really started getting into it and these are some of the games that i've made you'd probably recognize the faith series probably why you're here i also did several other titles that were smaller and these are just some games that i've been involved in and just for reference to kind of get to know me better if you don't know me yet so these are some of my favorite games of all time starting with links awakening for the gameboy that was my very first video game that was all mine taught me a lot about what games could be and so you're just some of my favorites so you can kind of get a gauge for type of person i am i guess and this is faith trailer if you haven't seen it first [Music]

my nightmares are getting worse [Music] i had to finish when i started what i ever cannot give up [Music] kid um [Music]

all right so that was the official trailer for faith so i started out with chapter one which i released in october 2017 and then 2019 i did chapter two and for chapter three i've partnered with new blood interactive to be my publisher so we're going to bundle all three chapters into a steam package and release it soon whatever we don't have a release date yet so a lot of y'all who know me and have heard me on interviews and stuff already know this but just to kind of reiterate what my vision was going into creating faith was can i deliver an effective horror game experience using just basic graphics um that's kind of how faith came to be faith is a retro inspired pixel horror game i like to call them pixelated nightmares and it's based on the kind of the retro era of the 1980s of the 8-bit generation of games classic

games and also the satanic scare of the 1980s so that was kind of the narrative backdrop for faith and there's going to be spoilers ahead so what i'm going to do is i'm going to demonstrate how i went about executing on that design vision on that design challenge and the specific design tools that i used for faith so there's going to be spoilers for chapters one two and three so be ye warned so you might be thinking to yourself so what who is this guy you know why should i care so um faith just crossed a hun over 100 000 downloads and it was included in ign's 2017 best horror games of 2017 and best indie games you might have missed and it's in the top 10 most wishlisted horror games during steam festivals it's been played by big name youtubers and accumulated a lot of views and uh it actually has a cult following that constantly sends me messages begging for chapter three to be released

or at least getting a release date but you're not gonna get it yet it's not ready so sorry for me those are big accomplishments because i literally made faith on a shoestring budget in my spare time i was just one person working on it and i and i think that a lot of stuff came together at once to get it noticed early on like its art style which i discussed in my previous talk and also how i marketed it and who i marketed it to but it also had a consistent design vision with how i designed its horror which i believe also contributed to its success so in the interest of helping other developers who are interested in this kind of retro inspired horror game space i'd like to share the design tools that i use in face development okay so this brings before i go into the toolkit i want to go over my personal design philosophy and it starts with three very important components

so number one is narrative so all games tell a story that's at least what i think and it can be in game like mario must get to bowser's castle and save the princess that's the that's the story of the game in the game having to do with the characters it can be a little more complex than that it can be like a monster slayer for hire has to race against time uh to protect the people he cares about from this otherworldly invasion of apocalyptic proportions in the midst of a brutal war between two nations so the witcher 3 right so it can be very complex or it can be very simple so you got to ask yourself what's the story but this is important this is something i personally believe is that you can include the player in that story so when you talk about your game's narrative it can be the player's narrative or the player's story so an example of that is i got the high score that's my story playing galaga when i was 10 years old

i'm still really proud of that or i died that's the classic one right so that's the player's story or i lost my queen you know and then it was all over so that can be a narrative there um but uh you know having a player say that scared the crap out of me that's the goal right there that's the narrative you want it's the story player story that you want when you're designing a horror game that's what i seek after that's what i'm going for so you got to ask yourself what do you want the player's story to be so your game's design should help shape that experience and there can be small narratives nested within the main or the meta narrative for the story and that can go for in-game you know diegetic or it can be the player story and within those small narratives can be even smaller narratives if you get where i'm going with this so um that's very important so what is the story what is the narrative number two is your mechanics so

i'm not going to go over what exactly game mechanics are because i'm assuming you are all at the level to where you understand what game mechanics are usually there are opportunities to learn or use or practice and then master the game mechanics that are and they're afforded by the level design so for me mechanics and level design are are very like co-related super mario brothers world one stage one so 1-1 that's the classic example that we often talk about as a game level or a level that is designed to afford all the mechanics that you need to beat super mario brothers and it teaches you them pretty naturally and pretty smoothly and it gives the player a chance to kind of try new techniques and master them so that's a great example one recent example that i really like is doom eternal and it's great for me it's a good example of a game kind of introducing more and more complex

techniques and mechanics and then level design that supports it forces the player to know them learn them and in some cases master them and it can be very very challenging but it kind of introduces them in increments so it doesn't overwhelm the player by the end of doom eternal you need to be using all the in-game mechanics in order to survive and i love that many games unfortunately they introduce mechanics only to abandon them later or they leave them underdeveloped or under challenged oops sorry almost spoiled my slide there so since we sometimes have this tendency or this habit to introduce mechanics and then just kind of forget them or they get kind of overlapped or depreciated by cooler more advanced mechanics or like upgrades why not start small so why not start simple a huge variety of gameplay can come from just a few simple mechanics again look at super mario brothers moving on

to affect so not not effect with an e but affect with an a so in human computer interaction research affect is a term for the feeling or the emotion affect can be positive or negative and for me sometimes designers will start with cool mechanics like the rules you know the magic circle all that sometimes they'll start with a really cool story that they want to tell and they'll kind of form a game around that and then there's affect and the affect or the feeling or the emotional experience is what i personally almost always start with when i'm doing a new game project and more often than not the feeling is fear but not just fear i go specifically into things like dread you know paranoia to me dread and this is just me personally dread is more important than shock or disgust which you know some some psychologists or

scholars on the horror genre they insist that horror is this feeling of disgust to me and this might overlap with terror theory and supernatural literature to me it's that dread it's that aching growing kind of pulsing feeling that has got you so frightened that you don't can't take another step forward in the game i've had experiences like that and i chase after those experiences in how i play game of the games that i play and also the games that i create so affect you ask yourself what do i want the player to feel and this can be basic emotions you know joy sadness fear anger disgust surprise very famous games like the legend of zelda they create this feeling and emotion of adventure effects of of uh kind of freedom i guess or it can be an experience and i i worried this experience this way like

one part of the affect of your game could be i feel like i'm an elite assassin in ancient greece or i feel like i have complete freedom to explore this vast underwater environment or i feel like something could jump out at me at any time and the question i constantly ask myself when making a horror game is is this scary is this going to create that feeling of dread is this going to make the player feel like they are not safe like something is out to get them like something could pop out at them at any moment it helps to know what scares me right know thyself so i personally am not scared by things like zombies i feel like i know how to handle one if i if one walked up to me shambled up to me more like things like werewolves and vampires it takes a lot you know their form has to be a specific way to scare me but there

are specific things that scare me a lot like the supernatural like the paranormal ghosts spirits kind of that spiritual spirituality you know kind of religious kind of kind of esoteric stuff that's what creeps me out cryptids things like disappearances urban legends anything that's you know thought to be a true story things like found footage that stuff really scares me and you also have to know what scares your audience so in my marketing efforts and when i first started uh formulating ideas for faith and started getting into his design i had specific targets in mind so i had specific i actually had it down to specific people that i want to scare so i've been subscribed to markiplier on youtube some of y'all may know him there's like 29 million subscribers on youtube and i have been subscribed to him he's the

first youtuber that i ever subscribed to and i've been following him since the amnesia days when he was playing amnesia the dark descent and i followed him through slender man i followed him through five nights at freddy's and beyond and he's changed a lot but uh from watching him especially in those early years i kind of got a feel for what will get a big reaction after out of streamers and youtubers and when i saw the number that he was putting um now he was doing on his youtube channel and just the mind-boggling amount of views that you can get from kind of tapping into the streamers and youtubers that's what i went for in my marketing is but that's probably for another talk but i specifically went for youtubers and streamers and it might sound creepy but there are parts of faith's horror design that were crafted especially to scare markiplier i don't know if that sounds psychotic or not like mannequins he really doesn't like mannequins so he put a mannequin scare

in faith that i created it based on his behavior during his streams i thought that if he would like a game enough it would kind of get popular with his youtube channel and that would give me free views so it helps to know what scares your audience so these three components narrative mechanics and affect you identify them and basically every design decision in your game needs to directly support your chosen narrative mechanics and affect if there is a design decision that you're thinking about that does not support them then throw it out trust me so that's what i personally did for faith is i identified the game's narrative mechanics and affect and then i kind of divided the structure the design structure of the game into these chunks you can call them you can call them chunks if you want but you could also call them moments or vignettes i suppose

um adam my advisor for this talk kind of gave me that idea that kind of calling it vignettes and so i take these chunks or moments or vignettes and they overlap but they each have their own way of supporting the overarching narrative of the game or the overarching feeling that i want the game to have and mechanics that i want to introduce or test or have the player master it all kind of overlaps and they have their own mini narratives and mini mechanics and many emotive moments so everything that i put in faith or my games has to directly go into the narrative the mechanics and the affect y'all are going to be tired of being saying this by the end of the talk but that's basically what i do so this isn't this slide is an example of kind of how i go about like the creative ideation of

these moments of these vignettes it's very tightly tied to the level design of of faith so i like to personally just get a notepad out or a sketch pad and and do a pen i don't i don't like pencils because then i get caught up in erasing mistakes so i just go for it with a kind of a permanent marker pen and this is kind of what'll what'll happen so these are areas where um the player or the character main character john ward is trying to collect keys and bring them back to this giant statue that opens up with three keys so we got three keys so three cool little opportunities to scare the player and introduce some cool tasks that test mechanics and they all kind of have their own feeling to them and their own little mini story and so this is kind of how i do it okay so enough about this kind of introduction um check my time real quick okay i'm doing

good with that in mind so let's launch right into my the faith horror design toolkit so number one is to know what you want each design decision to accomplish in terms of narrative mechanic and affect there it is again so how does it support my design vision which i define as your narrative your mechanics and your effect for me design choices typically come in the form of crafting those overlapping moments or vignettes throughout the game so this is um this is kind of how i go about it let's see i'm trying to get these gifts to play oops okay i guess i have to click click on them so i think of kind of one of these moments of vignettes and or you know upscale to the whole game so i think to myself if a player was telling a friend about this part of the game what would they say what would they express what

were their emotions what would what are their feelings about it you know maybe they're telling them oh you do this and then this happens or you do this and all of a sudden this happens you know and it's so crazy and creepy because this so be be conscious of what you want the outcome to be in terms of the player's story in terms of the players feelings in terms of what they do so here's the um you know the forest section of the first faith game and here the protagonist john ward is navigating these woods and there's a demon after him and i specifically designed this area as like a grid but it has these pac-man style wrap around warp so you'll go off to the right of one screen and you'll warp to the other side of the map on the left side and they have randomized layouts for certain scenes so when you'll come when you come back to the screen you came back to the layout actually randomizes

again so that was to make the player feel like they're lost in the woods so there's the affect and it kind of mimics the disoriented kind of isolated state that i wanted to bring into this horror narrative and also the overall feeling of paranoia and you know being lost and isolated in the 1980s you know no cell phones and you know having to do with the satanic panic where there's a lot of paranoia mistrust so there's again the affect and you have to navigate these screens there's your mechanics in order to progress of course you transition to going into the house where there was a failed exorcism you come back to the house to try to finish what you started and the mood changes i crafted this area to seem like a safe haven like you don't have to deal with the demon outside anymore and um it's supposed to feel good you know being one step closer to reaching the ultimate goal in the game

but i wanted the player to feel like they were safe and then not feel like they were safe this sounds so sadistic but it is a horror game and as all as all as we'll talk about another slide there's this playful dynamic that i i firmly believe the game designer should have with the player in all their design decisions so the panic that the player experiences outside dealing with michael the demon in the woods it subsides for a little bit you get this like fun jingle for when you come into the house but then the jingle stops and there's silence no background music and based on play-throughs place based on watching people uh play the game and just general observations this is a very popular kind of scary dreadful moment in the game where the music stops you can't rely on the music to kind of be a respite from the horror that's going on and it's really interesting to see players reactions to this now they have to navigate the uh the house which is a little bit smaller a

little more compact maybe a little claustrophobic um looking for clues which is the mechanic that introduced gets introduced here this is chapter two this is the very end so the usual mechanics of moving to avoid demons and using your cross to fight demons they kind of get remixed because now you have father garcia to it's basically you have to escort him through uh this ritual that he is conducting to exercise this demon so now the movement mechanics are are kind of reappropriated to protect another character and throughout chapter two it plays off of john's guilt so it makes you feel guilty for things that happen in the first game so there's your affect and your narrative and so the you know the player now is in this kind of heightened tension mode or emotion trying to protect father garcia all of a sudden every act you make is not just to survive and save your own

skin but also to save another person another character so here's number two embrace minimalism aka keep it simple so i have a very bare bones form follows function approach to the faith series at least i firmly believe in having a consistent voice and executing on it i think the greatest content is always made with the most consistent voice can i sell this moment or vignette more elegantly so minimalism for me isn't just about you know kind of an apple store aesthetic with very sparse stuff you can have a full screen of detailed stuff like here in pt one of my favorite horror game probably my favorite horror game of all time and i really like how it is an example of minimalism the story the mechanics um very simple so faith started with a very simple premise i'm going to bring up some images uh kind of that that i think exemplify its minimalistic design

so in chapter one the premise is really simple and the note that the presentation of the narrative is simple faith has kind of a sort of complex lore or backstory but it's pieced together by the player and they can go as deep as they want you know thinking about it after the game i want them to be thinking about it long afterwards but in order to kind of push the fear of the unknown kind of kind of dynamic and also to keep everything mysterious and let the player fill in the blanks it has a very minimal presentation of the story chapter one is get inside the house finish the exorcism chapter two is it literally says a young priest descends into a new nightmare so it gives very little chapter three is find the twins stop gary from summoning malphus this powerful demon and save the day so and faith has very few mechanics john ward the main character he can walk he can use his cross to either fight demons or cleanse objects of their corruption i guess he can collect items he can use items and he

can examine or you can take a closer look at certain uh at certain things and examples of that are kind of strewn around in this slide and it has this very simple presentation as you see faith is is pretty well known for its chunky pixel minimal detail look and uh it's actually a struggle to not make things more detailed i i often have to go back and make it less detailed more chunky because i want to create this fear of the unknown there's my affect i want to conjure up that oh my gosh what the f was that response from the player to me that's that's the gold simple unassuming menu you don't know what you're getting into when you first boot up the game based on the the menu a ui that's free of clutter i want the player's eyes to be darting around the screen there's sequin frequently there's sequences with kind of a simple looping background music or no background music at all throughout the design process i ask myself can i sell this moment or

this character or this environment or this creature more elegantly with less stuff less animation frames you know less less pixels the more elegant the better so that's my kind of simple minimalism with faith number three emphasize the player character's vulnerability so here i have a picture of james hunderlin who's the main protagonist of silent hill 2 one of my all-time favorite horror games and i really like how it's an example of a vulnerable character in more ways than just death mental and emotionally james is a very emotional he's a very vulnerable character and vulnerability is prolific and horror resident evil village the main character goes through a lot um and then resident evil 7 actually man that guy's been through a lot actually faith has a one hit kill mechanic love it or hate it he gets he gets killed as soon as the demon touch him

the simple fact that jon dies after one hit it makes demon fights in small rooms very intense so intense feeling there's my effect of panic and anything that looks out of the ordinary is potentially death anything that moves in the game or anything that's colored differently you know then the background and the environment i've seen players in in play-throughs and watching my friends play it they get paranoid just seeing anything out of the ordinary and for me as a as a horror game designer that that's great the consequences of death in horror games they've historically been you die you get sent back to the last save point like the typewriter save up those ink ribbons and uh or a checkpoint and you have to play back from that point and it's a cycle and it's a weird cycle that in in it is revealed this major issue for horror game designers i believe which is anticipating player death if you choose to put that in your game again that's a mechanic you can choose to put in there

so assuming the player character can die how do you handle that how do you handle the pacing of like the retry process because when you retry over and over with very few exceptions the unknown becomes known again and it can be considered punishing the player by sending them too far back so this is where qa testing becomes really important because it will help you identify areas where deaths happen and with that i like to be kind of generous with spawn points or um i try to identify where i need to put a more closer spawn point to the place where the player is likely to die again so these are two examples of environments where the player goes off and does something jon goes off into the cemetery and fights a bunch of demons to kind of unlock you know this puzzle in this area and then in the right side of the screen if there's a similar kind of item

collection task and so i put a manual save point uh right in the middle of the environment the player can choose to save there if you want if they want and um so if they have this vulnerability if they're highly vulnerable to death then be more forgiving with the the save points and uh if possible i try to respawn at one of faith's like cut scenes or i make manual save points so that the player can save at their own pace john has other vulnerabilities besides physical vulnerabilities he is uh he in chapter three he's susceptible to being possessed himself by a demon and he can actually lose control of himself and hurt other characters so we're going to kind of take a break between tool number three and tool number four with this quote and it's one that i really like and it kind of describes the element of playfulness between the game designer and the player the most provocative game

design possibilities are found where the role of the designer as an advocate for the player is disrupted so what that means is that there can be moments where you as a designer can totally mess with the player where you are no longer their advocate this is no longer going to be an easy time for the player in in terms of well in terms of however you design your scares and that's by douglas wilson and miguel search so with that in mind let's think about those those moments those vignettes and we'll go into tool number four which is find a way to turn every mechanic against the player how do i make it scary for the player on the level of the mechanics of the

game so mechanics you know the old motto easy to learn hard to master i would add sometimes they may turn on you walking might become scary doing this mundane task that you're used to doing in this game uh might be scary now and it's it it's kind of a way i discovered kind of a fun little way to surprise or panic the player without resorting to a cheap jump scare i could probably write an entire presentation on how i feel about jump scares how i think they could be used in a more effective way but we'll just leave it at that it's a way to kind of surprise or introduce this kind of oh crap moment with the player without rejoining you know re resorting to a cheap jump scare in the case of faith i ask myself how can i make walking scary how can i make reading picking up a note and reading it scary this is this is kind of my way of

addressing the like cursed old game that you find at a garage sale kind of creepypasta uh trope without the obvious fourth fourth wall breaking stuff by designing the horror to permeate or infect seemingly innocent mechanics or mundane mechanics that the players done over and over again i thought it would feel like the game was aware of the player and reaching out to them without like totally pushing the obvious like this is a cursed game it no it knows who you are there's an indie horror game it's on indie db i know that it's called the groundskeeper and the designer knew that when people get scared playing a game they will they will they tend to pause the game to kind of catch a break and so during scary parts where you're being chased by a monster if the player pauses the game they get something really scary instead of the pause menu like they were expecting and as i saw it years ago and i loved it and i

wanted to put i actually put something similar in faith so even the pause menu and faith can scare you at the wrong you know at the opportune moment so here in chapter 2 of faith this gif that i have on the right side of the screen there walking and navigating his turn turned on its head in the previous room there's a note that says when you see it don't move and you have to not move at this part and a demon walks up to you and examines you and then slowly walks out and if you make one you know if you make one movement it's mortise for you i that's a moment that resonates a lot with players here's a moment where cleansing a cleansing an item that usually gives you a little piece of lore or a note actually spawns a demon that you have to deal with i got that from the mysterious murasami castle game where you go into the castle

and there are fake princesses that are they're actually enemies so that was that's how i kind of turned that mechanic against the player in a moment so here's old markiplier from from youtube and he is reading a note that you pick up in faith chapter 2 that gets progressively more sinister and it addresses the reader john and it accuses him of all this horrible stuff and uh the note gets more and more sinister so the player is actually being attacked by the text of a note that should be innocent here you can see that the player gets gets pretty pretty upset and distressed reading the note until you have to close the note at the end and by the end of it i designed it to where hopefully the player is scared to close that note and find out what happens next it's an iconic moment in chapter two in my opinion that i i really enjoyed kind of designing and

crafting and players seem to like it as well and then there's some scares that actually hide behind the ui of the game so here's an example in faith chapter 3 where the closer look or the examined mechanic gives this this cultist or this this enemy an opportunity to sneak up on the player and surprise them ah here's a fun one this is a big one for me and that is earning the players trust so that you can so that you can shatter that trust what parts of the game does the player think does a player think are safe and how do you invade that how do you invade that safe space so to speak in the game what parts of the game do the player think is safe is it the save room is it a particular corridor or a

hallway is it a particular part of the game it can be tempting to never let the player feel safe like they're always in danger see for an example see five nights at freddy's 2. but i believe in in that playful relationship between between designer and player especially in horror and but you have to find those moments right those vignettes and this is where you kind of uh i'm going to introduce kind of the hero moment there's another term that that adam and my advisor for this talk kind of helped me come up with for for how to express this the resident evil series is great at forcing the player to backtrack but then it re-contextualizes the environment of the game to where you'll be backtracking thinking is chess another hallway i've already cleared it out and then boom something scary will happen like a dog the classic dog jumping out of the window and shattering the glass it's a great great uh horror gaming moment and so the resident evil series is really good at doing this earning the players trust so that they can shatter

it so in faith chapter one there is the catechism or the training mode where it teaches you how to do the mechanics of the game but it teaches you as if the game is this kind of arcade kind of con you know get rid of all the demons kind of arcade experience but for anyone who's actually played the game when you actually get into it it's not like that at all it's actually much worse than your training and i wanted to give that feeling the affect of being in a situation that you didn't get training for that you weren't prepared for uh here's a markiplier again reacting to this innocent looking tree that transforms into a demon and runs off and then in the next screen is filled with trees that are exactly the same so this was a fun little moment you never see the tree demon again but i i really wanted there to just be this random tree demon to make the player not trust anything for the rest of the game and i got a good reaction markiplier for

that and and most everyone who plays this moment gets gets pretty freaked out again that's the gold for me in faith chapter three the elevator is a safe haven until it's not until enemies start peeking in on you when the doors open so a a place that was supposed to be a safe haven for the player or non-threatening is now threatening so here's another one number six tell the player or shall show them show or tell the player exactly what's going to happen how can i create anticipation or apprehension so giving them just a little bit of what's going to happen not telling them how or or where or when in the game something's going to happen but just showing them this scary see the

scary thing it's coming for you it's uh it's a great way to in my opinion and i kind of seen it work in faith in some interesting ways it's a great way to create that apprehension that anticipation which can conjure up the feeling of dread the jackpot for me so in fatal frame two the build up to the first ghost kind of encounter in fatal frame two is my opinion in my opinion it's i love it it's a master class of horror design from the very first parts of the game up until maybe 15 minutes in you're being fed this this ghost is coming after you and knows you're there and this is what happens to people who find the ghost and come across it the player doesn't know when they're going to face the ghost how they're going to deal with it and that anticipation is just so great uh in in filmmaking alfred hitchcock had this saying where if

i'm paraphrasing if you you show a revolver sitting on a table in act one then you you better believe that that revolver is going to go off by the by act 3 or something like that so you create this feeling of anticipation it's not the explosion of the bomb going off it's the anticipation of it going off that's the thing i made another game called summer night for the dreadex collection and the starting screen says absolutely nothing scary happens in this game for best results play in a dark room and wear headphones press escape key to turn back now i'll f4 to leave at any time so it tells you exactly what's going to happen something scary is going to happen the form it takes the when the how the where the player doesn't know here's an example in faith chapter one you've been dealing with michael this demon and you know that he's there because you see him outside the window you just don't know

from where he's gonna come get you in chapter two uh the demo for chapter two which is a separate experience from the actual chapter two there's a note and there's several notes that kind of hype up the basement don't go in the basement says here at the bottom line please for the love of god don't go down to that basement you better believe you're going down to that basement and so there's this feeling of anticipation and dread there that i hoped to to craft with that moment and then there's this note in faith chapter three you pick up gary lied to us when you see it run and then then the next screen you see a corpse a trail of blood and a camera and the corpse had enough time to write i saw it they didn't run fast enough so this was another one of those moments or vignettes that overlaps with other moments in in the apartments level that i designed to kind of be this moment where it's like something is coming after you when you

see it run and the idea that someone didn't run you might not run fast enough to avoid it number seven so put the player in the worst possible situation they could be in and this idea kind of was taught to me by a mentor of mine when i was studying animation steve hickner who's the director of b-movie and prince of egypt he would always say if you want to test a character put them in the worst possible position they can uh situation they could be in so how can i make this situation worse for the player that's what i'm interested in so everyone knows that moment of their favorite game or that part that's extremely scary to them that's especially like they dread going to it like you know if you're watching a playthrough they're like oh i hate this part coming up right so during replay players dread getting to you know that

part there's fatal frame two you lose your flashlight in one part that's that's pretty scary alien isolation when you go into the hive and um i don't want to spoil it too much but it gets worse the evil within like the very first part of that game is a very very bad spot to be in for the player character and then here's a recent example in resident evil village this is house beneviento anyone who's played the game knows what what's about to go down in this part of the game so on the macro level you you can think of maybe one or two hero moments or hero vignettes per game that are that are that situation the worst part that the player character can be in um it's like an escalation of of tension of of level design you know space that's able to be navigated the types of enemies that you're encountering um make it make a perfect storm try to anticipate what the players

thinking you know what would make this worse i'm really glad that is not happening well then you design it to happen but it kind of takes a lot of playthroughs of your own game and kind of anticipating what youth and visualizing what you think the player is going through in a certain part of your game and on the micro level you want to craft scares around making the situation worse sometimes try it you know try making the situation worse um for the player and see if they can take it lost in vivo is an indie horror game that i i highly respect it's i really like it as an example of making the situation worse as you progress through a part of the game so there are parts where you find uh keys or switches or something and every time you find that item the environment that you just went through and now have to go back through gets worse progressively worse and i really like that as an example and it can be more creative than um than having the player character get

captured and lose all their weapons mid-game that's that's a trope that we see a lot in horror games and in games in general i my vision for it is that we could be a little more creative than that especially with horror in practice that means this means throwing something at the player that they've never seen before and it's also awful or a situation or something like that or a task and in order to design this effectively like i said before you need to be mindful of the game loop that the player is going through up until this point so what would the player's worst nightmare be at this point of the game based on how things are going based on how the narrative has been progressing based on what the player should be feeling in in these moments and these overlapping moments and mechanics wise how can i ramp up that tension ramp up that challenge the the chance of failure the consequence of failure how can i make it just this perfect storm and that's all well and good for faith because it's a very highly handcrafted game all the

moments and vignettes that i've been talking about in its horror design there's there's a high customization for each of those things and faith is very much not as not so much a systems driven game as it is a narrative driven game so what if you're in kind of the narrative narrative systems space of game design uh well the environment or the level can be designed to be the worst possible setting for the game under those certain systems for example if the player has been relying on a certain mechanic in order to survive or get through get past a certain enemy will design an environment to where that's not a viable option anymore or design an environment to where it's just the worst type of enemy for that situation you know to navigate that space and you know try to survive that space and progress

in chapter three uh the player actually has to give up let me see if i skip something no i didn't skip it anything in chapter three the player actually has to give up the cross that is their only means of defense against demons and then they come across this old camera then they pick it up and the lights go out and they have nothing but the flash the camera flash to light their way for a good chunk of that level and there are demons that are creeping up on them that they can only see in the camera flash and that's one of my all-time favorite moments in probably all the faith series it's this oh crap moment where i i designed it to where hopefully the player just feels like this is the worst possible situation it can't get worse than this with the lighting you know and using the camera to light your way and then you start seeing you start seeing demons in the camera flash i love it chapter two has a part where and a lot of this has to do with light not being able to see

uh the the screen space and the ui of faith affords the player to be able to see a lot of things at once it's not first like the first person perspective where your viewing range is actually very limited compared to the entire environment in faith you can usually see the entire screen environment of the screen but once you pick up the flashlight in chapter two then you can only see through this narrow flashlight beam and then you have to fight a demon with it and i i kind of designed and crafted this moment to be really tense because there are actually hallucinations of john's that are darting in front of the flashlight beam during this fight and based on player reactions this is a pretty fun moment to watch as a game designer which brings me and this brings me to my last design tool in the faith horror design toolkit which is you want to evaluate and re-evaluate

every design choice is this scary simple is that does this moment sell the feeling that you are being stalked by something that you can't see or does this really truly remix or test or challenge the mechanics that i've introduced in the game so far is this scary and then ask yourself am i sure this is scary what is the point so figure out the point you know the deliberate design based on narrative mechanics and affect of that specific moment or section or fight or enemy of the game and be honest with yourself if you if if it's not supporting or contributing to your design vision then toss it out you don't need it so faith chapter one had a very lengthy

uh flashback to the 1980 the first exorcism the one that went wrong before the events of the first game and it and i i ended up taking it out of chapter one because it for me it messed up the pacing it didn't really fit the ambiguous narrative the you know the uncertainty of what actually happened back then and i wanted to keep the player focused in the here and now of of what was going on in chapter one and so uh i didn't really feel it was necessary anymore so i toss it out and i'm glad i did it because it it was a part of consistently sticking to my design vision so we're going to review the entire toolkit and then some some final remarks so thanks for bearing with me so far this is the cheat sheet

if you were asleep this whole time so we're going to review the entire toolkit so know what you want each design decision to accomplish in terms of narrative mechanics and affect embrace minimalism emphasize player the player character's vulnerability what are their vulnerabilities maybe something more than just physical death could it be emotional vulnerabilities could be psychological vulnerabilities could be vulnerabilities relative to other characters things like that number four find a way to turn every mechanic against the player your game should be scary down to the mechanics a really a really recent uh example that i like was the haunted the latest haunted ps1 bundle there's a game about i'm kind of stalking through this like countryside and he had an old flintlock flintlock musket and just a simple act

of reloading the musket or the flintlock or the lever action some sort of old-timey rifle was scary and panicky because you had to take the mouse and literally manipulate every mechanism in the the action of the rifle so you had to pull back the hammer eject the cartridge put the new cart get a click on a cartridge drag it onto the rifle then close it again and then it and load it and that made combat really scary and really tense and panicky and that's a great way to turn just a simple mundane mechanic that we almost always take for granted and turn it into something scary number five earn the players trust so that you can shatter it and this takes um this is something that's kind of interesting for me because i've been working on faith for so long that parts of the game don't even seem scary to me anymore so every once in a while maybe let a trusted friend you know play play

your horror game or play parts of it if you have a publisher run it by your qa team i do that with new blood all the time and i try to kind of reset my expectations for my own game based on their reactions it kind of reassures me that i am creating a horror experience that can actually accomplish what i wanted to do so find those parts where the player could be in a state of trust or it could be kind of lulled into a sense of false security and then find ways to shatter it in creative ways number six tell the player exactly what's going to happen show or tell and you know get creative you know show the show the gun that's going to go off by act 3 hint at the monster that's coming after you there was an old source engine game called nightmare house 2 and it was really good at it had these like

randomized horror messages that were really funny every now and then you'd go through a hallway and it would trigger a little text prompt at the end and it would say like look behind you or something like that speaking of look behind you so pt the silent hills demo lord bless and keep it i'm still mad that it got cancelled but it will always live in my heart the iconic look behind you voice line from the radio tell the player exactly what's going to happen number seven put the player in the worst possible situation they could be in so there's got to be that hero moment that hero vignette that is the it is the if if the player is scared throughout the whole game they should be especially scared during this part and that usually involves throwing something different at the player that they've never seen before and then finally evaluate and re-evaluate every design decision so

conclusions takeaways a consistent voice is good consistency is good so define your design vision narrative mechanics affect that's all i worry about basically so have being consistent to that vision is a good thing and i believe it really helped me kind of craft the horror of design of faith but also a little bit of inconsistency is good so this is going to be kind of contradictory as you can see just from reading it but inconsistent moments that don't fit the mold of your design decision for the purpose of tripping the player up making them keeping them on their toes that can be good building trust with the player is is good they should get into that flow experience where they're enjoying it they're not they're not experiencing anxiety because the tasks or the fights or the enemies are too difficult but they should also not be breezing through it to where they're bored so keep keep within that you know that infamous flow graph in between challenge and player skill but

also betraying that trust is good again those hero moments those vignettes those little little parts where things just just get got worse for the player anticipation of what's coming is good but also surprising the player is good the way you accomplish that it seems like an oxymoron you should tell the player what's going to happen and then do it and it's supposed to be surprising you're not spoiling the player you're teasing them with something that's supposed to be really scary and they don't know when they don't know where and they don't know how so that's what you play off of kind of adhering to this design vision and this toolkit was how i managed to a finish the game you know finish creating finish developing chapters one and two on a shoestring budget and with just one person in my spare time basically so being consistent and having faith

to develop my design vision and my design kind of techniques that's what got me through it and that's what i hope will make faith chapter 3 into a unforgettable horror experience so thanks thanks for bearing with me on this talk i hope that you learned something and um you know a disclaimer i don't claim to be like a game designer or game developer extraordinaire this is just what worked for me this is ideas and techniques and design tools that that i was able to kind of put together and articulate in this talk that really helped me kind of in my vision for what i wanted faith to be remember it started with this simple design challenge could i make an effective horror game experience using just basic graphics and i think that has been successful in its

vision so far and adhering to these techniques really helped me so i hope that it'll help developers who are in a similar situation as me so here's my social you find me on twitter at airdorf that's actually the best way to contact me and join the new blood discord that's where the official faith discord channel is come hang out i'm always hanging around there and gary loves you dot com that is where you will find faith's steam page i hope to finish it sooner than later and always remember that gary loves you thanks [Music]