Process
I heavily focused on character and monster design in Thesis 1 so I could really get a feel for the type of visuals I wanted to implement. I'm heavily inspired by the Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, both of which have extraordinarily creative and eerie monster designs. The perspective of being a small, nearly defenseless girl is similar to the set-up of Silent Hill 3, which is what inspired me when creating the player character.
My goal is to create an example of an engaging horror game that is made by a single developer. I'm hoping to inspire fear in the player in a similar way that survival horror games cause me to feel fear. To put it simply, my game takes a mechanic from the video game Amnesia: The Dark Descent and expands on it, making it the game's main mechanic. In Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the player loses sanity when exposed to the darkness and has to stay in the light in order to avoid this. Having been inspired by the H.P. Lovecraft novel The Outsider, the main character is exposed to horrifying and grotesque monsters that continue to haunt the player throughout the game. In Lights Out, the player is equipped with nothing more than a flashlight, which will act as the main character’s weapon and defense. Shining light on enemies will ward them off, but the player has a limited amount of battery and must find batteries throughout the game to keep the flashlight on, or be exposed to repulsive monsters that are roaming the mansion in the dark.
Context
One of the most notable genres of video games in the past couple of decades is the horror genre. Titles such as Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Clock Tower have attained cult-like status within the horror-loving community for how effective they are at unnerving the player. This is the effect that so many indie developers have been trying to achieve in recent years - some more successful than others. Horror has recently started to make a comeback in popularity within the gaming community, and there’s a lot to be analyzed in that comeback. Clearly there is a demand from horror fans to bring back the era of survival horror that graced the late nineties and early twenty-first century. In this paper I’m going to analyze what exactly makes a horror game successful at being scary - audio, atmosphere, agency, and visuals all have an important role to play in creating a truly unnerving experience. This is the exact experience that inspired my thesis project and drove me to explore the survival horror video game genre in hopes of creating a similar experience.
First of all, the question must be answered - what defines a game? The complexities and properties of video games can be starkly different from each other. The term "video game" in itself is not very descriptive. A more accurate description for the kind of genre I took an interest in with this project would be survival horror. and even then, survival horror is very different from action horror or psychological horror. Merriam-Webster defines a video game as “an electronic game in which players control images on a video screen.” (“Video game”). Horror games in particular are obviously video games that are meant to scare or disturb the player. So then, what defines survival horror games? Even this sub-genre of video games has its own range of complexity. The focus of survival horror is the actual survival of the main character as they make their way through an eerie setting. This type of horror game will typically provide more challenges for the player that other horror games otherwise wouldn’t, such as limited resources or other game mechanics that increase the difficulty. Many survival horror games could be seen as a combination of the horror genre and the action-adventure genre. On a base level, I describe my project as an atmospheric interactive experience that has win or lose conditions as well as a fictional setting and characters. I would categorize my game as a survival horror game with elements of psychological horror.
Github
https://github.com/emrebf/Lights-Out
