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[Tawa]

This game looks pretty awesome. Like your avatar.

Anyway, I'm not a horror guy, but there's a few questions I have:

-First and foremost, will there be a one-player mode where the monster is AI-controlled?
-I take it there is a way to win the game. What happens if you lose?
-What can the protagonists do to fight back? Is it like classic childhood game tag, where you can't fight back? Is it like pacman, where you are usually vulnerable but can use a powerful item to turn the tables temporarily? Is it like an FPS and there are sanity-restoring pickups? Or are you able to fight back by, say, attacking the monster?
-How are the hallucinations coming? Are they actually scary, like "screaming flame-eyed demon jumping out of the dark at you" scary, or unnerving, like "pair of red eyes on a visibly large figure stalks you and refuses to go away"? True terror tends to startle people more and leave them open for a moment, but dread tends to keep them focusing on the dread and open to more. I find the red eye thing more terrifying, myself.

[Araph]

Glad to hear it! I'll answer any questions I can.

Single player mode: no, sadly. I have no idea how to make AI work in a way that would actually be scary, so I'm just sticking to what I'm good at. ...Which is apparently multiplayer. I guess it's all relative.

If you lose, it means ur ded. This is true on both sides of the game: the protagonists die from sanity loss, the demon dies (is exorcised; they're basically the same in-game) if all of its altars are destroyed.

Protagonists can fight back. Except by fight back, I mean they can flee and hide. Each person has a regenerating shield ability, but that's the only direct interaction they can instigate (for the moment; I may add in a stunning blast thingy for balance reasons). Aside from that, incorporeal monsters can't approach light sources (which the players can light an huddle around to regain sanity) and physical monsters are stumped by that age-old video game enemy: closed doors (which players can open and close).

Hallucinations are definitely geared towards dread. There's an element of jump scares, but that's primarily to keep the players from getting complacent. The monsters are split about evenly (or they fit both). For example, the corner-of-your-eye-ghost-monster (I'm bad at names) is only visible when viewed from the corner of your eye... and it looks exactly like another player. But it can slowly drain your sanity, adding dark fog over your vision and inducing hallucinations. The Mannequin, similarly, can hide in plain sight by disguising as a prop, only to leap out with a scare chord and murder your face. Paranoia AND jump scares. Also, better get used to suspecting every slightly-out-of-place rock is a soul-eating demon.

[GiglameshDespair]

Now the thing is players who have played for long enough would remember what's decoration and what's a monster. Would you have some kind of small RNG placement of items?

[Parsely]

Now the thing is players who have played for long enough would remember what's decoration and what's a monster. Would you have some kind of small RNG placement of items?

It's the same problem that prop hunt in GMOD has, and the solution there is "moar mapz p:"

[Araph]

The map is pretty darn big already. It's about a quarter of a square mile, if I remember correctly, which is a lot bigger than it sounds like.

And, once everything is finished on this map, I'm planning on adding two or three more. But that's a problem for future-me.

[DeKaFu]

Hallucinations could possibly help here. Have them occasionally alter the landscape. You walk by a tree and then look back and it's gone. Come back later and there's two trees. Eventually you get used to out-of-place rocks appearing when you're low on sanity, right up until one actually jumps out and eats your face.

[My Name is Immaterial]

The map is pretty darn big already. It's about a quarter of a square mile, if I remember correctly, which is a lot bigger than it sounds like.

That's huge! .5 miles by .5 miles! If you walk across the map in a straight line, it should take you 15 minutes!

[Parsely]

The map is pretty darn big already. It's about a quarter of a square mile, if I remember correctly, which is a lot bigger than it sounds like.

That's huge! .5 miles by .5 miles! If you walk across the map in a straight line, it should take you 15 minutes!

That's big. But what's it gonna be full of? Is this an open map, like you're outside, or is it a giant maze? Personally the whole time I was imagining cramped hallways.

[Araph]

By my best estimation, the island is roughly .23 square miles. It's almost entirely open, though the mountains on the northern half are only partially explorable (you can go all the way around them, but you can't get up to most of the peaks). There are still a couple empty areas which will be filled up over time, and there's a lot of clutter that still needs to be added, but this is the basic layout of it.

To keep things from getting boring (like if the monster got lost and couldn't find anybody to terrorize), the monster has an internal compass that directs them in the general direction of players along with a fast-travel form that can be used when the monster is at least a certain distance away from the other players.

[Tawa]

Pretty darn cool map. The only discernible problem I see is that while you have an awesome spooky forest, there isn't a visible creepy building in it. It would be awesome if there was some kind of small mansion in the woods with little or no lighting.

That brings me to another question:
Most of your screenshots seem to have the place at night. You mentioned light sources, too, however. How does the lighting work? Are there occasional hanging lanterns? Is the player capable of finding a torch or the like?

Of course, to balance out the torch would burn out eventually. I did see how there were light sources in the shots; how common are they?

[Parsely]

That's a really impressive map.

[Araph]

Most of your screenshots seem to have the place at night. You mentioned light sources, too, however. How does the lighting work? Are there occasional hanging lanterns? Is the player capable of finding a torch or the like?

Players have a constantly-lit lantern at all times, and a pretty darn good one at that.

It has three settings: on, off, and bright. However, the only real way to survive is to hide, so you're not going to have it on all the time if you think the monster is nearby. There's another thing, as well: fog. As your sanity drops, ambient fog starts to fade into view. Because of the way Unity handles ambient fog, lights don't matter; it's just about distance. So, at some point your light won't help you see simply because your sanity is too low.

Incorporeal monsters aren't repelled by your lantern. Static light sources (braziers and the like, which do repel incorporeals) are scattered across the map at fitting points (for example, a clearing in the forest might have an old campfire pit).

It bugs me when horror games use constant pitch-darkness to scare players. It's frustrating having no idea where you're going, which hurts immersion. On a more personal level, it just feels kinda cheap. I've seen games that use darkness to great effect, but I've also seen games that prevent the player from seeing anything and call it horror. Ideally, it'd work out that, in this game at least, darkness is used occasionally, but not all the time.

That's a really impressive map.

Thanks!

[Parsely]

That'd be nuts if there was a preparation round at dusk for hunters to gather weapons and collaborate and plan to trap the monsters before the game entered nightfall and it remained that way until there was a victor.

[Araph]

The majority of the last necessary monster was added yesterday. Today I've been working on sounds, which had been long-neglected. Unity has a really cool thing called animation events that allow developers to easily time scripted things (like sounds) to animations, which means I can easily sync footstep sounds up to the actual animated walking motion. So far I've got footsteps working well, with different sounds depending on what you're walking on (dirt, stone, wood, etc.) and changing volumes depending on whether you're walking, sneaking, or sprinting. After I go through and add various other sounds (ambient noise and other sounds associated with player actions) I'm going to start on an actual GUI, which has been nonexistent this entire time.

After that, we're on the final vital piece of the game: actually making it terrifying. That means adding more hallucinations and polishing monsters, along with whatever I can think of that might help the game be scarier.

That's where playtesting is really necessary, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to suck at that part of development.

[sjm9876]

* sjm9876 tentatively volunteers

Assuming my laptop can run it ofc....