machai-umno

Now for another lookie at our powerful arsenal of tools. This time I'm showing the Particle Editor, which is the app we use to do those nifty particle effects like fire, smoke and so on... you can get really nice stuff by using this thing. Actually, the Particle Editor is nothing new in our toolset. Those who picked the HPL tools pack to make a map for Penumbra (or just for the sake of getting them) surely will have spotted a ParticleEditor.exe in there. You could create and control every aspect in a particle system with it. Good ol' Particle Editor It worked like this: you created a new Particle System, added at least one Particle Emitter, and then set these up with stuff like starting position, velocity, material, etc., which would be used by every particle created by each emitter. When you are creating the Particle System, you sure need to check how it looks while you are at it, and this was the main flaw of the old Particle Editor: you could do a preview of the Particle S...

In this part of "A History of Violence" I will briefly investigate some of the types of combat found in horror games, compare them to films and discuss how they impact on the scare-factor. Action-hero Protago nist Example game: Doom 3 Example film: Deep Rising These type of movies and games are very similar. The lead character(s) go around with big guns and wastes tons of ammo while fighting the bad guys. The protagonist is far from vulnerable and this type of horror is generally more "fun" than the others. First of all I got to say that I like both games and films in this category, but the concern here is if they are scary. Games and movies of this type relies pretty much on having "BOO!"-type of spooks, where a monster suddenly emerge from a corner or something similar. I actually think that these kind of games and movies are on the border of being to referred to as horror. That being said, I know that a lot of people consider Doom 3 the scariest game ...

Hi everyone! As my first post in the blog, I feel like I needed to do a little introduction. I'm Luis, I'm not that known compared to the 2 visible heads around here :P but I'm the other programmer here at Frictional, maybe some of you might know me from the forum, but I kinda vanished from there a while ago... But I'm here again, and this time I promise to be a little more constant than before, which shouldn't be that hard :) As you might already know, I'm pretty much developing the game tool suite myself, and a lot of stuff has been going on for over a year now. Up to now, this suite is composed of a Level Editor, a Model Editor, a Particle Editor and a Material Editor. All of these use the HPL engine built-in GUI system, which makes it real easy to use the renderer along, that means I can actually do real time in-game previews of stuff. I'm sure you already know about the Level Editor , and I know you have had a glimpse of the Model Editor in the last wor...

Ever since I started working on horror games (first was a simple 2d game called Fiend ) I have been thinking about what kind of combat one wants in a horror game. This question was even more important when working on Penumbra as we had some problems in Overture concerning weapons. Our idea was that player would want at least something to defend themselves with, so we gave them some weak weapons and cumbersome combat mechanics, thinking it would only be used as last line of defense. Instead all kinds of problems arose, some players thought that since there where weapons, combat was meant to be used and complained about it be boring. Others figured out some tricks with the combat and thought it was way too easy. Very few players seemed play the game like we intended it to and we had to fix this somehow. In Black Plague we took the decision to skip combat altogether and let the player be as vulnerable as possible. Not only did this make the design easier for us (could always assume ene...

When discussing gameplay in games, the main focus is mostly on making it "fun". The meaning of "fun" is usually that it is an enjoyable experience for the player and that boredom and frustration are reduced as much as possible. Normally this is the main priority when working on some part of the game and if it is not "fun" enough, that part will be remade or scrapped. In many horror games things are different though and focus is instead put on invoking emotions other than just "fun". A good example is at the start of Silent Hill 2 . Here the player must go for several minutes through a wood and city outskirts until reaching the town of Silent Hill. Apart from meeting a character and finding a save spot, not much happens during this section and it is only used to build up atmosphere and more imporantly to make the player feel as if they are making a long journey to reach Silent Hill . The second point is really different as it wants to give the pl...

Welcome to Frictional Games' newly created for blog for all of you interested in our work and/or horror games. The aim with the blog is to not only cover what is currently happening at Frictional Games but also to discuss Horror Games in general. Having tried to create emotions of fear for a couple of years now, we would like to share our thoughts on the subject. As horror games are one of the few (if not the only?) game genre that focuses on invoking emotions in the player, we find it very fascinating and think that it touches many areas other games don't. As we are currently in the middle of developing our new game called Unknown, we would also like to keep everyone up to speed on that. We have previously done so in a work log at our forum, but have not been regular with updates, something we will change with this blog! Hope you all will enjoy!