machai-umno

Going to start of a new, hopefully, weekly feature on the blog called "Horror Tip". This will be tips of lesser known games, books, movies, etc with some kind of relation to horror. Hopefully it will give you all some entertainment tips! First out will be a small game called "All Alone". Name: All Alone Type: Game (Interactive Fiction) Link: Info and download All Alone is a short work of Interactive Fiction taking place in an apartment a rainy night. It is very atmospheric and I think it gives a good hint on what is possible with pure text in a game. Make sure that you play this game in a dark room and perhaps with some spooky ambient track in the background. If you are new to Interactive Fiction (IF) then a guide can be found here . Basically IF games are text adventures and you type the actions you want to do. This gives a very special feel for the game and gives lots of options for the player in what actions can be done. It can also lead to annoying "gues...

In this post I would like to expand on some of the things that where brought up in the last post on obstacles. I am going to go through some of the steps involved in coming up with an obstacles and problems encountered. Normally what we start with is having some kind of general journey for player. This could be something like this (a lit more detailed though): The player starts at the pirate island and must then steal a ship to get the jungle and rescue his loved one. This is then built upon step by step and ends up as detailed designs of each level. Now lets say that I now have to design the levels inside the skull castle on pirate island. Because of story reasons I now need to fit in the following levels: Treasure chamber Torture room Drinking hall Fencing hall When trying to fit these levels together I can do it in various ways. It could be a linear progression like: Treasure chamber -> Torture room -> etc... Or I could use some kind of hub structure . A way to do this is b...

Even though freedom is something of a buzz words these days in games, most games needs to restrict the player somehow. This is especially true for various types of adventure games where the player must be guided along a story path. In this blog post I will call these restrictions "obstacles" and will briefly discuss the various design problems connected with these. First out I want to start out with an example of some obstacles from Penumbra. In Black Plague, after the player as managed to escape from his cell and get to the residential area, we wanted the player to search the area, find notes and solve puzzles. In order to do so we need to halt the player's progress and this was done by a door needing biometric input in order to open. To do this the player must collect some body parts and these are in turn blocked by other obstacles that need to be overcome (another locked door, corridor with gas, etc). The big problem we have had when designing things like this is to ma...

The tool guy is back with some more dirty inside secrets on the development. This post was meant to talk a bit about the Level Editor, but first I need to tell you about something you might not know... and it's called tilemapping. The term tilemapping refers to a technique born in the mid 80's or so, back when videogames were pretty much down to 2D. These games used 2D images to represent the game world and entities in it. A 2D image is, in a nutshell, a grid of color values or pixels, with the following parameters: Size in pixels (width x height): these values tell how big our image is - 64x64, 320x200, 1280x800... Color depth/bits per pixel(bpp) : precision used to store an individual pixel in the image - 8 bpp, 16 bpp, 24 bpp, 32 bpp. This parameter pretty much depends on the format we are using to display our image. To understand the need for such a technique, we have to think in terms of the hardware available back in the day. We are talking about machines with veeery limi...

In this post the the no-save system hinted at in the previous post will be discussed by going over various systems and see how they apply to horror games. I also want to point out that as in the last post , saving means the type of save that determines where the player starts after failure (death) and not progress recording. Also note that I will, becuase of reasons found in the previous save post , consider that weak negative failure effects (like quick save) reduce the scare factor. Death is final This type of save can be found mostly in rogue games like Nethack and means that if you die, you will loose all progress and have to start over. Pretty much all games utilializing this system is based on random generation of levels, so when one starts over the game does not play out the same as last time. It also has a concept of levelling yourself instead of the game character meaning that by using knowledge obtained from the previous session one can make it longer in the next. Would thi...

Having talked about combat for a few weeks I will now move onto something else: Save systems in horror games. I will briefly discuss the various save systems available and how they affect the scare factor. But before doing that I would like to give a quick overview of goals of a save system. Save systems come in many varieties and basically fill two functions: Record progress when the player chooses to turn off the game. To give the player some a starting point after "dying" (or what ever constitutes failure). Note that in almost all new games the two are connected. But in many older games, the "death save" happened at the start of the level, but the progress was never saved when the game was turned off. Instead, turning off the game meant restarting. The reason for having this system is to increase difficulty in games and the place of the "save" is as such a measure of the penalty for failure. It is this penalty save (type no 2) that I will focus on in ...

In this blog post I will focus an underused combat mechanic: Chase Sequences. This type of "combat" is very common in horror movies , but quite rare in horror games. I will briefly discuss how we used it in Penumbra, problems it causes and how some other games have implemented it. In Penumbra we used chase sequences on three occasions in the entire series and and each time it was a highly scripted event. There was always little room for the player to move in and mostly a very clear path. The first two chase sequences were in Overture and both involved being chased by a giant worm . In both of these the player had to complete a specific obstacle along the way and failure resulted in death and a restart of the chase. While a lot of people said that they liked this, a large amount also disliked this portion of the game because of its trial and error nature. In Black Plague the chase sequence was a bit different. Here the player had more space to move about in, the goal was not...