“Morleyville Mall” was recently submitted to Greenlight, and isn’t making much progress (38% yes votes, 59% no), so some advice would be greatly appreciated. Part of the problem is likely the difficulty of clearly explaining what it is - a hybrid horror / store management game intended to have fairly mild horror elements and a selectable level of horror by allowing players to choose their role from a variety of different jobs / characters ranging from mall security and police detectives, to employees working in specific stores, restaurants and Food Court shops doing tasks such as making buffet items for the morning opening etc. The idea was to appeal to a broader audience that normally doesn’t play horror games while still hopefully appealing to horror fans.
Here’s the Greenlight page with a description of the game, trailer and screenshots: Steam Community :: Error
At a first glance I wouldn’t say it looks scary at all. Perhaps the concept may sound scary, but those screenshots don’t evoke any sort of fear in me.
Also I don’t think the graphics are very good. My personal choice for a horror game is that it should have high fidelity graphics, with eerie lighting and environments, but I just don’t get that from your screenshots.
I’m not an artist, I’m a programmer, so I can’t give you any sort of expert advice. But from what I can see there doesn’t seem to be any post processing effects? Also you don’t seem to have any anti-aliasing?
Where did you take those screenshots? In the Unity editor, or in a PC build?
You might want to look at one of the best assets I’ve ever bought, its called Beautify (on the asset store), which has a wide range of features, and really improved the look of my game.
Currently there aren’t any postprocessing effects, partly to improve the framerate. After full optimization, some postprocessing might be feasible depending on how much the framerate improves.
Some of the screenshots were taken from individual frames of the trailer and some were taken in the editor’s scene view.
Yes, that video is the Greenlight trailer. The feedback has been the typical Greenlight blend of a few positive comments, a handful of enthusiastic comments (very few), and a few curmudgeons / trolls (such as the inevitable guy calling it an “asset flip” even though a large percentage of the assets were made from scratch; but some Greenlight guys call almost every game an “asset flip”). One person criticized the faceless “characters”, so I explained that these are mannequins and reminded him that mannequins often are faceless.
The comments and votes tend to go in spurts of either positive or negative, something I’ve also noticed in the comments for other games and so the votes for other games probably also go in spurts. At first the votes were only 30% positive, then there was a streak (overnight, oddly) with a large number of people voting mostly positive until the total percentage was boosted to around 40%, then they became mostly negative again but after the volume dropped dramatically, leaving a total percentage of 38%. Right now there’s only a tiny trickle of new votes, mostly negative.
I just checked out the comments on Steam. Seems to certainly be appealing to some people. I’d look at it like those are your true target audience. The others (certainly people saying things about overused genre!!) definitely would not be your target audience and I always wonder why such people even waste everyone’s time commenting. Bored I guess. I mean seriously if a person doesn’t like Horror games then why are they even there checking it out. 1 + 2 = 3. Follow the pattern: a, b, c, d … ? Translation: it’s a basic common sense thing, right?
Avid Steamer here (and Greenlight voter on occasion). I watched your trailer. I think the issue is that it really isn’t scary. I would recommend you study the trailers for Five Nights at Freddie’s, for example, for some good examples of how to build fear and tension in your trailer, especially how to do that without giving stuff away. I would start with the music and atmospherics of the video. The music (or lack thereof) should build tension. The lighting and cinematography in the current trailer just looks like a plain walk-around on a game level. I think the trailer should be more small vignettes with darkness or fog of war obscuring extraneous detail. You have some of that already. I think you just need to build on it.
While I haven’t played the game, it seems like a very cool premise. I think you just need to package it right to potential players. By the way, when I originally heard of it, I scoffed at Five Nights, but then the trailer caught my eye so I bought the eye phone version and played it in bed with the lights off
Thank you.
Greenlight is supposed to be closed soon and replaced with some other method, although Valve hasn’t announced a timeframe for that, nor have they announced a finalized version of the new policy, nor given any indication of what will happen to current items in Greenlight which aren’t passed through before it’s shut down.
Steam says the trailer is supposed to show actual gameplay (although many trailers don’t), so that creates a bit of a dilemma. Another dilemma is trying to explain / show a nonstandard type of game in short vignettes without much text. .
I think your attempts to broaden the audience have ended up shooting yourself in the foot. The target audience for ‘a horror game that’s not actually scary’ probably doesn’t exist.
Crafting a product that suits a niche audience well is probably better then one that fits everybody poorly.
Didn’t seem scary at all. The translucent “ghost” who appears (by rotating counterclockwise, not by actually having animated movement) while you’re making a burger for no reason in a completely empty mall is rather humorous, actually–and that’s coming from someone who played about 5 minutes of Alan Wake before going NOPE at the first shadow person, and has not completed Alien Isolation or Dead Space in the years I’ve been chipping away at them.
Movement seems clunky (mainly the dude running away from you around halfway through), though I don’t think that’s a big deal. The premise of doing these activities like making a burger or making a cake in a completely empty place seem totally ridiculous. Stopping the action, turning to the mannequin, and slowly tilting it over isn’t scary at all (the way to do this would be to have it creak, stop the player and pan the camera quickly towards the mannequin, and then black out when it’s visible in the corner of the screen. This should also have some slight music which increases in intensity or volume when nearing the mannequin).
I think part of the problem is that none of these are really very good jump scares, not are they scary psychologically. It doesn’t really matter which one you’re going for, but you do need to go for one, rather than just having random “creepy” things.
Forget scary, it just doesn’t look like a very good game. I would expect to play this for maybe thirty seconds before going “meh” and uninstalling. I honestly don’t see any reason to play it.
There have been a number of recent games that did extremely well by providing only mild horror, such as “Hello, Neighbor”, “Finding Bigfoot”, “Tattletail” (which is actually pretty cute), and so on. There seems to be good evidence that more people play mild horror games that are merely creepy or unsettling, rather than the hardcore games that have lots of severe jumpscares or blood and gore.
The dark ghost peeking around the corner certainly needs to be fixed. One previous version of the ghost’s programming did include animation, and a variation of that can be easily put back in.
The reason there aren’t any shoppers in the trailer is because most of the scenarios involve either: 1) work after-hours or before opening (such as making bakery items for the next day or buffet items for the upcoming morning opening, etc) or 2) police / security investigations after the mall has been cleared. A few of the scenarios do involve normal operating hours, but it’s difficult to come up with effective horror scenarios for that type of thing since a mall filled with plenty of other people isn’t as creepy as an empty mall at night or after the mall has been cleared due to concerns that an armed criminal is on the premises.
It isn’t supposed to have severe jumpscares, just as “Hello Neighbor” is pretty mild (getting caught by a cartoony guy who merely puts you back in your house). There have been many successful games that are more creepy than scary. The actual game is mostly a matter of being stalked by invisible (or nearly invisible) ghosts whose footsteps are often the only thing you can detect; as well as mannequins that seem to subtly follow you (appearing in one window display after another) or fall on you if you get too close; but the invisible ghosts are difficult to show in the trailer and the mannequins don’t have a lot of “action”.
The falling mannequins could be reprogrammed in the manner you suggest (a faster “attack” without falling), but if they don’t fall then it ruins the ambiguity (are they just falling due to natural causes or something else?) A big part of the game’s premise is the attempt by the mall management to assure people that there are natural causes behind the activity, and that also helps create a feeling of realism which helps suspend disbelief and make it more creepy, like the skepticism in the early stages of “The Exorcist” or the attempt by the “phone guy” in “Five Nights At Freddy’s” to assure the player that the mechanical figures are just a little quirky due to engineering problems. If it’s too over-the-top, it doesn’t convince the subconscious…
Some of those games you mentioned are not considered “mild” by the general gaming community, with the exception of Hello Neighbor, the others tend too have moderate to serious horror elements or jump scare qualities. Simply watch some lets play with the youtubers and you will see them jumping out of their skin from games like Finding Bigfoot.
We can discuss till were blue in the face about how its not “scary” to either you or I; but most of the current generation of gamer’s can be scared by the anticipation of SOMETHING happening, their simply not built of sterner stuff.
I would dare guess that older horror games would probably send them to a shrink or at least their mommies if not for their low quality graphics.
Could you imagine a game like Project: Firestart with the current Next Gen graphics in a FPS scenario? The closest game to that style would be like the game Alien: Isolation.
A “mild” horror game will not do that well overall simply because it is mild in nature. In fact the quality of the horror or the intensity are not really what determine the overall effectiveness of the game in regard to sales, but the game play and graphical quality will really determine how well and for how long the game will sell.
