Hi guys,
We are Skobbejak Games, literally a 2 man indie team (with ZERO budget), and we’ve spent the last 7 months with Unity free and came up with a free prototype horror game, we just though that we would share it with the Unity community. Here is a gameplay trailer (which includes a download link in the description):
Looks interesting, but it’s not compatible with 32-bit Windows, so I couldn’t play it.
Maybe the next Slender!
@protopod: Oh no! So sorry man. We will upload a separate 32-bit version, thank you so much for letting us know.
@tatelax: Haha, I would be ecstatic if it were even just quarter as popular.
Looks really good! Good work 
It looks like the playstation 1 small soldiers game in fps. Sorry though it doesn’t look or feel scary in any way. I think you may need to revise horror elements in a video games, if you want to gain some good psychological inertia for a video game, look into frictionals breakdowns of horror games: http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com.au/
hahaha, typane nice trolling, try being a bit more constructive and try to remember we are not Frictional Games we are literally just 2 people and pretty sure PS1 didnt have normal maps.
Amnesia while being reasonably scary is not the style or approach we were going for and the one pitfall we didn’t want to fall into, that amnesia falls into as well as games like slender, is that the degree of your characters vulnerability stays the same when your just running away the whole time, if there isnt a way to fight back your level of vulnerability will more or less stay the same and the novelty of the scares die a bit quicker, plus it makes for boring/1-Dimensional gameplay in the long run. We also wanted a fusion of 90’s FPS games like Doom, Hexen and Blood to play with the tension and make you feel brave as well as scared at times.
Wasn’t meant to come off as rude or “trolling” but this is not a horror game in the slightest. I do agree that frictionals horror is more psychological but even then you avoid any for of explicit or psychological horror. You keep saying 2 man team, no budget and 7 months to complete. I think a lot of people are working like that. I am just telling you that I don’t like your game and I could write you out a list of reasons. The fact is my opinion shouldn’t matter to you, I am just some random person on the internet so you can just ignore me. If you are truly happy with your game, what I say should not concern you. If my opinion does annoy you, its because your motivation to make said game is for an ulterior motive of money or fame. That or you don’t want to see 7 months go to waste. I just wanted to ask as well, why did it take 7 months to make this game? 7 months is a long time to push out a lot of quality work but it seems everything is rather basic for this game. Not saying basic games are bad, its just a long time for little pay off.
Your right I dont care you just seemed a bit pissed and I wanted to answer you questions.
Typane is giving you good advice, machina. He is giving you criticism. He told you its not scary, and its not. You then say it not supposed to be scary, yet the title is ‘Experimental horror game’. Your game is okay for a 2 man team, but for it to be a true horror game or horror survival it needs to build tension.
Tips: Less fog, less light. Nightime. Maybe those fire things give off light themselves, and you use them to see? Make the spawning of the monsters random and unnerving. You never know if your going to turn around and see one. Add in ammo, so you cant just shoot willy nilly, this gives a sense of loss and isolation when the player runs out. He has to think about what he does.
Also, dont use the base unity terrain textures. Get your own, from cgtextures or something. Make 'em look better in gimp or photoshop. Generate a better terrain with unity TerrainToolkit, and then sculpt it afterwards. Dont use the circles brushes, use the circles brushes with a bit of noise added.
YOU NEED WAY LESS FOG. FOG IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE USED TO OBSCURE VISION. MAKE IT SO IT SLIGHTLY CHANGES THE COLOR OF TREES 100m AWAY.
Dont use the excuse ‘We’re only a two man team’. Use the excuse ‘We are new to the software’ and then learn more about it.
I’ve created a very successful horror game (was #14 in adventure games, played 2 million times) and here’s a little secret to making anything scary.
Turn down the ambient lighting, and boom you have a scary game.
Dark + flashlight = lazy, cheap, boring and overdone (not to mention you need to squint too much)
Silent hill and quite a few other horror games does mist, so your game doesnt need to be dark with a flashlight.
While we do listen to everyone’s criticism and take it into account, we dont need to take YOUR advice specifically (as you are developers and I know how some devs can be sometimes or just people in general towards something that isnt popular,especially if you are trying to be rude, while giving criticism) cause we have had compliments and likes so there are people that do like it and find it scary. I mean its way scarier than slender, at least.
I didn’t mean for any offense, it just seemed typane was intending offense in his 1st post and I thought he was trolling, I apologize if I was being rude, but if you want to criticize at least be civilized.
P.S. Where did I say “being scary” wasnt the point of our game, I dont remember that?
Slender is more scary then your game. I did a key paper of investigating experimental psychological horror as horror in video games is my main specialty and is a secondary thesis I pursue personally. Don’t try to convince yourself otherwise, I may come off as rude but I am a very harsh critique, even to my own games. The problem is you are not taking criticism and making the assumption that you are not wrong. You have to understand it is alright to be wrong and fail, I have failed multiple times, but each failure you learn something that you will further succeed at next time.
Also I know this is critiques from developers and from a stand point slender was the shittest game ever made because it uses everything prebuilt in unity and can be made in an hour. But no matter how simplistic a game is from a development standpoint, the player will never know. They only care about the core mechanics. Its the harsh reality, I can spend ages creating my own engine in C++ and develop a game that is good from a programmatic stand point but terrible from a gameplay standpoint. Polishing a turd of a mechanic doesn’t make the game anymore fun. I would say, prototpying specific mechanics individually and using a speration of concerns would work better in this scenario. Look at the game “hotline miami or Dustforce” both very popular games made in game maker, “To the moon” was made in RPG maker. All these games are incredibly popular yet no one cared about the effort that went behind them. The point is, time spend on a game does not mean the game will be good. I had to learn this the hard way with one of the game I developed.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130848/how_to_prototype_a_game_in_under_7_.php?print=1 This is a good resource for prototyping games in a short amount of time from the developers of world of goo and little inferno. Keep developing and eventually if you open your mind up you will get there one day.
Tips:
Turn down the fog. I know you said silent hill is misty, whatever. Turn the fog down, fog isn’t mist. Ill explain this soon.
Turn down ambient lighting. Not to black, just down to twilight or whatever. Right now your game looks like its in the middle of the day. This isn’t scary.
Now, for mist. Layer mist in semi-transperant planes with a perlin noise texture on it or something. Layer this planes away from the player. Write a script to have these continually generating. Use world-based fog, if you have pro. All these things will make it look better.
I haven’t played it, but I did watch the video.
On the topic of the fog: I feel like dense fog or darkness which obscures the player’s vision can be a very useful tool for creating tension and fear. Not so much by default, but DEFINITELY when coupled with the threat of dangerous enemies who could be lurking around anywhere. I didn’t think your enemies were very scary, either in appearance or behavior, but that isn’t to say you don’t have any potential here.
The way you have the terrain set up, IMO, looks quite bad. The art assets are decent, but the terrain looked blurry, had poor flow, and had a very “default” look to it. I feel like I’m being a little bit harsh here, but considering the game has been in development for 7 months puts the bar a little bit higher. At any rate, though, it’s something interesting and new and I’d like to see where it goes.
Sidenote on horror: it seems like you’ve given the player a ranged means of attack. if this is unlimited, expect it to be abused and all threat possibly imposed by the enemies to be gone. Silent Hill made the enemies more terrifying by forcing you to cope with horribly clumsy and difficult to control melee weapons to conserve ammo, or to waste it and run out. (Although, and this is unrelated to the idea behind the concept, Silent Hill games typically give you far, far more ammo than you really need so the pressure is only perceived and not so much real)
All of the hate by these self proclaimed professionals is really quite appalling. You guys hate on this Devs’ creation but I dont see any creation of yours worth mentioning. He made something. You didnt. So why exactly are you hating on his game and pretending you know more than he does?
The Developers took their time to create a VERY WELL MADE GAME, and try to share it with you and all of you come to this thread trying to pretend “You Know” what makes an amazing horror game. And bash his. I have to say, Machinax did a terrific job creating this Indie, not only is it different but its fucking good. Is it perfect? Well is Paula Dean Racist?
The point is, If you want to give criticism, that’s fine. But stating, “The game isn’t good. The game isn’t scary.” Is not in the very least any type of criticism you guys should be giving. Besides, where I grew up, I always learned that Criticism without compliments just make you like an ass.
For me, I loved the enemies, the fog, and the Atmosphere, but it was a little too bright. See? I don’t sound like jerk do I?
Furthermore, I see people getting on him because HES PROUD OF HIS GAME. Really? Is that wrong? This project was a two man team, why shouldn’t he state that? If I made a game like this, you can be damn sure I would say how this awesome project was done by two guys. Dont get all pissed cause he wants credit. He deserves it.
To sum it up, quit with all the insults of his game. And stop expecting he is supposed to listen to JUST YOUR OPINION and if he doesn’t, he is a bad Dev. He took 7 months to create something for us, that is COMPLETELY FREE. It’s disapointing when after that, he gets insulted for not doing a “Better Job”. The real funny thing is, you guys pretend you know horror, but the reality is, no one has seen or heard of a decent horror game created by you assholes yet. If you have made one, post a link for me, I want to see your professional work. So I can “Critique You”. Now what I HAVE SEEN and WHAT I HAVE HEARD OF on the other hand, is this guy’s game. And the vast majority of his audience, loves it.
I could be wrong but you have 1 post so I assume you are his friend or one of the people that made this. I am brutally honest when it comes to feedback, most everything I have made is really small and quite crap but the more things I make, the more I am able to understand where I went wrong. I am not sorry for my remarks because it is not a well made game. I have nothing in this game I like, I think it all looks awful. It would have been fine for a learning experience but as far as gameplay goes it was terrible. A better way to introduce the game would have been “I have been working on a horror game, can anyone please give me some feedback”. But proclaiming that this was amazing and acts as the epitome of horror innovation is what annoys me. The feedback is, don’t spent 7 months polishing a turd. Develop a prototype in 4 days, if its not fun, move on. If it is fun, make it a bit more.
So the point that you not get is this. I have made 14 or so games but I don’t put them all on the forums for a reason. I put the games I make in a day on the forums as part of game jams. The key reason is this: Developers are critiques, you can’t get an unbiased response from a developer so don’t even try. I may have 5 stars on everything I have made, doesn’t mean it is a good game. It’s irony at it’s finest.
In the end why do you care what we say. We have all been based and ridiculed before about things we do in life. Get over it. If it means so much to you to be a game developer then keep persisting, if anything all the bad response should be more motivation to prove us wrong. Just don’t cry about it and thing for one second that anything you make is good. Always be critical of your own work.
7 Months is a long time for what youve shown. I know how easy it is to spend a lot of time going no-where though.
All these horror threads lately have inspired me to hack something together though, just to put my money where my mouth is.
I’m in the same boat. I have all this research I can put to use and give some tips on how to develop horror elements in a game both jumpscare and psychological.
I just listen to creepy music while i’m working on it… I find it more immersive and makes it feel more creepy as im working on it.
Definitely gonna use something like this for the background ambience
This ones pretty good… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAP26hS82BU
