Darkness.
Abandonment.
Loneliness.
Emotional states that make you uncomfortable but at the same time… fascinating ones.
After all, when you are alone you understand yourself better.
These days of forced isolation have led me to think about loneliness and in general on solo experiences.
In the rare moments when I went out of necessity, I had the impression for a moment of being in a story in which I played the only man left on Earth.
In our new title, this is exactly what we are trying to communicate.
And in this, darkness plays an important role.
The darkness.
During this quarantine, since I had a lot of available time to play and watch movies, I dusted off several classics, deepening and analyzing them.
One is Slender, which I downloaded to my PS4 in what I think is its best-suited version (I know, I’m becoming a lazy console player đŸ˜‰).
It is amazing how a direct voltage can be created with a few elements such as darkness, “I see-I do not see” effect of the torch, and convincing sound effects when they are used wisely.
Another great classic is a movie that I recently watched for the second time. I’m talking about Paranormal Activity, one of the most brilliant and interesting productions in recent years, in my opinion.
I remember that the first time I saw it I was deeply fascinated by the apparent calm, by the disturbing silence on motionless shots in which nothing happened but in which I sensed a presence that, in one way or another, would sooner or later manifest itself.
Here, that darkness on the screen, every pixel, every shade of gray communicated something.
Before I even saw something, I “thought” I had already seen something.
Darkness enhances imagination. The engine of fear.
Therefore, from the initial stages, we wanted to give darkness a very important role.
As you know, our new title has a complete day-night cycle. We have experimented with several plugins to obtain the effect we wanted, and for the moment our choice has fallen on true sky.
I have to say that for now, the final result is fairly close to what we want to achieve.
The New Game prototype currently has a 48-minute day-night cycle. Furthermore, we will evaluate the game pace to see if this is something appropriate.
Desolation and loneliness…
The island is vast (it is a new island, a few miles away from the island of Die Young) and gives us the opportunity to create a desolate countryside that goes well with the leaden winter sky.
Abandonment, the sensation of seemingly stopped time, the feeling of being vulnerable and at the mercy of fate. These are all crucial elements.
We want the environment itself, in its entirety, to oppress the player, make him uncomfortable, and contribute to generating anxiety and anguish. We have many ideas on how to achieve these goals, soon you will know more.
The degree of identification guaranteed by the active use of the video game allows generating fear, tension, and terror in a way that is sometimes even more effective than in movies.
This will be our challenge in the following months.
Next week I will talk about how, while introducing numerous firearms, we want to give the player the feeling of being helpless and almost helpless in the face of the enemies and threats he will encounter
