So I didn't do this with the last blog post. Since I have a new computer and can record again, I wanted to upload something. It's nothing special, but here it is. All stuff that wasn't in the demo, but no story spoilers. Yay for being able to record again!
Amnesia
I finally got around to finishing Amnesia and I highly recommend it if you love horror games. I think I'm one of the last few who hadn't played it that was into horror. It actually got to me unlike most other horror titles. The only other games to really freak me out were the Silent Hill games. I'm into the horror games that get into your head, where the game doesn't actually have to put you in danger, but makes you think you are. Where you don't want to turn around, because you're afraid something might be there. Amnesia does a really good job of this.
It's a game that I actually preferred to keep the lights on, which I don't like doing with these games. This is the first horror game I've played on a PC, at least with headphones on. Most of the time, I'm on a TV, 10 ft. back with standard speakers. I find there's a different level of immersion when you're right in front of your monitor with decent headphones. The sound in Amnesia was phenomenal. When timed with the subtle actions in the game, it was chilling.
Your character has a sanity level. (Like Eternal Darkness.) When he sees unsettling things or is in the dark for too long, his sanity drops. Staying in the light, progressing forward, or solving puzzles would keep it up. Staying in the light, however, means that you can be seen. When your sanity drops too low, your view blurs and the controls become slippery. If he continues to decline, he'll simply fall over for about 10 seconds and will only crawl, mixed with a high pitched sound that cuts out the rest of the audio in the area.
I've found it's scarier when you don't know what's chasing you. The unknown is always more frightening, and Amnesia was well aware of this. Simply looking at the monsters in the game will blur the view and drop your sanity significantly. There's a section where you have waist high water and of course something is in there. You can't see what it is, but you know it's moving around as you can see the splashes and hear it as well. Sometimes a shadow will follow you, which of course, that is hardly visible, but you know it's there, and you know you have to get away from it.
5 comments:
Gotta agree with you on that horror comment. Slasher stuff with lots of gore (what was TVTropes name for it? I think it was gorn or something like that) doesn't really get to me at all. It's gross, but it doesn't really give me anything to fear.
If, on the other hand, the fear takes place in the mind, that's when I tend to get a bit scared. The unknown is a powerful tool, for it lets the mind fill in the blanks, and what the mind invents will always be worse than any monster they might put in there.
The new content looks quite nifty! The only thing I'm a bit eh on is Bubble Tower. One of the things I really like about Distorted Travesty 3 is that everything is that a lot of attention is paid both to aesthetics and design, and most of those levels you showed strike that balance wonderfully. Bubble Tower didn't quite give me that same vibe, for some reason. But I'm happy to see that the game is coming along and that you seem to be doing well.
Yahtzee said just that: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2092-Amnesia-The-Dark-Descent
Hmmm...you can record videos now, eh?
If I'm not mistaken, somebody owes us a no-damage run of Think and Act Fast. :P
Also, something I've been wondering about recently: What was the impetus for having damage numbers be on the scale they are, and what is the idea behind leveling them up via use?
It's a common enough idea, but the values go up slowly enough that it doesn't feel like a "damage upgrade" so much as a "new list of things I can one-shot, two-shot, etc." and it feels very balanced around that. It seems like that would be easier to balance/understand with a more subdued scale, like tens as opposed to hundreds.
Then again, big numbers are inherently fun.
That's a good question and one that I thought about a lot. It is indeed more balanced around; 'Now the player can 1 or 2 shot x and y with z weapon.'
The idea behind it is percentage boosts. 10 doesn't work well with this for what I want because I have to work with 10% increments from the base value.
11 is 10% higher than 10 where as 101 is 1% higher than 100.
It definitely worked better for DT1's system with all the damage boosts overlaying one another, but I decided to stick with it again for DT3. (On a side note, I almost always use 100 as a base damage value, even for shooters, as I don't like to work with decimals. The number itself is arbitrary in the end though.)
100 is an easy enough number to work with where 100 is actually valued as 1 damage. If an enemy has 300 HP, from my design side, I see it as 3 HP. The standard melee attack from Jerry does 100(1) damage and everything else is based around that. Projectiles, because they can be fired from a safe distance, do a specific percent less than 1 damage.
This is going a bit farther than what you asked but;
The Arrow does 70 damage and the X-Buster does 30. The reasons for this is the arrow has limited ammo whereas the X-Buster is energy based with virtually unlimited. (As well as being able to fire faster.) Though the numbers may change for these in the final version, this idea will still be used when considering what their values should be. The arrows though, are more versatile since they can be fired up and down. (More love needs to be given to the X-Buster charge. In the current version, the fully charged shot will pierce through enemies, but I think the default charge time needs to be reduced a little.)
If you're into horror, you should definitely check out White Day. It might just scare the crap outta you, haha.
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