Hey Guys!
Thanks for the kind words!
I’ll just speak a little more regarding the Style of the game.
We were really inspired by P.T. All members of the team have either played it themselves or have seen videos of Kojima’s Masterpiece. While our game does indeed share the same atmosphere as Silent Hills, the gameplay is not too similar. P.T didn’t involve any actual playing. There was no dying and retrying. Rather, they just had the player walk around and experience the terror. On the other hand, we plan on integrating AI and possibly a health system. All ideas are being debated .
A psychological horror game is indeed a little different. Most games these days rely on jumpscares for the element of Horror. However when it’s psychological, it’s a little more subtle. As developers and designers we need to find a way to mess with the player’s mind.
We have a lot of methods for doing this, although to keep the fun of the game, it would be better not to disclose them. At the same time, we should give at least one example to demonstrate what we mean.
I had earlier mentioned a Dynamic Level. This is something that will act as a tool of Psychological Horror. If a player takes a certain corridor to a room, we may actually change said passage once he enters the room. Thus on opening the door to leave, he finds that the corridor outside doesn’t look like the one he came from. It may even open to another room! Either way, this is used as a method to confuse the player, to make him question if it’s the game’s doing, or if he himself is forgetting. Of course, we will find clever way of doing this, as repetitiveness will cause it to lose it’s purpose.
Another example of messing around on a psychological level would be confusing the players by engaging the senses. Throwing shadows and footsteps right behind the player to make it look as if something is following him, whispers through one of the headphones(we can do that now!), to make him turn around and find nothing.
These are some of the many methods that we plan on using to mess around with the players’ mind. Granted, this won’t exactly terrify the player, but we have a lot of cards to play.
Also, keep in mind that while we won’t overuse the jumpscare, we will use it from time to time. A horror game without jumpscares would be redundant. Our only concern is not overusing anything, otherwise it loses it’s fear factor.