Grime & Gaslight | Devlog #4 ~ Level Design meets Horror Gameplay

Why H.P. Lovecraft might help us regarding level design or how to increase the scaryness of a game with level design.

How can level design help us creating a better horror game? Firstly, the players subconsiousness truly needs to believe, the world he just entered is real.  Let´s take the streets for instance. Originally the streets where models which were supposed to be something like a building set. You just pick a street-cross, consisting of pavement and actual cobblestone and place it right on the seam of another part of the street. Well, it turned out that this approach leaves no room for individuell flow. The streets had looked unbelievably and even computer-generated. Furthermore it won´t be possible to create height differences. That´s why I finally decided to use a terrain as ground and make models of pavement that I need to place quite fitting to the route of the terrain.

Even small height differences in the terrain made the city more plausible.

In order to meet the expectations of players regarding a horrorgame, I wanted to make sure, that I keep the view distance as low as possible. Why is that? H.P. Lovecraft is associated with the quote "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."  A horrorgame should not only scare the player with various jumpscares or compareable moments of high tention, but also sequences where the player is let unsure, whether something is happening or even, what will happen. Concealing parts of the level by cutting the line of sight is crucial for the effect I´m aiming for. That´s why the level need to be designed in a way, that the player can´t see far. Behind every corner could be a threat or a point of interest. The player is encouraged to explore, but with caution. I tried to achieve this by keep the route twisted and added trees to the large ones. Here the story comes handy, since the fights cultists vs police gave an excuse to place barricades and burning piles all over the map.  At first I wanted to create a map of cobblestone streets exclusively, but finally decided that there shall be a big poor district for the reason that it is actually hard to make the streets twisted enough to achieve the effect I named above. The houses are placed in a boring and ordered way. Good to see for far distances. In a muddy poor district the houses and cabins are randomly build with lean-tos. In this part of a level, it would make sense to build narrow, short alleys.  

Route of the streets. Those who are not are not curved, have obsticals like trees, barricades or burning piles of wood to cut the view distance.  

At last I want to name a couple more obvious points that increase the scaryness of the level. Fog for example helps cutting the view distance even further and is fitting to the theme. Darkness is great to increase the fear of the unknown, but in my humble opinion lot´s of games exaggerate this effect completely, leaving the player in an unnatural dense darkness with a very limited lightsource. I always found those game quite demanding and exhausting to look at. Furthermore Grime & Gaslight is supposed to be a horror game with aspects of exploring. Too much darkness is impractical if I want to meet this goal.

Since I love creating game assets, I´m a fan of spreading objects over the level that are simply scary to look at or indicate something dreadful. That´s why I added the fact to the story that the members of the cult kept hanging and burrying every cleric straight where they found them. There you go - having an excuse to place countless gallows, graves and coffins all over the streets. In my humble opinion it´s crucial though, that there is an explaination for all those terrible objects, otherwise it will become silly. There is a brilliant quote from a german author, whose name I unfortunely can´t remember. He wrote a book about storytelling and what makes a novel readable.  He said, in reference to communicating an important piece of information about the story or character: "...der Leser spürt die Absicht [des Authors] und ist verstimmt." As best translates, as it´s possible to me: The reader is miffed about the pure fact that he was able to senses the intention of the author. It is important to give a well-fitting explanation why things or people are how they are.