ATONEMENT - A horror game
For this project the brief required me to experience the loss of either hearing or sight for a week and then create something that simulates how I felt during this experience. The sense I chose to lose was my hearing, and I did this by wearing earphones for a week. The main thing I struggled with during this time period was my inability to communicate effectively with the people around me. This problem was partially solved by carrying around a notepad that people could use to write messages to me, but interacting with other people was still a major hassle. This led to me feeling really isolated by the end of the week. Additionally, I began to feel paranoid that people were talking about me behind my back while I couldn't hear them. I decided to try and invoke these feelings of isolation and paranoia in other people by creating a horror story and then creating a game based on this story. The story was titled "Shades" and the game was titled "ATONEMENT". The story has a separate page that can be found at:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/71445261/SHADES-A-game-narrative
What is ATONEMENT?
Atonement is a horror game that is based on a CreepyPasta that was written for this project, titled “Shades”. The plot of this CreepyPasta is as follows:
The protagonist is a middle aged man who put too much pressure on his daughter to try and get her into med school and to be like her older sister, which then resulted in her suicide. Because of the nature of her death the daughter ended up in purgatory, where time flows differently to the real world, and the eternity she spent there turned her into a twisted monster that consumed all the other souls in purgatory. This amalgamation of souls then came to be known as the Shades. Distraught by her daughters death, the unnamed protagonists wife joined a cult and tried to summon her daughter back from the dead. She succeeded, and the monster that her daughter had become was let loose upon the world. The first thing she did was seek revenge against her father. She caught him and trapped him inside his dreams, forcing him to endlessly complete mazes while she pursued him relentlessly, to give him a taste of what purgatory had been like.
How the basic game mechanics will work
The Shades can see everything that happens within the shadows and will move towards the user at a constant pace. The user will need to take advantage of the light in the mazes in order to complete the game. A Shade will be able to see the user even if they are in the light if the user gets too close to them.
The user will need to fear the shadows, but must not leave them. The idea behind this is that the Shades can kill the user at any time, but it would not be fun that way. They like some aspect of fair play. If the user leaves the shadows for too long (40 seconds) they will treat it as cheating and will become aggravated and hunt the user down vigorously, moving quickly through the maze. If this occurs the user will be instantly killed the next time they step into a shadow or encounter a shade unless they manage to pass into the next level.
As stated above the Shades do not like it when you cheat. If the user attempts the classic trick of following a single wall to find the way out of a maze they will be killed at the fourth corner they turn, as soon as they make contact with a shadow.
The Shades dislike cowardice. Every time the user turns around and goes back the way they came the Shade furthest away from them will appear at a random location, closer to the user, in the new direction they are moving in. This will happen as soon as the user makes contact with a shadow after turning around. If the user turns around four times in quick succession (or at all) all four Shades will appear and surround them. Game over.
LEVEL ONE
This level will be made up of massive sandstone walls with dark door frames that leak shadow set into them.
The first level is not made to be particularly challenging. It’s main purpose is to teach new users the basic mechanics and ideas that can be found in the game and it is quite an easy level to speed run if the user knows what they are doing.
The level starts off with the user waking up in a dark, empty room, as per the CreepyPasta. The room gets darker and the user will be killed if they do not leave. From here they will find themselves in a narrow corridor that leads to the maze itself. They will see a glyph carved into the wall in front of them that will introduce one of the basic ideas behind the maze in a very vague / cryptic manner. The user will then pass by a spot where a non-aggressive shade stands on the top of the wall in front of them. After passing this first shade the user will be able to walk down the ramp into the first level. These Shades can only be aggroed by running on the walls. They will always be in the same places, but will not always be visible. This will build suspense. They will be the main obstacle to beat when speed running the level by bypassing the ramps by leaping off of a ledge and jumping onto the walls beneath. The walls on the lower level of the maze will be low enough to jump off of without killing yourself. There will be eight Shades on both the top and on the bottom areas of this level.
LEVEL TWO
The second level will look like a dungeon made of dark, rough stone, and cells will line the walls. There will also be items like chains hanging from the ceiling and statues of childrens toys lying around to add to the levels ambiance.
The second level is more challenging than the first as it is more puzzle based. There are four Shades in the maze and there is far less light than before, so it will be more difficult to evade them. Two of these Shades will be close to the entrance, but locked in cells for 40 seconds after the user enters the maze. These Shades will circle around behind the user when released and will encircle them and cut off the users ability to retreat. There will be some torchlight that the user can use to hide from the Shades for a couple of seconds to try and get around them. This would best be done by walking in a single direction, dipping into torchlight and stopping, waiting for the Shades to approach your current location and then ducking off into an adjoining passage to get around them.
To succeed in this level the user will need to make use of the “catacomb” mechanic to get into cells and move them from place to place to make it to the end of the maze. This mechanic makes use of various cells scattered around the map. Each cell will have a number carved into it and a lever on one of it’s walls. When the lever is pulled, the cell will descend into the ground like an elevator and will travel through a dark tunnel until it ascends in a new location. Each cell will travel to the spot that the cell one number higher than it previously occupied. The downside to doing this is that every time the cells are shuffled the Shades will get faster. With clever use of these cells and knowledge of how the map works gained by exploring the user should be able to clear this level fairly easily. It should however take them quite a while to figure out these mechanics.
LEVEL THREE
The third level will be modelled after a cramped broken down maintenance tunnel system. Lots of rust, grime and water. This will be the most complicated and most scary layer. There will be a lot of strange sounds, as if the tunnels are shifting under the weight of the labyrinth above them.
The third level is the most difficult level and is based around waiting and strategy. There are four Shades in this maze, positioned in a way that makes finding a way straight through them almost impossible. The user will need to make use of the generators and safe rooms in order to beat the level. There are four generator rooms in the maze. Each generator that is turned on will boost the brightness of the generator lights, slowing the Shades down. Additionally turning on generators will unlock access to safe rooms around the map. These rooms will allow the user to close themselves off from the monsters in the maze. There will be a light and a radar in the room. The radar will show the approximate location of the Shades in the area, other generator rooms, and the general direction of the objective. The Shades will target active generators while the user is hidden from their sight in the safe room and the user can take advantage of this by waiting for them to pass by and then jumping out of the room to make a dash for the objective or another generator. While the user is in a safe room the Shades will not start vigorously hunting down the user after 40 seconds of being out of the shadows. If the Shades destroy all the active generators while the user is in a safe room the lights will go out and the shadows will consume the user. The lights will grow brighter proportionally to the number of active generators / generator rooms. Activating two or more rooms will give the users a very good chance of winning.
Upon completing this level the user will find a necklace belonging to the protagonists daughter in the final room. Upon finding this necklace a cinematic will play where the protagonist wakes up in hospital and sees a shade wearing his daughters necklace loom over him and chuckle before he drifts back off to sleep. The end credits will roll here.
USER TESTING
The initial user testing solution for testing the levels was to describe the surroundings to the users and give them the options for what they could do, in a similar way to how DND and other role playing games are played. This was however far too time consuming and did not showcase how users actually interacted with the mazes. This led to the creation of a low fidelity maze game for each maze, with no Shades and with coloured blocks acting as place holders for important features like the exit, moving cells and safe rooms. The users were not told that there were no monsters in the mazes.
USER TESTING LVL 1
The users attacked this challenge in quite a variety of ways. Two went right and four went left at the first crossroads. Two tried jumping over the ledges to get to the bottom level and the other four went all the way to the ramps. Yellow and pink were the only ones to get lost in this level, as they got disoriented when they entered the lower level. This level was generally quite easy and the users did not struggle with it much.
USER TESTING LVL 2
For some reason, no one except for purple went right at the first fork in this maze. Users often would stop, look in that direction and then go the other way. It may have something to do with how that passageway was lit. Cyan and purple both got quite lost and ended up going around in circles. They would have died for sure. Green and yellow also began to doubt themselves and turned around a lot. This would have pulled the shades in closer with every turn and would definitely have resulted in these users deaths. This maze is definitely harder than the first one. Almost all of the users took fairly straight routes through the maze. To be fair they did not have access to the moving cells, which somewhat limited their mobility.
USER TESTING LVL 3
Interestingly four out of the six users took a right at the first fork of this maze. These four had quite a hard time finding the objective, as this area of the map was quite complicated, with the exceptions of cyan and red. Green and yellow both took fairly straightforward, but roundabout routes that were considerably safer than the ones on the right. This level was potentially easier to navigate than level two, but once the creatures and mechanics are added in I believe that it will still be the most difficult level.
CONCEPT ART USER TESTING
The LVL 1 concept art was selected as the artwork which best represented the game by four out of the six users tested.
All users were easily able to identify which artwork fit with each level.
LOGO DESIGN
The final design made use of "Atonement" as the name of the game as the word has biblical connotations which fit well with the theme of the game. The second logo was chosen as it flowed much better than the first and fit better with the games aesthetic.
Below are three different versions of the final logo. The one on the left was made uncomfortable to look at, as guilt is not something easily acknowledged and is not something that can easily be ignored either. The main issue with this iteration was that the distortion of the text reduced it's legibility. The logo in the middle makes use of shadowy figures that have been overlaid over the text, many of which have been hidden in the sketchy areas at the bottom of the text. The closer the viewer looks, the more silhouettes they will see. This creates an unsettling effect. The third iteration made use of texture to try and make the logo more visually interesting. It ended up being too busy and the middle logo was selected as the final logo for the game.
FINAL LEVEL DESIGN POSTERS
