The goal for the first room was to create a sense of safety and comfort, while still using limited lighting from a legitimate source within the scene. I intended for something to move past the window and scare the player however due to the lack of time I never got round to implementing this idea. Once you exit the first room and enter the first corridor I wanted it to be initially completely dark so that the lights could come on one at a time, creating an effect that almost draws in the player to the final doorway.
I reviewed my research into colour theory and found that the colours yellow and green would work the best within the first room and the corridor as the yellow represents warning and the green symbolises sickness and evil. I turned these notes and concepts into a digital landscape that you could freely explore as seen below:
The component that affected the scene the most was the Post Processing Volume the effectively creates filters over the digital camera so that you can customise the scene to look however you want. Below is a comparison on how the scene would look with and without these filters:
Here are the setting I used within the Post Processing Component:
Exposure Comp: -0.6
Min and Max Brightness: 1
Low Percent: 59
High percent: 87
Chromatic Aberation:
Intensity: 5
Start Offset: 0.6
Image Effects
Vignette: 0.3
Grain Jitter: 0.7
Grain Intensity: 0.26
Colour Grading LUT: 1
Copper -
Ambient Occlusion:
Intensity: 0.5
Radius: 500
The grain effect was inspired by the game Outlast in which the hand help camera used by the player makes the scene look fuzzy and distorted as seen here:
The chromatic Aberation also seen at the edges of my game was used to continue this distorted and natural aesthetic.
After working on the visuals of the scene I began to consider how else I could immerse the player, I began to watch different character animation within other horror games. One of the most scary and immersive horror games I have played is Outlast,the entire game is from the characters perspective during all of the animations. It produced this highly dynamic feeling to the movement and I wanted to replication something like that within my own game if I had the time.
The first interactive element I added to the game was the ability to open one of the doors, I put extra consideration into this as I wanted to make this feel natural and not just have the door open by itself. I created an animation montage which allowed the player to play an animation of my choice whenever I want to trigger the event, so when the player is within the range of the door and pressed 'E' on their keyboard the player will start an animation which is the action of them opening the door and stepping through it from the first person camera.
This is the scripting I had to make to allow the door to reference the player programming and trigger the correct animation.
This was all of the programming required on the player to set the boolean variables to be true and false when the 'E' key is pressed:
The door component within the scene could then recognise that the player had pressed 'E' and would now begin the process of opening the door in time with the player animation.
After I worked on the visuals I integrated some of the audio clips I had found online into the scene allowing for some spacial sound to produce a more immersive and 3 dimensional feel. The sounds I planned to involve, included:
-Ambient Pipes
-Door creaking
-Water drips
-Lightning/Thunder
-Footsteps
-Breathing (didn't end up being used)
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