I was reminded of something from my childhood recently, while listening to the Something Rotten podcast, regarding the games Silent Hill 2 and Anatomy. In these, Jacob Geller describes his persistent fear of the dark, of being in his own home and fearful to turn out the lights, lest something be lurking within. It reminded me of a period in my teen years where I experienced the same thing, actually brought on by another survival horror videogame, Parasite Eve 2. For some reason I found the monsters in that game uniquely disturbing in a way most others were not, and even in my relatively small and inescapably lit home, felt a persistent nagging threat that there would be a Chaser down there waiting for me in the darkness if I dared venture to the kitchen at night (what a queer timeline that, as an oblivious trans teen, it was already a monster called a "Chaser" that felt most threatening to me).
It was this sense of foreboding in moving around a familiar space in unfamiliar circumstances that I wanted to recreate through Haunted House, the 8th game in my still ongoing "Surviving The Future" project. While you can use a space to evoke discomfort or unease (or sometimes even comfort) while lit, it is much easier to allow the imagination to run amok and create a sense of tension and dread when plunged into darkness. To some extent I wished to recapture that fear of moving ahead in darkness that I was familiar with from my youth, to be compelled to move downstairs but fearful to do so. I don't know to what extent I accomplished this, but we'll discuss the process regardless.
Haunted House is one of these projects that was a real struggle to drag beyond the conceptual stage. I entered the production week with literally no ideas ahead of time, and brainstormed a substantial list of potential themes, including
I didn't have any idea about mechanics at this stage either, just a bunch of H-Words, so I then spent a bunch of time doing some free drawing type exercises, trying to get a grip on what this might be about. I like to do this when I'm having trouble coming up with ideas, sometimes it's easier to think things through visually so doing a bunch of quick drawings helps with that. The results pointed me toward the "Haunted House" concept, so we went with that. How do you translate that into a 2 page game document? What I felt most drawn to do was make a sort of "Choose Your own Adventure" or Gamebook style game, but how can you do that with such limited space? And how to make it more than just a flow-chart with some narrative boxes?
While thinking of how we could make this format work in such a small form factor, we hit upon the idea of getting the player to explore an actual physical space, and use the game to provide a sort of narrative that recontextualises their experience. Yes, this is a normal house in the day, but right now it's something else, and you're in this role, and it's spooky!
How to make that actually work? Well, that could be figured out later. For now it was time to come up with loads of experimental mechanics that we probably wouldn't be able to use, see below quote from the development notes:
- Can we have stats and RPG mechanics we track? Or should we do this purely through narrative?
- Decrypt script? Would be annoying to do on the fly, but maybe it can be used just for the endings, or to hide secrets in the document.
- Running taps to solve problems or as a way to reset a mistake? Like you're intended to move quietly, and if you make too much noise you have to go run a tap for 10 seconds to set the house back to standby mode.
- I want it to feel like the house is alive and it has consumed its inhabitants, like everything is alive with un-life.
- What about using a torch as part of the darkness mechanic? And you have to shine it on certain things to advance the story, or it advances in different ways based on what specific things you're able to spot in your home in the dark.
- Count x objects (electronic devices, light bulbs, plug sockets/outlets, glass objects, wall hangings) in order to advance down certain paths. Uncover different secrets based on the route you take through your own home.
- It's a smart house because it developed enough intelligence to consume its owner.
I didn't use most of these. I don't use a lot of what we come up with. It lives in loads of text documents in case we need it later, but as noted previously I think it's important to be able to put ideas aside if they're not serving you. You can always revisit them later, maybe they'll be even better in a new context. You don't have to kill your darlings, but you might want to put them to sleep for a while.
After taking a break for a couple of days (I try to work on projects in 2 hour bursts, a thing that becomes progressively more difficult as my calendar fills up) I came back to it and devised a way of guiding the player through via a flow chart with some context sensitive objectives, and links to Codewords on the 2nd page, so they could get the information and instructions that would be extremely annoying to fit into the flow-chart structure. I felt that the Codeword structure would make it easier to avoid them just reading the whole thing, and encourage quickly scanning for the correct word and then reading just that bit. The Codeword Blocks contain narrative content, instructions, and modifiers to the game flow.
One of the first potential routes for example, contains the following Codeblock:
CODEWORD HYDRO Your torch glints across something as you scan your surroundings, but when you take another look there's nothing there. Shake your head and reassure yourself all is well. The moon enjoys mischief.
- CURRENT OBJECTIVE: FIND A REFLECTIVE SURFACE YOU CAN SEE YOUR FACE IN. DO NOT LEAVE THIS LEVEL UNTIL YOU HAVE DONE SO.
You may now move to the next room on this floor
Ultimately your goal for the game is to explore according to the instructions, working your way downstairs, descending into the lower areas as things become spookier over time. Eventually you have an ending, which is based on how long it's taken you to complete your objectives. There's a good ending and a bad ending. The game is played under cover of darkness, all lights turned out, with only a flashlight to aid your vision. It would be much harder for this to create atmosphere in the day, and as noted above, I want to recapture that childhood fear of exploring an unlit home, how the familiar and comforting can become alien and hostile in a fresh context.
It's a horror game, so the instructions are supposed to be kind of weird and spooky. While the expedition through the house is framed as a scientifically driven work, and you are provided reassurance within the instructions, the wording of the reassurance and the strangeness of the objectives is all built to suggest there's something wrong with this space, some kind of dread emanating from deep below. The instructions are broadly based on good luck charms and rituals, to contrast with the practical language and framing of the experience. As though your material equipment, the physical defences and senses you rely on, they're not enough.
This game, perhaps too subtly, is about exploration of a house haunted by what has been done there. There are no ghosts, save memories and echoes of what happened to the people. You descend further through the house with the intention of arriving at the thematic "basement", and uncovering what is really here- the residents, preserved in suspended animation, waiting out the end of the world. It is strongly suggested that something in this arrangement has gone awry.
Cryonics is kind of a creepy topic when you think about it for even a minute. Of course, the big selling point is that whoever is running it can keep your body safe for revival at an unspecified future date. You could wait out disaster, hit pause on a terminal illness, and wait until conditions improve to the extent that someone in the future can save your bacon. What they don't like to talk about is the fact that you've already died by the time they get a hold of your body, and not only does nobody actually know how to revive you yet, there's no indication it will ever be possible. It's just a rapid corpse cooling service at the moment, then you get stored (if you're lucky) in a nice chamber for an indefinite period. Or at least as long as the money lasts.
You can't even get frozen in advance of your death, because whoever carried that out would technically be killing you, which in a legal sense is usually frowned upon. Despite all this, there are plenty of billionaires convinced that cryonics is a valid form of life preservation, allowing them to cheat death and come back for another go, like the monstrously wealthy Tessier-Ashpool family of Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy, with the particularly resonant quote from Count Zero (1986):
"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."
Take Peter Thiel, the surveillance capitalist murder merchant and supporter of fascism, who seems convinced that nobody has ever tried life extension before, and is insistent on freezing himself after death just in case he can get a late rez, as if anybody would ever want him back. Or (alleged) rapist and sex trafficker Robert Miller, who has invested heavily into cryonics as a way of saving himself from his currently failing health, despite the fact that he could still be tried for his many (alleged) crimes in future if anyone did manage to revive him. Or if he somehow managed to avoid someone "accidentally" unplugging his freezer for several decades.
To provide some minor spoilers, the whole series is really about solutions that don't work. Personally I have very little faith in cryonics ever being gifted a breakthrough in the adjacent medical fields that will make it viable. And the fact that it doesn't work - that all subjected to it are if not simply dead, locked in some eternally haunted stasis until someone intervenes - is where I feel the horror of the subject comes from. It's what's haunting this house. An entire family of human popsicles in the basement. Everything they could have been before deciding to hide away down here. Lost in limbo, awaiting a good future that isn't coming.
Jim- With endless love, we left you sleeping. Now we're sleeping with you. Don't wake up. _X _
Enough doom and gloom, I try and include stuff about my production process in these alongside the design ideas and real world politics. In every one of these I've made pretty heavy use of stock photography, edited and remixed to fit the persistent aesthetics of the project, and to give additional flavour to each of the games. I get all of these from pexels, they're all free to use for these purposes without attribution or anything, so long as you don't just redistribute without modification. I modify the shit out of all of them, so that's me good there. I might produce an attributions list at some point, because they have been very helpful and the photographers do deserve credit for their work, but that's a big fiddly job and I currently have all on just making the games, so it'll have to wait.
The point in the process at which I start to source these varies from game to game. Sometimes it's the first thing I do, after coming up with the theme and some basic ideas, and looking through all these photos helps inform what I want to make the rest of the game be like. Other times it's quite late in the production process, when I'm actually putting the document together and need to work on formatting and artwork. Yet other times it's just a relatively easy job when the writing component becomes too difficult to work on, and I can procrastinate that while still doing something that contributes to the rest of the work.
Once I have my images, I do basically the same thing to all of them, with only occasional exceptions for games that demand a mild shift in aesthetic.
That's literally it. I do basically the same thing for every image I use in my projects. Odd times I'll mess with the colour or use a different distortion, but this is the general process. Look how easy it is, and they're very effective!
Before I started on this series in earnest, I looked at the options for using AI generated images via craiyon or something similar. Honestly though, they were all crap, I had to wait around for it, and none of them had the sort of vibe I really wanted. Now, having gotten more seriously into making art, I would never give it a second thought, but I think it's worth pointing out that a lot of what people think they need AI art for could be solved with just stock photography and a little creativity. Develop your own aesthetic instead of using this weird dead plagiarised synthetic crap. You'll learn nothing from plugging AI prompts into a machine in order to generate "content". You will get plenty of positive experience from learning how to select, repurpose, and remix freely distributed material into something new and make it your own.
That's about it for Haunted House. I like the game and I'm happier with it than I am with some of these projects, plus it gave me an opportunity to go on an a tangent about cryonics for several hundred words! I like horror games and have a couple of other projects outside of the AlphabetSuperset that build on what I was trying here, but we'll have to get to that later.
At least this one doesn't require an impassioned call to action around the climate crisis. If billionaire bastards want to freeze their heads then more power to them, and the sooner they all do it the better. The next game is Instant Replay, a game about losing, acquiring knowledge of the future, and then winning. I can't stop making games about time travel and predicting the future, sorry, something happened to me and this is how my brain works now.
See you there.
(ORIGINALLY POSTED 21/07/2024)