Quote:Original post by bzroom
Ever played bioshock?

• No explicit scare until well until the mid-movie. While you can get a jump factor when things burst through windows or sprint out of the dark, the actual fear comes from the foreboding of such things. As such, it's often much important to provide subtle hints (initially dismissed as coincidences) that something bad is coming:
  
  • Creaks on the floor above (with specks dust falling from the ceiling).
    
  • Statues or deer heads which, when you look at them, seem to "move back into place" as if they had been looking at you.
    
  • Seeing something run around a corner and disappear.
    
  • Furniture moving around when you turn your back.
    
  • You can see yourself in mirrors. However, your image slowly alters the more you look at yourself (see Evanescence, "Going Under").
    
  • Walls that bleed 'Hello' (the writing disappears as soon as the lamp overhead flickers).
    
  • Fog is scarier than darkness: light pierces darkness, but it doesn't allow you to see through fog.
    
  • Audible but unintelligible whispers. Moaning is so braaains cliché. Also, no sound in the entire game should ever come from a fixed spot: they should move around or appear to come from all directions.


• Do not allow clear, understandable enemies. Blasting demon heads away with your trusty shotgun might get you jumpy, but not truly scared, because you tend to learn what those demons do and how you can kill them. On the other hand, if the entire mansion you are in is out to get you, you will have much more trouble predicting what it can or cannot do:
  
  • Breaking the laws of physics or sanity, such as walking on the ceiling or the walls, or suddenly wearing new clothes (the light goes out and on, and now you're wearing a bridal dress, for a female character).
    
  • Breaking elementary euclidean geometry laws, such as a door leading from a basement room to the attic without any stairs or, worse, a door leading from a room into itself (infinite hall of mirrors). See also infinite corridors, doors which lead to random locations, doors which are "bricked out" or disappear when you cross them, starwells from which the stairs disappear and become ten times deeper so you can't jump back down...
    
  • Quasi-intelligent environment: a room with a chair, a table and a bottle of brandy. When you turn your back to the table and chair, they might move to appear right behind you. Or perhaps a noose drops down from the ceiling right in front of your head. Or a fireplace lights up when you get close.
    
  • Invisible 'ghosts', which are only hinted at by their physicical interaction with the world: flying knives, bumps under the carpet, invisible skeletons which only materialize in the moonlight, an incredible force which smashes furniture and walls and seems to be coming at you...
    
  • Seemingly random appearances: no way to predict them (even when reloading save-games)


• Allow pauses. This lets the player build a feeling of apprehension and mental rules associating 'coincidences' with dangers appearing. Sprinkle with coincidences that are not followed by dangers (normal coincidences) and let the player panic every time one of these occurs, looking for other hints of danger appearing. Let the danger appearance sometimes linger and slowly build up (you get coincidences, slow whispers, wait for a minute and then something appears), and sometimes burst (lights dim, voices increase from whispers to shouts telling you to run as knives and swords and lances start flying at you from outside your FOV) to be even more destabilizing.
  
• Avoid clichés: clichés are well-known and thus will not scare people who are familiar with them. Decaying humanoids limping around and moaning? Zombies! Slow, stupid, easy to outrun. Semi-transparent human-shaped glowing silhouette? Ghosts! They move through matter, they fly, they fear holy water. Blood dripping from a silhouette on the ceiling (only lit by the lightning flashes outside)? No idea! Actually a quicksand effect when you step in the blood puddle (which reaches out at you, only you're too busy looking at the celing to notice it). Skittering masses just outside the areas lit by your candles? No idea! Actually just a cheap trick with no actual danger.
  
• Inherent limitations of your human form. You have no shotgun. You have weak legs and breathing difficulties. You have to find a place to sleep.
  
• Do not repeat yourself. If any of the effects you use becomes repetitive, immersion is broken. The same goes if the player figures out the rules for the game doing something. Have the game remember which effects were used and which weren't, and only use these effects when you actually need to scare the player. Ideally, you'd only use each effect once, perhaps two or three times for small and difficult to notice effects.