Can "nothing" be scary? {Exploration demo, need help]

I'm using Max 2009. Baking the textures has both pros and cons. On the plus side, you wouldn't need to deal with all that light rendering. I don't know how well your engine would deal with all those shadows anyway.

On the down side, baked textures means you can't have moving lights -- no light bulbs swinging on strings, no headlights moving past a window, no flashlight effects. Also, I don't know how other lights and shadows would affect it -- would objects that ARE separate from the world (animated or otherwise) be able to cast shadows on surfaces with baked textures, and how would those two shadows combine?

Baked textures may turn out to be just the right thing for this game -- we're not making Crysis here. But you need to experiment with some of this first, to see if there are any limitations we may have to take into consideration when designing.

Without other characters, goals or a real story, the environment really becomes the main element, so we need to be sure of what we can and can't do before we go building stuff. No sense building a room where the creepiness is dependent on some object moving past on open window, casting a shadow across the wall, or a flickering/swinging light (or one that goes out). Best nail all this down before the individual rooms get built (I'm goign to be sketching up a scale 2d top down city soon, then i can do a quick build for all the buildings as solid or hollow boxes. That will give us a good idea for scale before all the individual rooms (and their place in the gameplay) take shape