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[MadWatch]

Hello TIG.

My artist and I are working on designing the enemies for our game. We're going for a nightmarish oneiric ambiance. We want the enemies to be somewhat creepy and disturbing, but we're having trouble coming up with a good design.

Here is our first try

Sure they look threatening, but not that much disturbing 

So dear TIG community, would you mind telling me what kind of creatures populate your nightmares ? Anything we could use as inspiration (things coming from games, movies or just from your imagination) would be of great help to us.

Just for the record, here are some mockups showing the rest of the game




Thanks.

[moi]

I like the robots, I think ther is some unexploited robot-horror theme waiting somewhere.
As for making them disturbing, it can be done with the situations you put them in, and giving them little cutscene where for example the player can witness them doing sthg or sthg

[rek]

Movement can make something normal very disturbing, if the movement doesn't match what we expect. It tickles our sense of Uncanny Valley, because it's easily mistaken for illness. A humanoid dragging itself across the ground by its arms, for example, is more disturbing that a humanoid walking. A slow, laboured walk, a significant limp or lurching, or obvious improvisation (such as the arm-drag).

The opposite tact can also work: something that moves "unnaturally", like a slinking puma gliding through the grass, or the way bats and pterodactyls walk on their wrists.

Making body parts disproportionate, asymmetrical, deformed, or missing entirely, can help too. You already have a few here lacking obvious eyes, so that's good, but the rest of their bodies are easily understood (except the third robot).

It's all about doing the unexpected.

Take inspiration from nature too. Here are two leopard slugs having sex by hanging upside down and wrapping their penises into a blue ball:

Would you want to come across two of your worm monsters doing that?

[ANtY]

Wow, this game just looks too amazing!

@ontopic: hmm, I'm not a fan of horrors but in a game I'd fear a creature that follows us slowly and doesn't attack atm but you never know if and when it will, and you can't outrun it for a long distance.

[Miko Galvez]

Wow, this game just looks too amazing!

@ontopic: hmm, I'm not a fan of horrors but in a game I'd fear a creature that follows us slowly and doesn't attack atm but you never know if and when it will, and you can't outrun it for a long distance.

I've heard this before and I think it came from you too. Am I right?

Anyway, I don't like your steam-robots but those aliens are awesome. If you want awesome enemies, frankenstein some animals. Place bird heads on bear bodies or stuff like that. That's what you usually see in modern games right?

[ANtY]

I'm 100% sure I never wrote anything on this topic before.

[rek]

Here's another idea: parasitism. One creature clearly in control of another, in a gross way.

Like this parasite that eats fish tongues and takes its place:

[retrohelix]

Siphonophorae are pretty inspiring for weirdness:

[Theophilus]

Cryptids are pretty weird. A lot of them have sketches already, so it's like pre-made concept art!

[Bandages]

I don't have "nightmares" in the sense that I have bad dreams that scare me, but I certainly have terrible demons in a lot of my dreams.

Probably my favorites are lumbering, slow, bears made of moss that leave trails of murky water behind them. They have black spaces where their eyes should be, and they kill all your friends by breaking their minds.

Also, they grant wishes.

Biology is also fun. My blog sporesandstuff.tumblr.com has a few parasites and animals that are freaky if you wanna sift through. I like the designs of your monsters already, though

[Sir Raptor]

As far as your own monsters, I think your first one nailed the disturbing look pretty well. Lots of legs = super disturbing.

I think what's keeping the other ones from reaching the same potential is that they look a bit too natural. Your monsters have an appearance that seems normal and familiar to existing animals. You want to subvert that. For that, I have two suggestions:
1. Decay. What people find scary about zombies is the image of the decomposed body walking. Get those things hollow. Make their bones visible. I hate to use a pony for reference, but would she be as disturbing without the holes in her body?
2. Insects. Nobody likes em. They're weird. Look at some weird insects, and base some models on that.

[xrabohrok]

Here is the last set of things to freak me out.
They're all good, just choose some and run with it.

I think these stories work because of the things left unsaid.  Those stories don't come with any explanations or nice summaries at the end, you know what the character knows.  Working that into monster design, your monsters could suggest something worse is going on over what you see.  An actual example would be this the abstract daddy from Silent Hill 2.  The first glance comes with it's own shock and horror from aesthetics alone, but then unsettling questions creep in.  Was he always like that? Did someone DO this to him? Is that his skin? If it isn't, than whose?  Why is he attacking me? How does he see me?!

Your silhouette style actually is a step in this direction, but right now it looks more of the happy(er) Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.  That game is so dark, it's goofy.

[C.D Buckmaster]

I believe rek has the right idea about using the uncanny valley, you don't need to necessarily make them humanoid, but the more human qualities you add to them, the greater the sense of "wrongness" that they cause will be.

[MadWatch]

Thank you all for your ideas 

We're not trying to make an horror game, neither a scary game, we're only trying to make it weird. I think xrabohrok and Buckmaster got the right idea. We will try to mix human features with animal/insect bodies and see where it leads us.

Here are some more recent attempts.

[C.D Buckmaster]

I love how twisted those enemies look in the first image, I can't wait to see an animated version.

[Bandages]

I really love the latest batch of monsters

I think maybe something sad could also serve to be kind of disurbing/weird? Like maybe a person who looks like one of those monsters but is clearly in a lot of pain or just looks like it. IDK. It's harder to kill something that seems like it has humanity and is suffering

[Miko Galvez]

The newest ones are really nice. I never really liked the robot ones. But please don't make them weird for the sake of being weird. It has to come from somewhere, like the environment demanding them to adapt to what they are or something.

[Nektonico]

Here is the last set of things to freak me out.
They're all good, just choose some and run with it.

Do you have any idea how much time i wasted reading those manga because of your link?
Well, do you?
And i do agree, the things left unsaid are where true horror lies, in that which is unexplained, unexplainable, unknowable.

[Bandages]

you didn't count to 10

[MadWatch]

But please don't make them weird for the sake of being weird. It has to come from somewhere, like the environment demanding them to adapt to what they are or something.

I see what you mean. Discussing the story of the game is behind the scope of this thread but, to over summarize it, everything is happening into somebody's mind. Since this is a mind world there isn't any limit to what we can imagine. And that's what makes it hard to come up with good designs.