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[{VeTeR}]

The Pure Evil Lasts For Ever
The Crypt - A survival horror game

This is ambitionus project making a horror game bying as much realistic as we can achieve.
We focus on interesting story line wchich we have finished (100% screenplay) and now we are updating the core events to make it more clear, and adding some horror events. Focusing on story doesn’t mean that game is walk simulator, we want full immersion, and we want player to be scared as hell but in same time interested in future events.

Our inspirations are Outlast, SOMA, and few other horror games.

The story is set in current times. The character is a 25 year old girl with some story - to be explained later. She also has some brain anomailes which appear by hallucinations - brain releases substances casing it when she is in stress. She has some dark secred that leads her to very old crypt. Everything seems to be normal, and then all the fun starts… and did I mention that the Pure Evil Lasts For Ever?

We are group of three pro gamedevs with AAA experience, creating a small studio The Dark Matter:

• KleeB - Concept Artist and the designer of our evil characters.
• Bart-kovsky - Enviroment Artist, brain behind terryfing locations.
• {VeTeR} - Game and Level designer, I’m responsible for the story and to keep everything working.

[joe_eyemobi]

Hi there this sounds interesting, it will be great to hear more specifics on the gameplay.
What will make this game different from anything else on the market?

[mgrilec2]

The brain anomalies reminds me of Malkavians from Vampire the Masquerade, I loved just listening to their mad voices.

[{VeTeR}]

Thanks for your posts joe_eyemobi, mgrilec2

Hi there this sounds interesting, it will be great to hear more specifics on the gameplay.
What will make this game different from anything else on the market?

For sure it has elements common for survival horror games - but we design in a way that every action and mechanic is explained by the story (no weird notes or objects triggering abra-cadabra actions). The game is set in undergrounds of Mayan/Mesopotamian (we are inspired by both cultures and our civilisation is a mix of them) pyramids and ancient city. Also the brain anomalies are not only used for horror/scary stuff but also allow character to absorb skills and create a time link with "Them" as we call ancient shamans.

The brain anomalies reminds me of Malkavians from Vampire the Masquerade, I loved just listening to their mad voices.

We have few distorted voices anomalies in screenplay to implement

[{VeTeR}]

We changed our sprint from time based to milestone based.
Milestones are small - like "draft of cemetery location" next one is "get and implement feedback for cemetery". It's because we didn't have enough time to finish our tasks in two weeks. This change helps us to focus on a subject and don;t be stressed it;s past deadline. We know that we are doing our best, and scrum should be elastic tool right?

Working on screenplay. Feedbacking and tweaking
We worked on screenplay in google docs. First version was only for our team. I had edditing rights as moderator, rest had commenting rights. We commented - ideas to add, tweaks, references, wtf moments etc.
The awesome things is schema menu in google docs, which allowed as to jump in parts of game.



Next version was shared with selected group of people: gamedevs, writers, players. We got large amout of comments about unclear parts of the story, ideas, poor moments, wow moments(!) etc.
We worked for a month to redesign the story using recieved comments to end up with the final version of the screenplay.

Screenplay was divided into locations / mechanics / enemies / gamedesign elements and we started to work!

Hacking and Planning
To track out progress of tasks and project we used HacknPlan. Its great app that have more awesome functionality every update!



Location cemetery
We started to work with easy location for a start - cemetery. Got tons of references on pinterest - best refs were selected and gathered into one slide.



I started with designing the cemetery area in Unreal 4 whiteboxing the cemetary location.




After designing ‘critical’ path I started to add placeholder meshes to get cementery feling.
Here are shoots with references.

































After I finished the location I made build and gave it to the team to get feedback.
Good idea for a feedback was creating a document where everyone can place a screenshoot and add comment to it (it also removes duplicationg comments and shoots because you see what someone already posted).
We have few problems with understanding what some whitebox elements are :D like here:



But after adding some references for the idea everything was cleared out.
Also we had some awesome actions when after looking at location our CA had awesome ideas to merge some locations:




What were our thoughts after making the firs location and feedbacking it (some were removed here)?

• Remove 40% of the cementery - it’s to long. Better will be to create more intence and well made location.
• RDetailed (using placeholder meshes) whiteboxing gives better feeling than only boxed space. Every place on the drafts needs to have evenly placed meshes to remove feeling of emptyness and mislead ( what I am looking at? )
• References!
• RNeed concepts for unique statues and location with obelysk in church ruins

Thanks for reading!

[{VeTeR}]

Hi!

Here is some update from our osom concept artist KleeB.

Reserch for one of enemies:







And concept for location:

[joe_eyemobi]

Cool! Really dig the art direction and your concepts - this has made the project a lot more interesting 

Will the game be more of a walking sim (e.g. layers of fear) or perhaps a mostly story-driven survival horror (e.g. SOMA, Amnesia)?

[{VeTeR}]

Thanks!

Cool! Really dig the art direction and your concepts - this has made the project a lot more interesting 

Will the game be more of a walking sim (e.g. layers of fear) or perhaps a mostly story-driven survival horror (e.g. SOMA, Amnesia)?

We don't want to make a walking sim... that's evil.

SOMA is our huge inspiration for the interesting story, design and consequence. Amnesia also.
And Outlast is inspiring us for gore, but I'm sure we can do more

[joe_eyemobi]

Thanks!

Cool! Really dig the art direction and your concepts - this has made the project a lot more interesting 

Will the game be more of a walking sim (e.g. layers of fear) or perhaps a mostly story-driven survival horror (e.g. SOMA, Amnesia)?

We don't want to make a walking sim... that's evil.

SOMA is our huge inspiration for the interesting story, design and consequence. Amnesia also.
And Outlast is inspiring us for gore, but I'm sure we can do more

Fantastic!  I love horror, but I kind of hate walking sims.  I love the feeling of being in danger and uncomfortable like in Outlast/Amnesia/SOMA