Darkness Dwells - Reflection

Darkness Dwells was the first Horror game I have worked on through my Game Development journey so far. Lucky for me I was teamed up with some awesome team mates who had found previous success in the horror genre giving us some quality experiences and developer social presence to play off. Darkness Dwells was a Five Night at Freddy’s style horror game consisting of three monsters terrorising a child before bed time. For me personally the project was a huge success as not only was I able to work in the specific field of VFX which I was desiring but the game has gained a large following with a positive reception.

In the beginning of the project the team and I spent a whole heap of time researching our branding and promotion. One of the core tenants of our market was players who loved bragging about how they played a game, especially a horror game. We termed this niche as players suffering from Bigboyism or Machismo. One of the things we wanted was players sharing their experiences with others and targeting these Macho players who loved bragging about their gaming accomplishments was a really beneficial move. To add to this we tied this into our twitter Bio asking players “Are you brave enough to find out what Dwells in the Dark.” Along with running polls about player’s preference of jump scares and how scary they liked their games, this further reinforced and confirmed the validity of our research into Bigboyism. Another part of our promotion was working localisation into the project. This was a huge eye opener for me personally as I hadn’t even attempted to do this for my other games. Utilising localisation has given us a much larger market and the ability to reach them, one team member had players from Brazil play their last horror game so adding Brazilian Portuguese language settings to the game gave us the opportunity to get that exact same streamer which not only gives us the opportunity to reach a larger audience but gives us a solid contact to continue to talk in the future. This has spurred me on to utilise this functionality in all my publicly released games in the future. With the strong social media presence and our niche located it was incredibly gratifying to see so many streamers make videos on our game which brought us the audience we were aiming for with our assumptions about Bigboyism.

As previously stated our marketing plan consisted of consistent user engagement on social media, especially the use of polls on twitter. This gave us engagement with our target audience even before we had made the game and continued to keep the hype afloat until our release. Since then our viewer base has been growing and our attempts to keep them in the loop of what changes we are making and plans we are making for the future. This has formed the base of a really strong and positive community and also provides great motivation and momentum to continue the project.

Personally the most interesting metric which we tested early in our research into our target market was trying to find out exactly what horror game players wanted in their games. Since streamers loved overreacting to and viewers loved watching jump scares in games it seemed logical to delve deeper into the metrics of people’s enjoyment of these. My major source in this research was looking at a website that broke down how many jump scares there were in all popular horror movies and time stamping when they are to find out their frequency. It was fascinating to see that the movies with the highest number of jump scares which was an average of the low 30’s the movies still retained a 4 to 5 star rating on the movie. This was clear evidence that people don’t care if there is a large number of jump scares in a short play or view time. We took this in our context to meaning that in a 5 minute demo of our game we can focus on making the jump scares really good and having the player see them multiple times.

One of the great things about playtesting Darkness Dwells was being able to tweak the games difficulty by the speed in which monsters triggered their jump scares. This lead to us realising that only giving the player three monsters to deal with made the game far too easy. This lead to us designing some more complex choices for the player to make such as adding the radio filling the dead space on the left of the players vision, when the radio is active the monsters cycle through their states at a much faster rate making a stressful environment where the player needs to react faster or make the choice to stop dealing with the monsters for enough time to shut the radio off. We also plan on integrating another monster which has already been created but not implemented on the outside window. Along with this were planning on making it so the monsters don’t have a particular spawn point but can spawn in different locations in the room to not only make play more diverse but change the way players interact with the same level in different play sessions.

Having a particular goal in mind for Darkness Dwells where I wanted to work as a VFX and Lighting Artist gave me a huge amount of drive and motivation. This lead to me holding really good work and time management practices where I was consistently updating Hack n Plan with the tasks I was working on and staying in constant communication with my team. We held both in person and meetings via Discord and Slack to keep all members on the same page and this allowed everyone and especially felt it help me know exactly what I was meant to be working on and when. I was really proud to be able to do what I am looking at specialising in on a project with my peers, although it was the first time I really had the chance to do so it absolutely was a positive experience and I learned a great deal from the project. Working together especially with lighting being such a pivotal part of the ambience in a horror game, I was forced to rebuild and change lighting multiple times. It was a fantastic way to practise and get better and I think when looking back at early screenshots the lighting got better and better over time from the practise. Overall Darkness Dwells was a huge success for the team and also me personally, I look forward to taking the marketing knowledge of assumptions and testing as well as the localisation and new found momentum in the field I am aiming towards into my upcoming projects.