It's better to use too little salt than too much. (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

A new blog post, a little earlier than usual this time. I hope you'll forgive me.

In the picture, you can see Amy. Once again, this image won't appear in the finished game. It's just a little eye candy for you. Do you think Dia will forgive Amy that she stole her dress?

So, what's new on the game side? Those of you who have been following me on Patreon for a while know that I decided to end Chapter 13 with a horror section. With a proper payoff, of course. It's not just horror. There's also that moment where everything kicks off. You know the scene in Aliens where Ripley climbs into the power loader and takes on the Alien Queen? That moment when you've been cornered the whole time, then everything flips, and you finally get to show the evil what you're made of. (Great movie, by the way. Highly recommended.)

That moment is still in. But for the payoff to really land, I wanted the oppressive part before it to be properly creepy. So I asked a good friend of mine to playtest it. I put a lot of effort into making it immersive and tense. His feedback? "Dude, this is way too much. You're not making a horror game. I'd tone it down."

And I think he's right.

When I started on this section, I really wanted to do horror properly, so I did my research. One thing I can recommend is Josh Strife Hayes' video essay on horror, which uses the original Amnesia: The Dark Descent as its example. The core idea is that horror works through unease. As far as I know, Amnesia has barely any jumpscares. It does have monsters, but they aren't really trying to kill you, because the moment the player dies, all the tension is released. If you dig into the game's code, the monsters often just vanish again without ever hunting you down. It's all about the feeling that something is there. Something evil, and you don't know what it is. Your imagination will always be worse than reality. As H.P. Lovecraft put it: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

That's exactly how Amnesia works. The monsters themselves aren't all that scary, but the game punishes you for looking at them by draining your sanity. So you have monsters that don't want to kill you, and that you can't see, or rather aren't supposed to see. I found that fascinating and built something along those lines.

But instead of constantly asking myself how to pull off the best horror possible, I should have asked whether I should be doing it at all. So yeah, I'm glad I have a playtester who played through it and told me it was too much. Luckily, it didn't take much extra work, so I toned the horror way down and made it a lot more digestible. It might be a bit too tame now, but I'd rather err on that side.

Despite all that, I've made a ton of progress. The second half of Chapter 13 has a lot of animations, even more than the first half. With some video editing, I managed to pull off a bunch of things my studio setup normally can't handle, and I'm really excited to show you.

It might be less scary now, but I hope it's no less interesting. And as I announced from the start, the most intense part was always skippable, for anyone who'd rather not engage with it and just go in guns blazing.

Quick summary:

The most intense part has been toned down, and it was skippable from the start anyway.

The buildup before it is now much less intense as well. I hope it's still interesting, since we learn a lot and get to see new sides of characters we thought we already knew.

Honestly, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I can't wait to release Chapter 13!Take care of yourself and stay safe.Berki