Project Haunted Light 14-02-27

About two weeks ago I finished the animation for a creature in the game called a “wall monster”, or “Waller” for short. Rather early in the project we decided to give the player a candle that would be their source of light. If the candle was blown out it would become dark around the player, making it harder to navigate and avoid the enemies. At first we thought about having the light go out if the player sprinted for too long, but the idea quickly changed into having a monster that would put out the light instead. The monster, that we came to call a “Waller”, was originally supposed to be an arm and a hand attached to the wall that would reach out towards the player to put out the light. During a short discussion we thought about having the monster slap the entire candle out of the players hand, forcing the player to look for their candle before proceeding, but that was quickly changed into having the monster wave it’s arm at the player and have the light blow out by the wind of the hand, as the first idea felt like it would mostly irritate the player and would had been a lot harder to animate and code. When the light goes out the players field of view becomes a lot smaller, and the screen becomes darker, and in order to light the candle again the player will have to find matches that spawn in the corridors to light it with.

The wall monster got a few quick sketchdesign, were the focus was mainly on the arms and hands, as that had been our overall focus for the monsters in the game up until then. I made a simple sketchanimation of how the arm could move when attacking the player, and the group liked it.

However, after a meeting with one of our teachers, we began to re-think the whole arm-attached-to-wall idea. As our big monster (also known as the “Crawler”) is entirely made up of arms and hands, and will kill you instantly if it catches up to you, the player will soon associate arms and hands with instant death. Making the Waller look like an arm could confuse the player, as it won’t do any actual damage to the player. We still wanted the monster to have human-like features though, as humans are the scariest things around.  If the enemy is an animal, you know that you can outsmart it as it is just an animal, but humans learn, and are a lot harder to avoid. We’re also so very familiar with humans that anything human-like that isn’t really a human will become very uncanny to us. After another discussion we decided on having a human face attached to the wall, that would use its’ tongue to lick out the light instead.

I made a couple of quick designsketches of different faces with varying shapes and expressions, and the group immediately liked it. The idea was to have the head attached to the wall in a sideways fashion, with one cheek towards the ground and the other towards the ceiling in order to show the player more of the face instead of having it viewed from above as just a circle with a nose, as that wouldn’t be quite as scary. We all quickly decided on one of the faces, and I went on to animate it. I’ve done tongue-animations before, so it didn’t take too long, and I quite enjoy animating wrinkled faces and drool. It adds a nice effect to it.

I wish you all a great weekend, and good luck with the projects!

MPh out.