Planning a hybrid 1st/3rd person horror game

[Black Noise]

Although I haven't played as many survival horror titles as more hardcore fans have,
I have a love for the genre nonetheless.

For a long time, I've played with ideas for a survival horror game that mixes aspects of first person and third person gameplay with the classic fixed angles.

You play a silent protagonist in the first person and are exploring an abandoned complex once controlled by a twisted cult, with no memory of your identity or how or why you got there. As you explore the facility to try and escape, you come across discs containing security camera footage which depict the facility's history while the cult was still thriving and focuses on a few select individuals trying escape while keeping a low profile to avoid the cult's sadistic punishments.

It is during these sections you play as other characters in a third person perspective with the cameras installed in every wall and corner of the facility serving the game's fixed camera angles.

I initially thought this game up for a 3D engine but in light of recent plugins, I thought I might play with trying to achieve this kind of gameplay with the RPG Maker!

I could use the MB First Person Labyrinth Explorer for the first person sections.
I wonder if it is possible to make a plugin that gives you pixel-based movement in a first person view along with some neat headbobbing for immersions sake.

Although I've yet to find a camera plugin that might do this but, similarly to the classic Resident Evil games, during
flashback sections, the camera would be fixed to a single point and doesn't follow the player character around.
It is once you leave the edge of the screen to move to another area, you instantly switch to another camera's view in a fingersnap which builds tension as you don't know whether or not there is a hostile waiting for you around the next corner but you've just got to force yourself to go there.

 

[Basileus]

...You sure there's an RPG Maker plugin for this? I know MV uses Javascript, but what is basically a 3D environment with possible head-bobbing sounds a bit much for one of these engines. It sounds more like a Unity project really.

I guess if you want to try this in RPG Maker I'd have to ask the obvious question: Why the heck is one of the characters in first person in the first place?

There are a lot of great 3rd person horror games, so if you just want a spooky atmosphere I know it can be done even with the protagonist on screen. I guess 1st person is good for jump scares, but only bad horror games rely on jump scares. It seems like adding 1st person would only create far, far more work. I'm not really sure what your expected payoff is so maybe it'll be worth it.

It'd certainly be a lot easier if you made all of thew segments 3rd person, and any version of RPG Maker can make a good 3rd person horror game if you've got the writing chops for it.

So there real question becomes: What is supposed to make your game scary?

• If it's jump scares, then you'll want a 3D engine so you can make graphics that look scarier than the mid 90's.
• If it's the "cult's sadistic punishments" when you fail stealth or something, then you might be in trouble. All I can think of for you to do here amounts to torture scenes, and those don't work on everyone. Go too far and you risk becoming too much like torture-porn and turn off the audience completely or so over-the-top that the whole thing becomes a comedy. This would also require very good graphics and/or voice-acting to make scary and that's probably beyond what RPG Maker can realistically offer.
• If it's a tense atmosphere dripping with suspense, then it'll all come down to your writing ability and map design but should rely less of graphical/audio fidelity so you can pull this off in RPG Maker.

 

[Black Noise]

Thank you for your reply.

I am aiming for a suspenseful, atmospheric kind of horror with more reliance on psychological scares.
No jump scares!

As for the cult's punishments, they're not physical but mostly based on psychological torture such as locking someone in a dark tight closet or shaming them in public and even then I want to show as little of it as possible so players can use their imagination to fill in the blanks.

As for the first person parts. Again, you're exploring a dead facility that used to monitor its captives 24/7. You are experiencing the stories of other characters through the viewpoints of those cameras and since said cameras are offline in the present, you, the player, in the skin of the protagonist are looking through your own eyes.

Last but not least, those 3rd person sections are indeed mostly stealth-based but to tell you the truth (and this is going to be embarrassing) I don't yet know how to make this work considering that if you see the player character sneaking around, then so can the evil authorities watching through the camera feed.

This is still a work in early progress.

 

[Kes]

'Game Mechanics Design' is not for feedback on individual, specific games but for a broader discussion at the conceptual level of aspects of game play, though you can use your project as an example to get the conversation going.

If you want specific feedback I can merge this with Features Feedback.

 

[Kes]

I have waited several days for an answer, and see that you have visited the site since I posted my request. Presumably, therefore, you don't want this merged.

[mod]I am closing this.[/mod]