Affecting Real-Life Sanity

**DamnNoHtml** · 07-05-2011, 10:51 PM

I've been brainstorming ways to actually make the player start to think he or she is insane without affecting in-game sanity.

The thing is, seeing a Grunt doesn't make you go "insane" it makes you pee your pants, which is completely different. Insanity makes you question what you know.

So far, the only idea I had was creating two identical rooms, except in the second room there is no entrance / exit. When you enter the first room, a script moves you to the parallel position in the other room without the door, so basically the player enters the room and when they turn around, the door they just came in is completely gone.

Any ideas?

**MrBigzy** · 07-05-2011, 10:59 PM

The better idea would be to disable and enable entities. If you use the teleport function, the player's sight will automatically straighten out, making it obvious something happened. But yea, making subtle changes to the environment is always a mind****. D:

**MrCookieh** · 07-05-2011, 11:00 PM

A good idea I had, was to create a room, with three doors. You come in
through the first one. The second door is locked, so you have to take the last one.
Let's say, you get an important item from there, and return to the big room.
Now you see, that the second door is open, and maybe some stuff broke, while
you were in the other room.

Don't know if that's really what you were asking, but this would really give me the creeps.

**Roenlond** · 07-06-2011, 10:45 AM

One important thing when creating these things: make sure that the player doesn't notice the change. If you for example play a loud crash sound and stuff is broken everywhere once you get back, the player won't be as creeped out as he was already expecting something. It is better for the player just to notice things on their own. "Was that bottle really turned over when I last was in here? I'm not sure. Why is there blood on the floor here? I don't think there was any before, but it could have been"

The insecurity is what makes it scary: if you KNOW that something happened, it just won't be as scary.

**palistov** · 07-06-2011, 12:07 PM

A door is an entity and you can try setting it in-active. Your idea sounds brilliant, and it's the kind of thing FG was aiming for with Amnesia. Keep at it and search for clever ways to get this effect, but make sure it doesn't break immersion. If you try teleporting the player, they might notice the jump.

Nevertheless, it sounds promising. Smile

**Synatic** · 07-06-2011, 12:12 PM

u should go play abduction, in chapter 3 there's that thing ur looking for, i stopped playing 5 minutes later.. :>

**DannieWest** · 07-06-2011, 10:05 PM

You could make like, you start in one room, the next room has 3 doors, first one is locked, and u gotta go left, then you're away for a while, and when u come back, the door you came from first leads to another place, while the door in front of you leads to the starting room, to mess wit their minds a lil? Smile

**MrCookieh** · 07-06-2011, 10:21 PM

another idea would be, that you get something like 'flashbacks' which shows you the room, in which you're currently running around, in his evil variation. For example at first, room is nice (flowers, nothing broken) then suddenly you get some screen effects (like flashback) and then, the whole room is filled with destroyed stuff and corpses

**DRedshot** · 07-06-2011, 10:53 PM

Im using a pretty spooky script in my custom story, its kind of like your original idea with the doors, but its with statues.

1. The player Enters a room with statues on the far wall, use lighting effects to make them subtly noticeable
2. The player looks away and the statues get a bit closer to you
3. If you are really clever (or if its even possible) make them slowly move closer to your coordinates everytime you glance away. Tongue

EDIT: its not like your original post, i just reread it Smile

**DamnNoHtml** · 07-07-2011, 04:23 AM

(07-06-2011, 10:21 PM)MrCookieh Wrote: another idea would be, that you get something like 'flashbacks' which shows you the room, in which you're currently running around, in his evil variation. For example at first, room is nice (flowers, nothing broken) then suddenly you get some screen effects (like flashback) and then, the whole room is filled with destroyed stuff and corpses

That's not really real-life sanity though. You would know that it is a simple scripted event.

(07-06-2011, 10:53 PM)DRedshot Wrote: Im using a pretty spooky script in my custom story, its kind of like your original idea with the doors, but its with statues.

1. The player Enters a room with statues on the far wall, use lighting effects to make them subtly noticeable
2. The player looks away and the statues get a bit closer to you
3. If you are really clever (or if its even possible) make them slowly move closer to your coordinates everytime you glance away.

EDIT: its not like your original post, i just reread it

This is more along the lines of what I am talking about. The statues shouldn't have any big end-scare...just move slightly closer so the player has to question himself with "...did that move or not."