04: Brainrotting at its finest

I took a well-needed break from coding this week and discovered a new kind of suffering! Storyboarding. There is no happiness. Only pain.

Spoilers for our game ahead!

Research

This week’s work was dedicated to watching hours of streams of people screaming at jumpscares. For my Poppy Playtime monster research, I focused on the player’s reaction to the first encounter and the main, scary moment of each monster. For Huggy Wuggy, the height difference and the emergence from the dark became an iconic jumpscare of the game. This monster reaction averaged around 3.9 on the scale (my ears hurt). On top of that came the vent chase scene. It first reassured the player of safety, but only to show Huggy Wuggy was also in the vents with you and emerged traveling towards the player. This immediate follow-up chase had a lesser reaction around 3.6, because of players being on higher alert or turning too early to notice Huggy Wuggy charging at the player. 

The Mommy Long Legs hide-and-seek scene was so far the most reactive jumpscare out of the bunch, averaging at 4.3. Making it seem the player could escape and the monster jumping down onto the player unexpectedly was super effective. Then the hide-and-seek scene, which plays into the “parents counting down to zero,” completely freaks the player out with the monster appearing at any moment and with spider motifs. Despite both of these monsters not being traditionally scary monsters by itself, their cutscenes, animations, and interactions with the environment made them the most reactive monsters on the list. When creating the monster designs and storyboards, I will pay attention to the height and their unexpected entrances.

These findings inspired my concept artwork for the alienation monster cutscene. The monster will be the first boss encounter so we have the element of surprise. The player will walk down an endless brightly lit forest/jungle until they meet a condition (Still deciding) to represent Raven not seeking to deal with the issue. Once she finds the condition, the end of the forest will become a silhouette of trees. The monster will initially appear as a human silhouette onto a play structure. After the dialogue, it will transform into a much bigger monster and initiate a tutorial boss fight. The player will lose this fight and will begin a chase sequence.

The game, Omori, is more reliant on haunting and unsettling story telling than chase sequences or quick jumpscares. From the results of my research, their more environmental and story-telling jumpscares and a hit or miss when physically scaring the player, but they were extremely effective when showing the horrors of the moment. The cutscene for meeting the body dysphoria monster will be using the techniques shown here. The first appearance of this monster will be through the reflection in a mirror. It will be seen crying on Raven’s bed before appearing behind her and initiating the fight. I’ll show storyboards of these in the following weeks.

Story Planning

We finally laid out the story of chapter one will look like! We probably should have done this earlier but better now than later! I now have a list of game object will need to create for this project. I also learned that house and puzzle designs are hard ughhh. We laid out what our combat against the monsters will look like as well. At least I’m more hyped up!

Next Week

I get to experience what unpaid artists with deadlines feel like.