作者：Kris Graft

Thomas Grip看似一个亲切友好的人，却并不是我想象中那种成天构思令人惊魂不已的恐怖电子游戏之人。

Grip是Frictional Games这家瑞典独立工作室的创意总监，其工作室主要代表作是恐怖冒险游戏《Penumbra》系列以及《失忆症：黑暗后裔》这一大作。

thomas grip在家开发恐怖电子游戏(from gamasutra)

该工作室目前正开发《Soma》（游戏邦注：预计于2015年在PC和PS 4平台发布）项目，从其预告视频所显示的内容可知，这款游戏延续了该工作室之前游戏的紧张感和恐怖感。鉴于Frictional团队如此成功的设计，我们最近与Grip交流了关于恐怖游戏设计方面的一些问题。这并不是一个决定性的最佳操作指南，只是适用于Grip本人和Frictional工作室的一些技巧。

Frictional承认“找到乐趣”并非恐怖游戏的首要考虑

设计一款恐怖游戏不同于其他题材的游戏，Grip声称其中“最大的问题在于你设计恐怖游戏时，你必须找到其他游戏所不具有的一种特殊情感。”

例如，射击或平台游戏就有一个基本的核心玩法循环——它们关注的是有赖于该循环的有效性及主观质量的“趣味”。

“而对于恐怖游戏来说，它的设计与其他所有题材截然不同，其重点在于‘游戏是否吓人？’你并不需要太操心如何让你的玩法机制更棒或更有趣，而是‘我该如何让游戏更吓人？’玩法机制几乎是一个副产品。”

“这里的基本设计技巧在于——你并不需要从故事入手，而是先从试验、原型开始，然后再将其制作成游戏。虽然恐怖游戏可能源自这个方向，但我认为这的确不是制作此类游戏的方式。你应该从自己想让游戏呈现的感觉，你想制作的恐怖类型入手。”

Frictional团队在制作《失忆症》时确定了多数基本机制，例如第一人称视角，以及基于物理的交互性。开发者和设计师由此开始创建自己的恐怖游戏。由此开始添加额外机制，以便服务于终极情感目标。

Grip承认恐怖并非设计师可以从高层理念入手，然后为传达这一理念而创造机制的唯一电子游戏题材。例如thatgamecompany的《Journey》和Minority Media的《Papo & Yo》等游戏开发者也是从一个情感目标入手创造游戏。

Grip称“高概念会决定玩家在游戏中应该采取怎么做，以及不应该怎么做。”例如，武器升级机制在Frictional恐怖游戏中看似一个很好的理念，但即便如此也可能让游戏更“有趣”，而这却会“破坏恐怖元素”。

Frictional为最大化恐怖感而迭代和测试

Frictional设计恐怖感的方法很大程度上取决于游戏设计师的直觉和经验。你不会在此看到Excel动作矩阵或者生物计量扫描器，以及过多的外部测试人员。

SOMA-awakened(from vg247.com)

Grip表示“在开发《Soma》时，我们有一个注明每个关卡基本细节的表格。”设计师规划好关卡对光照的使用，关卡要传递的情绪，敌人的密度等。在这个阶段，他们会加入或抛弃关卡。

根据这些计划开发完可玩的游戏片段之后，设计师基本上会看看自己能否沉浸其中，或者被自己的作品所吓到。

“你坐下来，在晚上一次性体验游戏的大部分内容，之后就会对它产生一种感觉 。”此时，开发团队会变成恐怖编辑——剪切、添加、移动自己在试玩过程中发现不妥的游戏元素和场景。

Frictional确保在游戏开发早期就能够为最大化恐怖感而迭代。Grip笑称“我觉得没有什么必要过早深入细节，因为等到你完工时，就会发现一切都变了。”

对Grip来说，让开发者而非外部人员来测试游戏是有原因的。例如，像《Soma》这种慢节奏型，并不专注于射击等单一机制的游戏，无法让玩家轻易给予具体反馈。恐怖游戏测试有赖于玩家潜意识中的心理活动。而要让玩家分辨并描述这种情感以便开发者优化游戏，这个过程极为困难，甚至是无法完成。

“你很难判断根据人们的反馈来判断自己究竟有多成功，”Grip解释称“涉及你该如何调整游戏的特定层面时，你必须自己玩，让自己用新玩家的视角来体会。这超级困难，你会持续犯错，但这是你进入他们思想的唯一途径。你很难要求人们来说明自己的潜意识心理。”

Frictional让玩家自己吓自己

像优秀的恐怖电影导演一样，Grip也要依靠玩家在特定情形和环境的心理模式——通常会创造一个让玩家能够天马行空地想象的不稳定空间，创造他们自己的恐惧对象。这种游戏设计方法一向很有效，甚至对Grip亦是如此。

他谈到了最近发生于《Slender:The Arrival》的例子，他在其中的恐惧心理模式是向所有的气罐开枪。他说“你正在接近这座房子，它变得越来越暗，你听到树叶沙沙的响声，完美地捕捉到了这种心理。我知道这是一款神秘人游戏，但我并不知道它始于《Gone Home》风格，什么都没有发生……我进入了一款充满神秘人元素的游戏。我将其运用于项目中的一切，例如树林中的嘎吱声——‘糟糕，他在树丛里吗？！’这里存在无限可能。”

“我觉得这种刺骨的寒意直侵我的脊梁，这是我之前从未在一款游戏中获得的感觉。我不确定自己是否能够继续玩下去，这一切都只是我在自己吓自己！”

这有赖于玩家的想象力——他们的心理模式，但这了确实带来了一个游戏设计问题：你该如何在整个游戏过程中保持这种心理模式？“它很快就会被打破，你也很难知道如何塑造，除了空无一物的环境。而这种套路很快就会过时。”Grip承认他仍然在琢磨这个问题。

Frictional坚持让游戏所有层面都具有恐怖感（这相当困难）

虽然Grip的游戏开发过程选择从一个高概念，而非创建“趣味”原型入手，但他也认为这种高概念方法可能非常费力。

在一款基于机制的游戏中，开发者理论上可以在数天内“找到趣味性”——甚至数个小时就能完成。但“找到恐怖感”却需要更冗长的时间。对于《失忆症》，Frictional不得不在开发晚期抛弃游戏的大部分内容，而这种做法无疑会令团队士气受挫（游戏邦注：在故事导向型的游戏开发中就鲜有这种情况）。

当问到Frictional是否会探索恐怖之外的题材时，Grip承认“摆脱那种状态，并从事一些有趣项目的第一周感觉很好”。当你必须执行一个高概念时，一切与游戏有关的东西都要受限于这个概念。

“你必须坚持恐怖主题，以及冒险和谜题——设计这些真是太无聊啦。”Grip笑称“故事都有要求，谜题也有要求。你得吃透这一切，让各个元素完美匹配。”

Grip称《Soma》甚至一开始就没有打算成为一款恐怖游戏。最初它的目标是成为探索意识理念的游戏。但之后恐怖元素却成为表达该理念的最佳纽带。在过去两年中，《Soma》恐怖游戏的身份得到了越来越多认同。这就好像Frictional无法摆脱这种标签一样。

尽管Grip也有一种想“在第一周找些有趣之事”的想法，但他仍然对恐怖题材的潜力情有独钟。

他表示，“我们有自己的细分市场，如果过于偏离这个轨道就很不妥了。我觉得这一领域还有很大的探索空间……如果《Soma》表现良好，我就知道自己下款游戏该怎么做了。所以我们至少还要再做一款恐怖游戏。”

“在这之后，我们可能会做一款自上而下射击游戏之类的项目。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Four ways to design for horror, from Amnesia dev Frictional Games Exclusive

By Kris Graft

For a man who conceives of video games that scare the living daylights out of me, Thomas Grip seems like a pretty affable guy.

Grip is creative director at Frictional Games, the Swedish independent game studio that developed the horror adventure games in the Penumbra series, as well as its breakout title, Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

The studio is currently at work on Soma, which, if the trailers are any indication, will crank up the intensity and fear found in the studio’s previous games. With such successful designs from the Frictional team, we recently chatted to Grip about a few aspects of horror game design. This isn’t a definitive best practices list, but these are just a few things that have worked for Grip and Frictional.

Frictional acknowledges that horror isn’t about “finding the fun” first

Designing a game for horror is unique to designing games in other genres, says Grip. “The biggest thing is that when you’re doing a horror game, you’re going for a special emotional punch that you’re not doing in other games in the same way,” he says.

A shooter or a platformer, for example, have a basic, core gameplay loop – there is a focus on “fun” which relies on the effectiveness and subjective quality of that loop.

“But a horror game, which is very different, I think, from all other genres, is about ‘Is this game scary?’ You’re not as much looking into figuring out how to make your gameplay mechanic better or more fun, but rather ‘How can I make the game scarier?’ The gameplay mechanic is almost sort of a side thing.”

“There’s a basic design tip – that you don’t start with the story, you start with experimentations, prototypes, then you make that into a game,” Grip says. “While horror games can come from that direction, that’s not really, I think, how you want to do it. You want to start with how you want the game to be, the type of horror you want to do.”

“You want to start with how you want the game to be, the type of horror you want to do.”

With Amnesia, the team at Frictional did decide on the most basic mechanics, such as the first-person perspective and physics-based interactions. The developers and designers built their horror game from there. From that point, additional mechanics were added to serve the ultimate emotional goal.

Grip acknowledges that horror isn’t the only genre in video games in which designers begin with a high-level concept, then create mechanics with the purpose of conveying that concept. Developers on games like thatgamecompany’s Journey and Minority Media’s Papo & Yo also start with an emotional goal first.

“It’s this high concept that is dictating what you should do in the game, and what you shouldn’t do [from a mechanics standpoint],” says Grip. For example, weapon upgrade mechanics might seem like a good idea in a Frictional horror game. But even though that might make the game more “fun,” says Grip, “it will destroy the horror element.”

Grip working at home, creating horrifying video games

Frictional iterates and playtests for maximum horror

The way Frictional designs for horror is very much based on the gut instinct and experience of the game’s developers. You won’t find any Excel action matrices or biometric scanners here. Or even very many external playtesters.

“For Soma, we have a sheet that just details the very basics of every level, stuff that’s going to happen there,” says Grip. The designers plan out levels’ use of light, the kind of moods that level is meant to convey, enemy density. At this stage, levels are being put in, or thrown out.

After developing playable slices of the game according to those plans, the designers basically try to see if they can be immersed and frightened by the same scares that they work on as their day jobs.

“You have to play it yourself, and put yourself in the position of a new player, and just feel it.”

“You sit down, late at night, and play a big chunk of it in one go,” Grip says. “Then you get a feel for it.” At this point, the dev team becomes horror editors — snipping, adding, moving around game elements and scenarios that don’t click during their play-throughs.

Frictional makes sure to get to the point of iterating for maximum horror early on in the game’s development. “I feel it’s sort of unnecessary to do anything too detailed at an early point, because by the time you’re finished, everything’s going to change,” he laughs.

For Grip, there is good reason to have developers playtest the game, instead of outside playtesters. For one, games like Soma in particular are slower-paced and not focused on a mechanic such as shooting, which players can more easily give concrete feedback about. Playtesting for horror relies a lot on what’s happening in player’s brains on a subconscious level. Drawing out those emotions and making players describe them so developers can improve the game is difficult, if not impossible.

“It’s very hard to judge how successful you are, based on the feedback you get back from people,” Grip explains. “When it comes to how you need to tweak [certain aspects of the game], you have to play it yourself, and put yourself in the position of a new player, and just feel it. It’s super hard, you’re constantly making mistakes, but it’s sort of the only way to really get inside their head. It’s hard to ask people to explain subconscious stuff that’s happening.”

Frictional lets the players scare themselves

Like a good horror movie director, Grip relies on players’ mental modeling of situations and environments – basically creating an unsettling space in which players’ imaginations can run rampant, creating their own objects of fear. This Lovecraftian approach to game design tends to be highly effective, even on Grip.

He talks about a recent example in Slender: The Arrival, where his mental modeling for fear was firing on all cylinders. “You’re approaching this house, it’s getting darker, you have these leaves rustling, capturing the mood perfectly,” he says. “I knew this was a Slenderman game, but I didn’t know it’d start Gone Home-style, with nothing happening. … I know the whole Slenderman meme or myth, and I came into that game just filled with what I know about Slenderman. I’m using that to project on everything – like the rattles in the trees – ‘Shit is he in the trees?!’ The possibilities are limitless.”

“It got really creepy, and I felt this cold chill down my spine, which has never happened before in a game. And I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to continue playing this game,” he laughs. And it was all just me scaring myself – no mechanics!”

This reliance on players’ imagination – their mental modeling – does introduce a game design problem, however: How do you keep that modeling going throughout the course of the game? “It just breaks down very, very fast, and it’s hard to see how to mold that, other than just having empty environments where nothing happens. That just gets old after a while.” Grip says he’s still trying to figure it out.
Frictional adheres to horror in all aspects of the game (and that’s really hard)

While Grip chooses to start from a high-level concept at the beginning of development, as opposed to prototyping “fun” mechanics, he concedes that the high-concept approach can be incredibly taxing.

With a mechanics-based game, a developer, in theory, can “find the fun” in a few days — perhaps even in hours. But “finding the fear” takes a lot longer, and a lot more time. For Amnesia, Frictional had to throw away large chunks of the game, very late in the game’s development, which was demoralizing (though definitely not unheard of in regards to story-centric game development).

“It’d be cool to get away from that and work on something that’s fun to play in the first week,” admits Grip, when asked if Frictional would explore genres outside of horror. When you need to serve a high concept, everything about the game is constrained to that concept.

“We have our own niche, and I feel that it’s sort of stupid to go out of it too much.”

“You have to [adhere to] the horror theme, and the adventure theme, and the puzzles — oh, it’s so boring to design that!” he laughs. “The story has demands, the puzzle has demands. You have to figure everything out, how everything fits together.”

Grip says Soma wasn’t even going to be a horror game at first. Originally, it was meant to be a game that explored the idea of consciousness. But then horror just happened to be the best vessel to express that idea. Over the course of two years, Soma was increasingly identifiable as a horror game. It’s as if Frictional couldn’t escape from it.

Even though Grip has this fleeting fantasy of doing something that’s “fun in the first week,” one can tell that he’s still excited about the potential of the horror genre.

“We have our own niche, and I feel that it’s sort of stupid to go out of it too much,” he says. “I feel there’s tons more to explore there. … And if Soma goes well, I know exactly what I want to do with the next game. So there would be at least another horror game after that.”

“Then after that, we’ll just make a top-down shooter or something,” he laughs.

Soma is slated for a 2015 release on PC and PlayStation 4. （source：gamasutra）