What drives the modishness of a particular genre of game? The temptation is simply to say modishness itself: perhaps RTS games were popular in the ’90s just because they were, and some clever people at Westwood Studios – then Ensemble, Blizzard and the rest – just happened to have a bright idea that started a bubble, which had its time before yielding to the next trend. After all, that’s mostly how it is in other art and entertainment media.
Games, however, still owe so much to technology. When it comes to horror, atmosphere is everything, and although genre classics like Alone in the Dark, Ecstatica, and Dark Seed managed to do a hell of a lot in this regard with the little they had at the time, the pixels and polygons that we were pushing around the screen were obvious, and the effect, inevitably, was abstracting.
No longer. In the decade since 2010’s Amnesia and its like, horror fans have been enjoying a glut of first-person games able to use sound and lighting to hint at the pursuit of a terrible monster, to unsettle with grim and grisly environments and textures, and to pull any number of other inventive tricks to create atmosphere. With all credit to the original Resident Evil, the panic induced by managing scarce resources doesn’t quite compare.
Curse of Anabelle, released in February by Turkish indie Rocwise Entertainment, is a new entry into this tradition, but it’s looking to bring plenty of fresh ideas too. Both in order to create that all-important atmosphere, and to achieve some of its more ambitious mechanics, the choice of engine was critical.
“In a horror game it’s really difficult to create engaging moments that are scary and/or startling, especially if you have a very limited time window,” game director and studio lead Engin Yüksel says. “Creating the source of scares is another problem, but searching for an answer, and finding solutions by exploring all of the engine’s capabilities, is one of the most enjoyable things [about game development].”
The starting point for the project was the story. The titular Anabelle is a nine-year-old girl who dies mysteriously in the grounds of a Colorado mansion, after which her older sister, Emily, begins to communicate with her soul in a series of lucid dreams. As these dreams become ever more intense, Emily comes to believe her sister is stuck in purgatory and needs help. Her efforts to render that help draw her into the mansion’s dark past and its long association with the occult, and when she goes missing too, you play her boyfriend Nathan, who retraces her footsteps in order to look for her.
Inspired by real legends of the occult, it is in many ways a classic haunted house tale. “I wrote the plot myself,” Yüksel says, “and then our writer Can Cankatlı did an amazing job about creating the story side of the game world. He researched the legends of King Solomon to the finest detail, created a historic background for some of the characters in our game, researched the demons, prayers, occultism etc. Almost all of the written elements in our game were created by him.”
Everything else followed, including the look and feel of the setting. “Your imagination gives a start for concept design, concept design gives an idea to 3D artists, and it continues like this – like a chain reaction,” Yüksel says. “At the same time, all these elements become the fictional visual structure of your game. Issues like a limited workforce, budget restrictions, deadlines – they all inevitably affect your creative process too. The most important thing to keep in mind is careful planning.”
Several points of the game’s design, such as its puzzles, clicked naturally into place as part of this process. “If you plan your story flow before starting the production, these elements find their place almost by themselves. So planning beforehand for a project like this is really important. You can think of it as always seeing the bigger picture.”
Yüksel compares this approach to centering the game’s design on headline features other than the story. “If you have a unique gameplay mechanic, you can go about this process the other way around, too. But this approach can cause problems down the production line in my opinion.”
It so happens that Curse of Anabelle does have a unique mechanic – or at least, one that is unique in the horror context. “In our game, players have an ability which allows them to jump back and forth between two different timelines,” Yüksel says, which may sound familiar to anyone who’s played A Crack in the Slab or Effect and Cause, the two celebrated time-hopping levels from Dishonored 2 and Titanfall 2, respectively.
“At first, we had a plan to represent this by letting players move between different levels, but it was impossible for us to make that work. Then we asked the Unreal forums about this kind of gameplay mechanic, and we got a lot of responses about how to achieve this effect in real time. So I can say that the biggest help of Unreal Engine is its great community.”
More like this: The best horror games on PC
The Unreal community is frequently cited in this series as being a great help to developers looking to overcome thorny problems, as well as the engine’s many in-built tools, which offer ready made solutions to tackle most game development challenges. Yüksel singles out the Sequencer, a multi-track editor for creating in-game cinematics, as “one of the most useful” for his team’s particular needs as creators of a narrative-heavy first-person adventure. “We also used the animation tool Allright Rig, which is available in the marketplace,” he adds.
But no matter how complete its toolset, the endlessly varied nature of game developers’ visions means it’s probably impossible for any team to adopt any given engine and feel that it’s perfectly suited to their needs. Another common thread in this series is that some tinkering is often necessary, and that fortunately, Unreal is open to receiving whatever jerry-rigging solutions the devs can come up with. “The implementation of interactive UI elements and particle systems to the widgets are a bit of a hassle,” Yüksel says. “Fortunately, we have been able to integrate them with some internal tricks.”
Whatever the medium, horror will probably always be a bit of a niche because not everyone enjoys being scared, so the development of this genre doesn’t receive the same scrutiny as, say, the FPS. But it’s an equally fascinating story and just as – perhaps more – sensitive to improvements in technology. Hence studios like Rocwise, with help from Unreal Engine, are pushing the limits of what gaming can achieve every bit as much as triple-A.
Curse of Anabelle is available on Steam here. Unreal Engine 4 is now free.
In this sponsored series, we’re looking at how game developers are taking advantage of Unreal Engine 4 to create a new generation of PC games. With thanks to Epic Games and Rocwise Entertainment.