/lit/ - Literature

>>20890212

I recommend you go and play sunless skies.

That game is the textbook example on how to create a great atmosphere with absolutely no cinematography. Here’s how they did it.

>Sound design.
The sound effects basically make you always on edge, from the loud noise of your engine to the weird fleshy noises that the monsters make. Don’t even get me started on those fucking bees.

>art direction

The entire game has a consistent and great art direction. Every single pixel reinforces that you’re fucked, you shouldn’t be here and that a trip to Tesco here makes the Franklin expedition look like a vacation at a five star hotel on the Bahamas.

>extremely descriptive writing.

Sunless Skies really make sure that whatever you can’t see you’re going to imagine. This even goes to the point that characters don’t have names but descriptors, stuff like ‘the incognito princess’, ‘the rat brigade’ and people like that.

>a good soundtrack.

A good soundtrack that’s well implemented can really elevate an experience. Sunless Skies is a great example of that, you’ve never felt relief until you’ve heard that intro to ‘the high wilderness’ start playing after you have been fighting for your life so you can afford to feed your crew something else then human flesh.

>high, but fair difficulty

That’s the best way to make the player care about their decisions. Punish mistakes heavily but also reward good decisions. Make sure that the player will barely survive the first couple of hours before actually achieving anything of importance. Remember that for this to work the player must be punished for bad decisions both while during scripted sequences and during unscripted gameplay.