Ophelia

Creator

Project Snapshot

Ophelia is a story-heavy standalone Amnesia: The Dark Descent custom story where the player faces the traumatic reality of the death of an infant. Featuring a completely custom story, brand new and scares backed by research; Ophelia is a thesis research artifact seeking to improve the use of phobic objects in horror games and scare everyone who plays while it does.

Engine: HPL2

Role: Designer/Scripter/Narrative Designer

Team Size: 1

Platform: PC

Project Goals

Research and Implement Best Horror Practices

Understand Phobic Objects

Create Gripping and Frightening Experience

Best Horror Practices

Anticipation

Scare a person most by saying something bad will happen, but not what or when.
I foreshadowed the monster in the water two sections before the player ever encountered it.

The Uncanny

Players are unsettled when the familiar is where it doesn't belong.
I used a teddy bear to stand in as the memory of a baby, and it would be floating in water, in a dark and empty nursery, and staring at the player when they walked out of a haunted bathroom.

A Story Too Close to Home

Horror sticks most when the story hits on a real life fear people have, or things they might experience.
Ophelia follows a woman who copes with the reality of drowning her newborn baby in a fit of sleep-deprived postpartum depression.

Phobic Objects

Conditioning Fear

A conditioned response is a learned and automatic reaction to a stimuli. Example: a dog drooling when it's time for dinner.
I conditioned a tension response to water by having scary things happen with water and putting the monster in water.
After teaching the player to be scared of water, I could control the player tension response by adding more or less water.

Nowhere is Safe

I used my own code to animate scare sequences in three separate maps.
For two of these sequences, I built out 'haunted' copies of the original map to teleport the player where I could decorate with different lights, decals, sounds, and meshes to build tension and environmental storytelling.

Technical Challenges

Saga of Slenderbear

The project needed a teddy bear floating in water to represent the protagonist's baby. The perfect model was available, but it turned out that the model didn't play well with water.

I checked online sources for a solution, but nothing and no one could tell me why the bear was reacting like this or how to fix it.

So to fix it myself, I opened HPL2's fully custom model editor and made what I called 'the teddy museum' to test how different values affected the bear's reaction to water. I isolated the problem down to the joints and the number of collision spheres the bear had.

After isolating the values, I tweaked them until I was happy with how the bear floated in the water. After the teddy museum and my value tinkering, I had a total of 20 bear iterations.

Custom music in video by Dylan Messina
Female Humming from Freesound