Hello, my name is Scythe, I’m an okay developer. I was looking through my old projects and found a map, I thought that I could add-on to this map and make it better. Here is a screenshot of it.
Angle 1:
I would like to ask you all, how could I make this map more scarier? I know it does look bad, the main focus, is the shed, I’m mostly trying to get the shed to look better and more spookier. Any suggestions?
Thank you for reading!
Note: It’s supposed to look bad, the reason why, is a secret
In order to make this more eerie, I would focus in the lighting category, specifically changing the ambient and fogend. To start you should make sure that the lighting is voxel, and that global shadows are on. You should start by changing the fogend to something around 100 and make the fog coloring darker. I would also change the ambient so it is darker and turn the brightness down. The end result should look something like the image below.
There’s a lot you can do to give your build an “eerie” aesthetic. Namely provided above, everything that revolves around the lighting, fog/fogcolor, ambience, and brightness.
I feel like you can give it more of an eerie immersion if you changed up your tree positioning, maybe make it look like it’s towering over the players.
This might just be me but I’d try putting red eyes lining the forest line. (If you had a very nice lighting set up, that’d be awesome)
I honestly feel like making the trees larger, darker lighting, creepy sounds, or even making the trees bigger for nice shadows could be some good inclusions. But, this is definitely a nice start!
If you want to make the shed more spooky maybe have a chimney with smoke coming out of it. Then maybe have a door on it that creeks when you open it. Maybe you could also have a hole in the roof as well. You may want to make the shed sway a little bit, when it moves it could creak a little bit to put the player under the impression that it is a very old shed. Inside you could have some tools like a fork and a spade. You could have some background sounds as well, like an owl hooting or some quiet scary background music. With the rest of the build make sure the trees look different from each and different sizes. At the moment the whole build just looks empty so I would play around with the terrain and make it more of like a spooky forest.
I’d start with a dark outdoor ambient, as well as that I’d add choose the colour based on what suits the map. Another way to make a map eerie is to make the sky very dark, having a starry night sky isn’t as eerie as a dark and cloudy night sky. I’d also add small lighting checkpoints to “guide” the player through the dark. I’d love to see where you take this game in the future and I hope this helps!
Yeah I tend to get lucky with finding visuals, whenever I find something that catches my eye I bookmark it for future references.
On a unrelated note… would anyone know how to replicate the effect? I believe it was accomplished through dark fog + a screen GUI yet I’m not entirely sure.
Play around with the terrain colours, make everything look more “dead”.
On top of this, also play around with the lighting/fog, similar to what @LocksOfDispair said above. Make it difficult to see far distances, as people typically fear the unknown. Making it hard to see what’s “around the corner” will make people more on their feet.
Also, a good idea would be to play around with free variants, maybe add some grass and bushes. Perhaps add some dark pine trees to this landscape, dead grass, or bushes. Remember to make each of the trees vary in size, or maybe even make 2-4 different variations of trees.
The terrain right now looks a little too flat, and really easy to see to the other side. A good idea would be to do what @Unsayableorc stated, which would be to add some hills. It does not have to be anything too much, just enough so the user can not see flatly across the map.
Apply a dark fog, as well as turn the ambient and outdoorambient to a darker shade of grey.
Also, you can play around with properties alike to color correction - if you want to go for lighting that is a little more detailed, though I’d suggest to play around with it.
Surely it’s not that simple, I’m pretty sure there’d be some effects (colorcorrections, blooms, etc) involved in it aswell. For the screen gui, just a simple vignette would work fine. Dark skyboxes, and all that comes after that is just a lot of messing around and testing with the lighting.
You definitely could make the trees more realistic, but remember to try and keep your map to a certain theme that you have in mind. If you are wanting everything to be a bit more realistic, then go for it!
