How do I make this map look "eerie"

Maybe make the tree’s more realistic, and add more detail to the house. Also as LocksOfDispair said;

Fog, subtle lighting, darker ambiance, sounds.

This would make the build look complex and “eerie” as you want.

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Maybe make it so the terrain isn’t as flat as it is now; have the house perched atop a small hill. As LocksOfDispair said;

fog, in this scenario, is very important, as well as some nice, creepy ambient sounds or music.

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Personally, I would go with ambient 75, 75, 75 with fogend 200 and fogstart 100.

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Something like this?

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Albeit you don’t need to go that all out with your game, but yea something around those lines.

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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.

Feel free to copy the settings.

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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)

Goodluck!

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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! :+1:

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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.

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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!

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Damn, that showcase looks amazing. I get the vibes and feel like I’m about to get jumpscared at any time.

But yeah, it’s something along those lines. Just darker ambience and surroundings in general.

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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.

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With the trees, should I make them more realistic? I was thinking of making it with scary faces etched into the trunk, or is that too cartoony?

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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.

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Hello, thanks for your feedback, what do you think I could do with lighting to make the map look more spookier?

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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.

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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.

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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!

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So, should I make a color correction? Should I make it like a light shade of black?

To make a place eerie on purpose only makes it less eerie. Make it natural, but make it feel off. Look at ROSES by Clockwork Entertainment for inspiration.

From what I can see in your current build, I would:

  • Delete the trees already there, replacing them with individually tall, large trees, such as this and this. I would detail the base of each tree as the player would look at that part the most.
  • I would rework the house you have created as it currently looks severely undetailed which would fail to incite a feeling of eeriness. Each brick would have its own surface, created in Blender, and the wooden planks barring the windows as well as roof tiles would be made with CSG unions.
  • I would use smooth terrain with desaturated grass (rather than the black grass which you have used) to create two parallel (but not identical) hills around the path leading to the house. The faces of these hills would be riddled with various tree roots (made with CSG unions) as well as rocks (meshes) of varying colours and sizes. Eventually, the path would look more like this (but with the aforementioned rocks, of course).
  • I would put work into creating shrubbery and vegetation to bring the place to life.
  • In terms of lighting, I would use an “evening” time (approximately 18:30 in Roblox’s lighting) as well as sun ray effects to create a sense of “finality.” The stark darkness of nighttime fails to achieve much emotion in this respect.

What does ROSES do to augment its ‘eerie factor’?

The game predominantly focuses on the quality of loneliness, solitude, and an inability to escape. There is little exploration on the map and it is highly linear; as well as this, the use of certain lights and the emptiness of the asylum itself builds on the sense of loneliness - which no human particularly wants - to create anxiety and suspicion.

Good luck.

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