The Dark Descent is a story-driven game about a miner that wakes up in a catacomb that is unknown to him. He needs to discover why is he there, and how he got there. As the story unfolds, he begins to experience more and more paranormal activities. He finds out that many others were there before him, on the surface world he hears explosions, he does not know what is happening. He explores the catacombs finding notes left by the others, some of them are truly terrifying.
The game is currently lacking content, what you are about to see is not the finished product.
If you have any suggestions on how to improve the story or the game, I’d be glad to hear it.
Personally to me it seemed like a lot of walking around, maybe add a bit more pressure to move / something chasing you? also maybe make it so some things appear that were not there before, like say first time you see the tombs there is a dead body in there however you end up going round in a circle and suddenly its disappeared? on the whole tho, looks like it would be fun to play.
What would definitely increase the horror experience is if the player actually made sound on their own. Fear can make a person breathe hard and shiver. What would also be interesting is if those things started looking towards you first as a warning. The player would have to crouch, close their eyes and accept whatever is around them while being completely helpless at that narrow corridor at 4:35. Also make the sounds amplify more during that.
You should completely remove the starting corridor and turn the first minute and a half into a tutorial, shortening it by explaining what the player can do and where they should go to get into cover. You could have easily forced the player into fleeing from the second the true game starts by crumbling the floor beneath them forcing them into that flame wall thing.
I actually played it from your profile, and I can immediately say that you should preload some assets as people like me with pre-2010 type of connections won’t even understand what is happening. I couldn’t see the smoke or hear the radio so I expected that white box to be something else since I didn’t watch the given video first.
Having it pristine would actually add to the dark atmosphere. Most players looking at a random ghost-like thing with torn rags for clothes will probably think “Oh hey, a spooky ghost”. Having clothes torn will just make the NPC look like a homeless guy.
I would much rather make them look like normal people wearing normal clothes, maybe a bit dirty because of all the dust. But what makes them creepy is that they will completely ignore you until you touch them or make too much noise. With a casual face expression which is inappropriate for their aggressive behavior.
