With the research project now well under way, it’s time to start preparing surveys and begin my primary research into the field before I start designing my actual levels. With this in mind, the first survey is going to be an extremely short and simple one so that I get a good baseline from which to work from. The first thing you should know before creating a level is knowing the setting – Does it take place in a home? Hospital? Army base?
And as such, I’ll create a survey to find out just that. Based on my previous secondary research, cliche environments are still effective assuming a certain spin is put on it. To test that, I’ll include them as options. The way I’ll set out the survey is I’ll have various different environments with a 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest) rating scale of what people find the scariest.
With this in mind, the settings I will be putting on the survey are:
- Ruined house
- Hospital
- Asylum
- Sci-fi/futuristic
- Research/scientific station
- Other
I’ve included all the usual cliche environments, but obviously there is a near infinite amount of settings, so I’ll be including an “Other” option where people can type in what environments they consider scary – Any recurrent answers will be helpful.
The final survey: