Now that I’ve settled on what setting I believe will be best to go with, it’s time to begin my analysis on what elements I must include in my horror levels before I begin designing them. I’ve researched various level design theories, and I’ve looked into what elements certain games and films use and how they use them, but I want to get a feel of how people react to certain things directly – I want to find out what people find scariest and try to build a level around that.
If I include that and leave out some of the “fluff”, I’d have a solid baseline to build from. And for that, I need to find out what people feel about various different elements in horror games and films.
I’ll split the survey in different sections touching on different subjects – Enemies/NPCs (Non-player characters), the usage of water in scenes, their reactions to certain scenes (Such as if they think certain lighting setups are better than others, if some levels should have water or not and so on), and a final section touching on various tropes and seeing how effective people feel they are/how they’d react to them.