Design for Another World: Horror Forest!
by Ethan Dunne, Rafe Batchelor, Jordan Montero, Adam Plonski
Introduction
As we exist as beings in the third dimension, our notion of reality is bound to the confines imposed by such a space. To create an immersive experience in virtual space — most often characterized by 2D screens — our expectations of movement within 3D space must be preserved. However, one could argue that the preservation of 3D space is the most fundamental criteria that must be satisfied for the creation of an immersive virtual experience. Once the user feels as if they exist within an environment that shares physical properties with their own, the natural processes by which we recognize elements in an environment take over. In fact, the life that exists on our own planet is far fetched enough that a lack of realism in a simulated environment should be no hindrance to the immersive feeling of existing in a new space.
In this article, we will be discussing the creation of a new environment — a place that is purely conceived by ourselves for the sake of transporting the user to this realm. However, rather than creating an environment solely for the sake of immersion, we hope to create an environment in which immersion occurs rapidly and unnoticeably, such that more emotional responses can take over. In other words, we hope to create an environment that the user immediately feels that they exist in, such that this feeling can be pushed to the back of their mind for the garnering of further emotional response. The particular emotion that we hope to provoke, in this case, is fear. Feel free to experience our environment here.
Ideation
When deciding which direction to take our creative efforts at the very inception of the design process, we discussed ideas of recreating ancient historical landscapes and foreign planets, but quickly converged upon the proposal of a horror-based experience. In particular, we derived significant inspiration from our own experiences playing the game Slender, an experimental horror game that takes place within a dark, wooded area. Within this experience, the user must collect pages scattered throughout the tall trees while avoiding a frightening, stalking entity.
As you can see, the graphics are poor, the mechanics are incredibly simple, and the objective is meaningless. Yet, this game has achieved widespread popularity by means of presenting a genuinely frightening experience, completely uncorrelated to the elements that a traditional “good” game would present. Rather, this game presents a horrific experience by means of convincing immersion.
After deciding on the pursuit of a horror-based user experience, we then directed our design process towards the ideation of the most basic, fundamental elements that would allow for an immersive experience. These included ideas for handling user movement and direction. For the sake of delivering a quality VR experience, we proposed that the direction towards which the user is facing will control the direction that they move; the angle of where they are looking (i.e. looking up or down) would then affect their speed. Lastly, we concluded that sound must play a large role in creating an immersive and frightening environment.
Continuing with sound ideation, we proposed that the game be kept relatively silent for the most part, with an ambient noise present only to break the silence. This ambient noise could come in the form of gravel crunching underfoot, wind blowing through the trees, or the heartbeat of the user. We felt that an initial satisfaction of these most fundamental elements to the core user experience would open the design space for continued ideation and iteration.
Now, moving towards the bulk of the experience, we began to consider the more detail-oriented elements that would convey a frightening environment. As you’d expect, this included a night-based scene; additionally, we sought to convey the feeling of entrapment or confinement to the user, such that we pursued an environment in a densely forested area. The last element that we considered was the presence of additional creatures in this forest along with the user. Combining these elements, our initial, pre-development ideation phase concluded with the proposal of an experience taking place within an alien-like forested landscape paired with the presence of ghoulish, alien-like creatures, similar in nature to the photo below.
Development and Prototyping
The development of our experience was a collaborative experience that took place within Glitch (LINK) using the A-Frame (LINK) framework as a backend. For those unfamiliar, A-Frame is a web-based framework for building VR experiences, implemented by means of HTML, such that it is quite simple to implement and can be easily modified/iterated on.
After establishing a basis upon which to direct our development efforts, the actual implementation of these ideas began with sourcing element models. This included models for trees, beings, nearby planets, and objectives within this landscape, as well as textures for the forest floor and night sky.
Our first step was to then implement the forested environment in a dense fashion; to do so, we spawn quite a few trees in random orientations across our landscape.
After handling forest generation, we integrated the night sky and forest floor textures, as well as some distant planet models. Additionally, we limited the view of the user to a brightened radius, simulating the effect of a flashlight. Our early prototype can be seen below:
Following the development of the core environment, we then directed our efforts towards the implementation of additional beings to share the forest with the user. Implementing the model shown in Fig X above, we designed their movement such that they follow and eventually converge upon the player. We decided to spawn four of these creatures at each of the four corners of the forest, such that the player feels that monsters are coming towards them from all sides.
Lastly, we integrated the aspects of sound that we proposed early into our design process. This included the ambient sound of the player’s heartbeat, a suspenseful music track cutting in and out of silence, and the screams of the alien-like creatures chasing the user. The volume of these screams is correlated to the distance of the creatures from the user, such that as these monsters approach, their screams grow louder. Finally, we increased the gradient of the flashlight viewport, such that a more realistic lighting effect could be produced. With this, our initial environmental prototype was complete.
Design Features
Throughout the creation of our horror-forest prototype, the core elements of creating not just an immersive, but easily tolerable VR/3D experience were continuously considered. These elements include ideas of user control, limited brightness and acceleration, immersive atmosphere and terrain, a contextual reticle, and guided soundscapes [1, 2, 3].
- User control — Touched upon initially in our ideation process, user control plays a fundamental role in creating both an immersive and tolerable 3D or VR experience. The user must feel as if they are in full control of their movements to feel immersed in the environment; thus, the camera must be aligned with the direction towards which the user is looking at all time. Any additional movement of the camera without the input of the user leads to a less immersive and potentially motion-sickening experience. Thus, we have implemented a discrete set of controls for motion handling, in which the direction towards the user is looking will always determine the direction towards which they move.
- Brightness and acceleration — As excessive brightness due to staring at a screen and acceleration changes in this new environment are key factors for promoting motion sickness, we approached our design with a static player speed and dimly lit environment in mind. Thus, the user runs at a constant rate in an environment that should be easy on their eyes in regards to brightness.
- Atmosphere — Integral to immersion is the idea of depth; the atmosphere must convey the dimensions that we are most familiar with by means of depth. In other words, elements that are farther away from the user must reflect this distance in the same fashion that they do in reality: they must become smaller as the user grows farther away and larger as the user approaches. Additionally, these objects should reflect distance by means of lower clarity at larger distances. However, as our forest is densely populated with trees, the user cannot see over far enough distances to where a haze-effect can be noticed in most cases.
- Terrain — What the user is supposed to do within the environment must become immediately clear. To convey this objective, how they can do it must be completely transparent. In other words, as the central focus of this experience is navigating through a forested environment, the user must have an immediate sense of the terrain upon which they can move. By means of open spaces between trees, along with a covered terrain texture, we simulate the creation of an infinite set of paths throughout the forest, upon which the user can travel. This affords a more natural experience that is guided by the user’s own, natural intuition.
- Contextual reticle — Contextual reticles are used to show the user the specific point where they are looking. This is useful for orienting their position in space. We implement this sort of reticle in a less traditional fashion, however. We do so in a more integrated, natural fashion by means of a well-lit viewpoint to simulate a flashlight. In other words, as the brightened flashlight center indicates the direction towards which the user is looking, it acts as a contextual reticle.
- Guided soundscapes — The last design element for promoting immersion that we’d like to highlight is the use of guided soundscapes. We’ve integrated this aspect in two primary ways: the first being the sound of the monsters within the forest. As these monsters grow closer to the user, the sound of their screams increases, such that the user — without looking behind them — can be aware of the positioning of these monsters relative to their own. The other guided soundscape is less for immersion and more for gameplay. This comes in the form of a soundtrack played when the user has won or lost the game, by means of escaping the forest or being caught by the monsters. However, by using sound to indicate the completion/failure of the objective in relation to their environment, we feel that it does improve the experience by means of soundscape.
Conclusion and Moving Forward
Through the development of such an environment for the sake of not only immersion, but emotional elicitation, we feel that we have gained significant insight into the aspects of 3D environment generation necessary for producing a fully enveloping, natural experience. These come in the forms of user control and movement, the integration of environmental and sound cues for guiding the user, and reducing less-pleasant effects that might come along with computer screen-based applications, such as intolerable brightness or sickening acceleration.
Moving forward, to improve our own horror experience, we hope to integrate the need for the user to collect objectives/elements throughout the forest, in order to increase their time in the environment, in contrast to the current objective of simply escaping the forest. With more time spent searching within the forest itself, we can then keep the environment relatively small, which in turn, keeps the computational demands low. Additionally, more time in the forest gives the user more time to be snuck up upon and frightened!
