Daylight is a horror game featuring a procedurally-generated environment. With only the light of a cell phone to guide them, players will navigate the halls of a dark building as a woman who’s just woken up. Every experience will be different as rooms are randomly generated, and players will only learn about the game’s story via clues they discover as they explore.
At DICE, IGN had a chance to speak with Zombie creative director and studio head Jared Gerritzen as well as Jessica Chobot, who wrote the game. The pair explained what players can expect, plus the motivations behind the project.
“The player doesn’t have a name,” Gerritzen told IGN. “We don’t give any backstory on the player. She literally just wakes up and you need to find your way through, but there’s a lot of story elements. The way the story unfolds is we have all these elements where you can pick up documents and case files, but also your phone gets possessed and it plays recordings from the past. So there’s so many different elements we’re able to use that allow players to get all this information, but the way that we’re going to do it it’s programmatically, procedurally given to the player. So I’ll play it and I’ll get the first bits to understand what’s going on, but from that point on everything will be in different successions.”
“There’s a lot of different types of horror. There’s hack-and-slash. It’s not like that,” Chobot said. “It’s all very subtle. It’s all very implied and it kind of leaves the player to their own devices.”
A playthrough of Daylight is only meant to take around 25 or 30 minutes, but the idea is for players to replay it multiple times in order to find all of the story elements.
“Different players will have a totally different experience,” Gerritzen said. “You’re essentially a rat in a cage, but the cage is an asylum and it’s scary as hell. You need to find your way out, and each time you do it it’s completely different.”
“We have so much content story-wise that it hopefully, whether the person manages to succeed to the end or not, will be an experience that they want to capture more of the story so they have to go back and replay, because each time you might be getting different story elements,” Chobot elaborated. “And over the course of that time, depending on how long you decide to play and what you find, it opens up the concept of the world a little more, the backstory, what your involvement is in it, how you find yourself here and whatnot. So instead of finding the same item over and over again and saying ‘I’m not going to bother reading this piece of paper because I’ve seen it a thousand times,’ it’s different every time.”
Players will be armed with a cell phone that offers a compass and various tools they can use to navigate the asylum. “You don’t have combat. You don’t have a gun. You don’t have anything. You literally have to run away when a Phantom is attacking you, and those things are really interesting,” Gerritzen explained. “The phone itself has multiple features. It’s Players will be armed with a cell phone that offers a compass and various tools they can use to navigate the asylum. “You don’t have combat. You don’t have a gun. You don’t have anything. You literally have to run away when a Phantom is attacking you, and those things are really interesting,” Gerritzen explained. “The phone itself has multiple features. It’s kind of like a character. It’ll get possessed occasionally and play recordings and stuff like that. And when a Phantom’s around it’ll start to glitch out because it’s just like a psychic ability. And hopefully you won’t get lost, but if you do, you can flip [the phone] to a different mode that doesn’t put out as much light. It puts out a UV light that lets you actually see your footprints, so if I get lost I’ve got essentially bread crumbs that I can follow back.”
“And then you’re able to find emergency kits that have flares or glowsticks,” he continued. “The flares will scare off all Phantoms, but it’s also very violent and it’s very bright and it drags shadows around. Because everything’s fully dynamic lighting, and so it’s very scary just to use. And then the other emergency kit thing is a glowstick, and that’ll have a much bigger light. It’s also kind of like the phone where you can see your footprints, but also you’ll see messages written on the walls and you’ll see other story elements. And then the phone itself will also go to a video mode that will show me elements like clues or story bits that I can pick up and interact with.”
Daylight will be released via Steam, as Valve has allowed Zombie to circumvent the Steam Greenlight process. The game will cost $20 or less and will be released some time in 2013.
Gerritzen explained that Zombie will be taking an episodic approach to future Daylight content. “After we release Daylight, it’s going to be considered Chapter 1,” he said. “And Chapter 2 and more chapters will come out, and each chapter will not be a reboot or anything. It’ll just be more systems that get added to the bucket and more story elements and all that.”
We’ll have much more from our interview with Gerritzen and Chobot over the course of the next week, so check back to find out more about Daylight’s brand of horror, plans for the future, the inspirations that led to it and much more.
For screenshots click da link.
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
Hmm, sounds intriguing. Plus, I actually don't know anything about Chobot's work on other projects except for her MS3 appearance. She may prove being a decent writer?
There are no weapons. No way to fight back. In this game, the only way you can survive is by running.
The game's story was inspired by a mashup of writer Jessica Chobot's youth spent urban spelunking and a healthy dose of urban legend, conspiracy theory and ghost stories.
Chobot, who also hosts several shows on IGN, is part of a team of six at Zombie Studios working on the game, said studio head Jared Gerritzen.
Gerritzen, who worked on two of the F.E.A.R. games and Condemned: Criminal Origins, says that the self-funded game bubbled up out of his time spent playing around with the Unreal Engine 4. He said he knew he could create a game that would procedurally generate maze-like settings and felt that a horror title would be the best way to explore that tech.
"This isn't my first horror game," Gerritzen said. "We've been trying to dial it in to allow it to be tense."
From the developers of F.E.A.R., Condemned and Saw (yes, Saw was decent)? MY BODY IS READY!
That ex-Monolith dude, is I think the dude that was really disappointed with Condemned 2, and wanted to reboot the series, with a return to proper horror, instead of the action route Condemned 2 went with.
Sadly it will never happen. Condemned 2 just didn't sell enough copies.
It is sad that Condemned 2 got caught up in the 'everything needs multiplayer'. We could have really used the staff on multiplayer to make the single player campaign amazing.
There was come good ideas of where to take the game. I've always wanted to do a reboot and just play Condemned 2 off as a bad hangover and have Thomas closer to what he was in C1.
As for C3. I really wanted to do a St. Elsewhere on what happened in Condemned 2, and Condemned 3 would pickup where Condemned 1 left off. I wanted Thomas goal to be proving that the Oro exist, so hunting them down, searching books, newspapers, anything he can get his hands on. This scene from LOST gives you an idea of what I was thinking.
My idea is the game would be more like Silent Hill detective/CSI edition and less like God of War where C2 started to head.
Which sounds pretty fucking fantastic. I bet this game is a bit like the Condemned 3 he wanted to make.
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
“You don’t have combat. You don’t have a gun. You don’t have anything. You literally have to run away when a Phantom is attacking you"
Not sure how this will work out, some hand-to-hand a-la Condemned 1 would have made it more interesting imo. At least there are CSI elements/investigation so it won't be just a horror 3D Pacman.
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
it actually looks like she inadvertently made eye contact with that guys beard, and is now trying to fight off the inevitable hypnosis which usually ensues after making such a mistake...
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