135 - Enemy Design

[matt]

In this dev diary, I talk about my approach to enemy design for horror games. I've been talking about this a lot lately on the forums and in a kickstarter update, but here's a video discussing it and enemies in past games I worked on.

[Grabthehoopka]

Jeez, sometimes I feel like it might seem I'm getting bribed to name drop the same games over and over, but...

That's one of the things that blew me away in Condemned: Criminal Origins. With a couple memorable exceptions, there isn't much variation in the enemies, but the focus is less on the individual enemies and more on the vague sense that these crazy hobos and crackheads are somehow in collusion with one another, they're everywhere, and they're closing in on you. So, while design-wise they're nothing special, the fact that you often faintly hear people shuffling around, banging, and yelling in distant parts of the building, as well as the jump scares, gives them that feeling of being anywhere and everywhere at all times. But what really impressed me was the AI, which is one of the best enemy AIs I've ever seen in a game. They don't all just run up and attack you; most of the time they'll run off and hide behind a pillar or a corner, wait for you to come close, and then jump out and sucker punch you, and none of that behavior is scripted. Sometimes you'll disarm them or they'll just come into the area unarmed, and they'll run away and tear a pipe or a 2x4 off the wall before coming back to attack. And on top of all that, there's the frenzied and erratic way they fight in combat, which is also not scripted. Their behavior adjusts depending on whether you're fighting more offensively or defensively, and they rarely ever give big, unrealistic wind-ups to their attacks.

All of their behavior is easily understood and logical, so they seem smart, while still being bestial enough to display simple, crazy behavior. All of this does the extremely important thing of making you feel like an interloper; like you're an outsider being somewhere you don't belong. (something Manhunt also did really well, and there I go again...) You understand what they do, but there's always something unpredictable about them, and you really get the sense that these aren't just Doom 3 aliens waiting to jump out of the closet, but this is their den, and you're walking right into the middle of it. These people are up to something, and they're skulking around and doing stuff regardless of whether or not you're there, but once one of them has seen you, you can just feel knowledge of your presence spreading throughout the entire building, and before you've covered very much ground, everyone within 10 miles knows you're there, and they're all watching you. I think that perceived and actual unpredictability is what sets the crazy hobos and crackheads apart from any other horror game enemy I've seen.

And then they made a sequel and fucked it all up. But that's neither here nor there.

[matt]

I agree they created really interesting enemy behavior in Condemned. However, according to the Philosophy of Horror, they might not count as "horror". There has to be something evil, unnatural, or uncanny for something to be an adversary in horror. Do homeless drifters count? Maaaayyybbbeee. I guess there was some sort of weird aliens making them behave strangely or something?

To be perfectly honest, the first time I played the demo of Condemned, I disliked it because I felt like it was a bum killing simulator, which seemed bad. I've played the game in its entirety, and my initial impressions were TOTALLY wrong, There is a lot they did really right, and it's an interesting and different feeling horror game even if the bums aren't QUITE horrific.

[Grabthehoopka]

I think they do qualify, since what is craziness but corruption of the brain? Have you ever witnessed a crazy homeless person publicly being crazy? It's really uncomfortable. Seeing people go violently insane is completely unnatural, since we as a society have accepted that that's just not something people do. And on top of that, I seem to recall there being some pretty bizarre enemy designs, like the big guys that had I think those mouth guards they give to people receiving EST , so even though there's nothing covering there mouth, everything they say and all the noises they make are all muffled and incomprehensible, and there were some other guys wearing motorcycle helmets with a smashed visor, some guys whose eyes were taped over, not to mention the skinny crackhead people that came crawling out of the walls in the burnt library, or the mannequin people...oh god, the mannequin people...

[matt]

I think in the end, what defines horror is just a matter of opinion. If they are effective and make a good game, that's the most important thing.

I was just thinking about it because for Neverending Nigthmares and the game that will hopefully follow it, I want truly horrific enemies that are well within the realm of horror. For the baby monster, I wanted to create something memorable and iconic like Pyramid Head. For the inmates, the original design doc didn't have anything special about them. I think we already had some concepts before I realized two things:
1) They weren't horrific enough
2) Their behavior would probably be similar to the baby monster.

Having the eyes stitched shut helped with 1 and totally solved 2.

[Grabthehoopka]

Yeah, I guess it just pushes my buttons the right way, but the most I've ever been absorbed by a game's atmosphere was playing Manhunt and Condemned. I've actually thought about this quite a bit, and I think the distinguishing thing between the enemies in these and other games isn't so much the fact that they're people, or that they're realistic or anything like that, but that they make it explicitly clear that the enemies are thinking, logical beings, and not only do they want to kill you, but they hate you and would revel in it (Manhunt did a particularly good job at this).

I think this is sort of a trigger for my OCD, since I've accidentally upset people enough times when I was younger to develop a deep fear of people suddenly blowing up in my face, and even to this day when I talk to people in a one-on-one environment, I'll be talking and everything will be going fine, and then suddenly a mental image pops in my head of them suddenly getting angry and shouting at me, or of them slapping, choking, or (in the most uncomfortable cases) kissing me, and then I start getting super nervous and act as nicely as I can, and if I perceive the tiniest hint of them getting angry or upset, I backpedal like crazy and repeat myself a lot. Job interviews are fun.

Anyways, yes, technically speaking, I suppose Condemned is more like a psychological thriller than a horror game. The weird extradimensional people with no lips that they never explain might lean it more towards horror, but of course the sequel ruined it by not only barfing out an explanation for every single unexplained thing in the first game in the first level, but by making the explanation really anticlimatic and stupid.

The beings are really members of a secret society that use high-frequency sound waves to control people's minds. All of the weird things are hallucinations they engineered with their sonic sound machines and surgically-enhanced vocal chords. The metal fragments you collected in the first game are the remains of self-destructed sonic devices and the dead birds are birds whose brains hemorrhaged because of the sound waves. This secret society includes the mayor and chief of police, who wanted to quell the homeless and lower-class criminal population, so they tuned the machines to make them unable to sleep which drove them murder-crazy. All of this in the first level.
Ethan's unusual physique is the product of selective breeding by the secret society, and he has "perfectly evolved" vocal chords that can kill people by shouting at them. You kill the main villain by having a shout fight and then you shout him to death. Sigh.

It's a shame, too. One of the lead developers said in a NeoGAF post that the sequel was a result of executive meddling. Someone up top didn't like the ambiguous ending of the first game, so not only were they forced to come up with a definitive resolution to what happened, but also they were forced to put more action set-pieces in, have a wider variety of more monstrous, inhuman enemies, and worst of all, they were forced to put multiplayer in, which basically cut the dev team in half, and they were given less time than they had for the first game to make it. He said it's a miracle they were able to get the game out as good-looking and polished as they did, and he would love to make a sequel that basically picked up where the first game left off and said the whole second game was a bad dream, but Condemned 2 was a commercial failure so that's never going to happen. Not unless someone decides to go indie and make a spiritual successor on kickstarter, anyways...I'd kickstart the shit out of it if they did...

[matt]

I haven't played Manhunt, but the enemies were cool and creepy in Condemned. I can see how given your experience, it would be even more intense.

I'm glad I skipped Condemned 2. Executive meddling is a big problem in video game development as is shoehorning in multiplayer. Some multiplayer "modes" are actually separate games. Probably the best example of that was in the Medal of Honor reboot where the multiplayer mode was developed by DICE in Frostbyte 2 and the main game was developed by Danger Close in Los Angeles using the Unreal engine.

[Grabthehoopka]

So anyways, you said your goal for the baby monster was to make an iconic enemy. What, to you, makes an enemy iconic? What made you choose the current design over the other concepts?

[matt]

I guess for it to be iconic, it should be interesting looking and immediately recognizable as Neverending Nightmares. I kept thinking how could we create something as cool as pyramid head that would work with the narrative of our game.

Honestly, it's hard to say what makes things so iconic though. Why is Jason Vorhees so memorable, but so many other horror villains faded into obscurity? I don't know.

I'm not sure the baby monster is iconic really, but I was hoping it would turn out that way. I guess time will tell.

[Grabthehoopka]

But on the other hand, I really can't think of any other time I've seen something like the baby monster in a game. Maybe that one level with the giant evil baby in Catherine, but that's not really the same.