Recreating Our Real School for a Horror Game

The foundations of our horror game were oozing of real world thus, with accurate campus mapping the familiar turned into dreaded.

We did measurements down to the very last detail. Merging the design limitations of modularity and the realistic proportions was an issue that kept on coming back and it elongated the whole process of modeling to more than three months.

In a very meticulous manner, our team operated from counting the number of tiles in the hallways and laboratories to making use of wooden scales and common things such as plastic files for reference, and they also made the same number of measurements several times to be certain of the precision.

There were some places like staff rooms and utility shafts with pipes and elevators from which we found it very difficult to get direct measurements because they were not accessible to us. We were forced to resort to sketches and estimations, using these data very carefully in our modular approach to keep the flow of the project going.

Modularity was the backbone of our operation. The use of the Blender array modifiers for walls and the manual placing of rooms and corridors allowed for rapid iteration and effective reuse of assets which is an important factor for future leveling up. Keeping the game running on mobile platforms smoothly was realized by having low polygon counts and the use of visibility control in a smart way instead of the usual systems of level of detail.

The layout of the real world was both a benefit and a challenge for the level design. In comparison to the usual horror games, where the environments are made very precisely according to the gameplay scripts, we had to adapt executed scares within the limits of the real campus architecture which meant narrow areas and restricted choices, but also increased tension naturally. For the players who know this layout, the fear is increased by the creepy feeling of déjà vu.

The addition of the horror elements like atmospheric lighting, disturbing audio cues, and unsettling visual details changed the character of a typical school into a haunting.