Notgames Forum

Just wanted to say that we just released our horror game "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" yesterday. I have mentioned it in a few post and while not a 100% notgame project, a lot of notgame thinking has gone into it. There is no "fun" gameplay at the core really, there is very little trial and error we have had a holistic / top-down approach where we started with a feeling and then let everything added support that. There are gamey elements in the game and I know Michael disliked a few parts with enemies :) The plan was to add an easy mode (with no dangerous enemies) but we did not have time. Perhaps we will add it for a patch.

In any case, I think that the notgames thinking has served us very well. What we have tried to do is to put some more responsibility on the player and require them to roleplay in order to be engaged in the game. This has been very visible in comments, as some players are simply unable to do this (perhaps to used to cheap action based thrills that do not require anything?), but quite a lot of people have, seemingly unconsciously, been able to immerse them self. Horror is probably by far the easiest emotion to do this for, but I think it bodes well for the future and I hope to explore it more.

I liked this reddit write up:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/db2d4/my_amnesia_the_dark_descent_experience_last_night/
it shows how the player managed to almost create the experience by themselves.

And we also got a, extremely surprisingly, positive review from Game Informer
http://gameinformer.com/games/amnesia_the_dark_descent/b/pc/archive/2010/09/08/horror-done-right.aspx

Here is a link if you are interested:
http://www.amnesiagame.com

Congrats on releasing the game and all the positive feedback!!! Saw the interview in the newspaper (DN) today also, it was great (and touched upon a lot of notgamey stuff in an easy-to-understand kind of way). I'm in the middle of the demo now... it's pretty scary :)

DN? I heard we where in SvD :) Not seen for myself

Oops, we change newspaper too often in this house. SvD was it. Good anyways!

I've been looking forward to this. It's the only game I've been excited enough about to pre-order recently apart from Demon's Souls, and I don't even particularly like the horror genre. I think a lot of your blog posts about designing it convinced me that it would be interesting, plus I started playing Penumbra Overture recently which helped convince me of Amnesia's potential.

Saying that, I probably won't download it until I go back to uni, partly because of my crappy internet connection here and partly because I'm currently low on hard drive space and need some time to delete stuff. But I'm really looking forward to playing it.

I look forward to Amnesia, I played penumbra overture awhile back after purchasing the humble indie bundle and while it wasn't a favorite of mine, I was intrigued with all the things you guys are doing with the horror genre and actual gameplay mechanics (the actual pulling of doors is really immersive for me).

I am so happy to hear this, Thomas - I hope you gain a lot of attention, I am very intrigued by the game and what it seems to be. I must admit I was getting a bit nervous not seeing any truly interesting games come out, but here you are!

I will sacrifice nightly rest to play it, but then, I understand that is somewhat the point of the game.

Also I am reminded of our discussions on knowledge of cold doorhandles, so I am very curious to see how I will receive non-visual/audio information ;)

And GameInformer being positive?.. Some days I think 'never' but some days I think the (what I secretly refer to as the) 'Samyn revolution' is not that far away at all.

I will certainly give you some decent feedback when I have had a chance to play it.

I saw the interview (http://mobil.svd.se/rss.jsp?rssid=16199071&item=http%3a%2f%2fwww.svd.se%2f%3fservice%3dmobile%26articleId%3d5283963&cid=16198031) this morning, on the rare occasion of me checking SvD's mobile website! For some reason they don't seem to have published it on their regular website.

Here's a crude touched-up google translation for the 1% people on this forum who aren't from Sweden.

Congratulations on the release!
I really hope the press continues to be positive and Amnesia becomes a big success! We all know it deserves that. I'm crossing all fingers I can find.

I'm eager to play it. But I want to do so in optimal circumstances. It's like I'm teasing myself with this. :)

That's awesome man, congratulations.  I'll check out the demo and make sure I can make it through the whole game. :P

The comments from that Reddit link all seem incredibly positive.  Although many people are saying they're too scared to play it.  That sounds cool, but are you worried that you made the game so scary it will hurt your sales?  Someone mentioned you topped the Steam charts; are you doing well enough to recover?

Well, "being too scary" also draws attention so it is a double edged sword :) And besides, it is all about making the work of art as one wants it right? ;)

Sales are good, although with all the positive response we have had we where hoping for a bit more. That is not saying they are bad though. I think we have recouped the cost it took to make the game by now. But was working at very low salaries, so need to get in more for the sales to fully finance the next game too.

All looking good though, so will be no need have publisher or the like. Gonna try and use this freedom to try new stuff and get further into the territory of not games. For next game, we are gonna try and get rid of all classic incoherent adventure game puzzles and the like. Also gonna see if we can evoke emotions other than fear.

Feedback we have collected from this game suggest that as long as you have game where the player has a high level of presence, you can make them play along with just about anything. Fear seems like the simplest thing to do, and will be interesting to see what will be possible to achieve.

Having just finished 'Penumbra: Black Plague', I'd say this was one of the main differences between it and 'Overture'. I found the puzles to be a lot more natural and intuitive in 'Overture' while I often had no idea what I was even supposed to be doing at parts of 'Black Plague' and had to use a walkthrough throughout. On the other hand, I found the 'combat', or lack of, to work a lot better in the 2nd one because the enemies were actually scary (I suppose the spiders kinda were in the first) whereas the dogs in the first one were more of an annoyance because it was always far easier to kill them than to hide or run away. Also, 'Black Plague' seemed to have "bigger" scares, though maybe that's just because I played it more recently so I remember them better...



I'd very much like to see that, fear isn't my favourite of emotions  ;)



Also, I've finally started downloading Amnesia on steam. Impressions should be forthcoming within the next week or so.

Any examples here? As I want to remove any forced puzzles for the next game, would be nice to hear what you found most natural and which where least natural.

Can not start the game on my Macbook. Is there any chance for Intel graphics support?  :(

Afraid not, most Intel cards are not powerful enough. And those that are have bad drivers.

That's amazing! Congratulations!
Happy to hear this.

Off the top of my head,

Some I liked from Overture were:
-One bit where there was an item I needed on a high shelf, to get it I think I was supposed to use the broom behind me to knock it off, although it was also possible to just stack chairs/boxes and jump to get it.

-Another one was where there was a lever that opened a door, but once you let go the door started to close (albeit slowly). I'm not sure if it was possible to run to get there in time before it closed, but what I did instead of trying that was hung a chair on the lever to keep it down.

-Also, there was a box which I think contained a  battery for a machine, but it needed a special machine of its own to open, the machine didn't seem to be in the general area and the box couldn't be moved too far. Fortunately there was a nice deep pit nearby to drop it down. I suppose that may be a bit illogical (the battery could well have broken too) but it felt like good improvisation. (Getting the machine to work after that was unnecessarily complicated and quite annoying though.)

A couple I didn't really like from the start of 'Black Plague' were:
-In the first room, crushing the coin in a clamp to then use it to open the grate. Once I'd done it, I could see how it could possibly have worked, though it didn't feel very natural. Also, there was a toolbox in the room which I smashed, bits flew everywhere and I spent ages scouring the room to see if a screwdriver had fallen out of it.

-Another one was getting the soda can out of the vending machine. If I'd known I'd need the can it would have been easy, but when I examined the machine it said something along the lines of that it wasn't working, so I thought it was just scenery. Also, when I'd got the can, I had no idea what to do with it.



I guess on the whole I prefer the puzzles which don't rely so much on inventory items, but more on interacting with objects in the physical world, which tended to be the physics puzzles. Overture had some of the inventory puzzles too, but usually the required items were right there, or I'd just picked up some notes which explained what to do, so they were pretty easy and less annoying. I'll skim through a walk-through later to see if there were any notable ones I forgot about.

Yeah i remember this one too, although i just didn't like the whole puzzle at all. If i remember right it was kind of a wooden box, which would signify i should be able to crack it open with the crowbar but i couldn't. And there were multiple boxes so i went around trying to crowbar all of them to no effect. I do like that you had to drop it down the pit, but i had to resort to a walkthrough to realize that's what i was supposed to do, and then a needed the walkthrough again to finish getting the machine to work.

Yeah congrats on recouping, although I can understand what you mean when you say that you're recouping a very unreasonable amount and so that won't really sustain you since you can't take that low of a salary again.

Maybe the next project could be smaller to build up another source of revenue quicker? :P

My hard drive is very low on space, but I hope to download the demo soon, heh.  Will the game run ok on a Macbook Pro with an X1600?

QXD-me:
Thanks for the feedback! Good examples, and this is definitely what we are gonna go full out on for next game. No standard inventory puzzles at all is the goal.

badvibration:
It was meant to be a metal box :) Perhaps it had bad physics sounds or not good enough art? :)

God at play:
Well, money is still coming in and we have retail deals left that might bring in more cash. So, we have no intentions of making a simpler game :) We have tons of ideas and stuff to improve :)
Macbook Pro with an X1600 should work, if it does not, there is patch coming for mac very soon that should do the trick!

Like i said i don't remember it clearly, it's been awhile. So it might've obviously been a metal box, but for some reason i though i should be able to smash it.

Amnesia: first impressions.

I tend to focus on the negatives so, since most of my points will probably be about things I didn't like so much, I'd like to start by saying that what I've played so far is pretty amazing. I can't remember ever being so immersed in a game before. I think I've sat down to play it 2/3 times (though I took a break in the middle of one of those to get something to eat, and also to ease the tension a little). And I think I've gotten just past the trap-door puzzle that was shown in one of the pre-release videos, I don't really know how far that is in the grand scheme of things.


The first thing that stood out to me was the menu screen. It seemed somehow wrong to me. I think it's because the menu seemed to be part of the 3D rendered background which made it appear to be part of the game world. "There are dungeons with bright computer game related words on them in this world?" Maybe this is just me being weird, but with the rendered backgrounds and the perspective at a similar place to where you would expect a game character's to be made it feel like the game had started, and yet there were menus.

Half life 2 does something similar, but I think it uses stranger camera views and the menu text doesn't seem to be a part of the world, it's like it's written on a window that looks into the world. My initial thought was that it may have been better if you moved around the area to select menu items, walked through different doors or something, but I don't know. I suppose you're probably more interested in feedback on the game iteslf.


Another early thing that I didn't like so much was the fact that almost as soon as I gained control, I practically lost it. I don't mind the stumbling / hard to controll-ness that comes with low sanity, but for it to happen straight away gave the impression that the actions weren't really controlled by me and sort of 'detatched' me from the character rather than making me feel like I was Daniel. Later on the loss of control works very effectively, though I'm not too sure about it happening so soon.

It's probably worth noting that the first time I played it I was really tired and not in the mood to be doing anything. But I felt compelled to do something, which ended up being play Amnesia so maybe my impression wouldn't have been quite as bad otherwise.


One thing that I Like is the fact that all the 'collectables' seem to be useful. This is perhaps the only game where I don't just horde items so that I'll always have plenty should I ever need them, I always want to use my flint/lantern because I don't want to be in the dark. There's no logical reason for it, I just want to. On the other hand, the flint/oil do seem to turn up in pretty weird places, or maybe I'm just not that up to date on usual flint storage locations.


And the thing I like the best so far is probably the monsters (I think I may have seen about two or three of them or perhaps even the same one 2/3 times). The great thing is that I still feel like I'm completely unprepared for any sort of close encounter to them. I have no idea what will happen if they catch me, but the world is so convinceing that I really don't want to know. Before I'd seen them I was getting pretty anxious about what would happen when I saw them. Reading about some of the creatures in one of the texts started getting me worried, then being told by the tutorial hints to run or hide when I saw one added to it as well. When I finally did see one I kinda froze and just tried to hide and stay completely still until it went away. Which it didn't, so I ended up trying to creep as slowly away from it as I could until I got a bit of distance between us, then I sprinted. It was incredibly nerve racking.


A final thing for the negatives is that the castle doesn't seem to be structured very naturally (or maybe it's just the way that you progress through it that doens't seem natural). It always seems like there's only one way to go at each point in time, then you unlock the next door, explore and move to the next. It seems kinda forced, though I'm not sure how that could be avoided easily in this type of game.



I don't think I've written this much in ages, but if more things occur to me while playing I'll come back and post some more. It's actually been a week or two since I last played it so there are probably a few things I forgot to mention.

QXD-me:
Thanks for the feedback! The trap door is still pretty early, more disturbing stuff to come :)

I finally tried the demo - and it freak me the hell out. I thought about buying it but I can't play it. Amnesia scares the crap out of me! It's just too good at what it does. I won't buy it because I'll never get through it! Yeah, I'm a wuss.

That makes me both happy and sad to hear! :)

Play it it short sessions, ghostwheel. And know that it's all in your mind.

Amnesia is not just scary. It's also very well designed. It will never abuse or neglect you the way that other, far more "fun" games do. It takes care of you, never leaves you alone. It's a story.

I've finally found my first puzzle that I had to look up online, the one with the different shaped things (I forget what they were specifically, there was a square one and a triangle one and another one) and the lift. I hadn't actually realised it was a puzzle, I'd looked over the text, seen no immediate clues as to a puzzle and assumed I'd just missed something else out. Perhaps this was just a result of me being conditioned to not expect to have to do any form of abstract thinking in video games whatsoever.

I must admit that at this point (just made it past the Cistern), I have given up on trying to solve puzzles on my own. I just immediately read a walkthrough as soon as I realize something is a puzzle. Sometimes I don't realize it, though, and I solve a puzzle simple by interacting with things without really knowing why. I like this better because it doesn't take me out of the experience so much. But still, the puzzles are really a weak point in the design. Amnesia is a major improvement on Penumbra in this respect, in my opinion. And I hope the next Frictional game will take another step further in the same direction.

That is exactly what we where hoping for with all puzzles, but it was very hard to find the right level. Depending on the game experience people has, different things will feel intuitive.

This is our major goal for the next game! We are trying to work out a design where the goal is always obvious and the player simple does interesting interactions along the way. As we do not want the player to feel like they are exploring on their own and not being handheld all the way. The trick is to actually do a lot of handholding, but keep the player unaware of this. We are not sure how to do this, but have some ideas. Perhaps I have to make a thread here discussing it :)

Sounds great!

Yes, would love to discuss it! :)

posted here:
http://notgames.org/forum/index.php?topic=336.0

:)