Less is more. Balancing telling and acting in fear

As a solo developer and producer having previously released multiple titles across all consoles, fear has a special affection for me because it’s the first title I’ve made with a team, albeit a tiny team of three talented first developers who helped me shape the narrative aspects of fear.

Having developed three horror titles before, I have found that the journey through the pitfalls of indie game development makes balancing narrative and action a real hurdle.

As an indie developer, you not only try to overcome big obstacles like budget problems, but also technical problems. Luckily for us, developing for the Xbox consoles has been a very reassuring process. The IDXbox team was very patient and helpful during the certification process fear. Knowing our engine, more specifically Unreal Engine 4, also helped us a lot in realizing our vision.

Our vision for fear was simple: have a short but intense and atmospheric horror experience. We wanted to keep the interactive elements simple from the ground up and wanted the players to focus on the narrative concept we were trying to establish. One of the biggest pitfalls for indie horror games is to “overwrite” the backstory… Players know they’re playing an indie game on a relatively low budget, so they want to experience something more unique, contrasting, and distinct.

So what did we do for fear was to create a multi-layered and deep story involving several different characters and create a plot that the player only gets a glimpse of. It was really difficult for us to cut out most of our literary material, but we had to finish the game the way we envisioned it.

Players will encounter several interestingly macabre characters along the way fear but only experience a fraction of their lives. This might sound like a risk that can alienate some types of gamers, but hey, what’s the point of being an independent developer if you’re not brave enough to take such risks?

Finally, fear is a short horror game, but it’s full of provocative incidents and quivering and scary characters at every step you take and for most of the characters you encounter fear

it might be your only time to meet them.

We believe this opens a door to replayability and endless possibilities for a sequel. We eagerly await audience reactions to each level of backstory fear.

Here is also an interesting question:

If you meet an interesting character just once in a horror game, how does that character affect you?

The answer is simple: you will start imagining things about that character. And we believe capturing a player’s imagination in a horror game is the best thing an indie developer can do in this genre. It would be our ultimate reward as a developer for Fear. Dive into fear today – it’s out now on Xbox!