Sinister Studios Games
Game Concept
Specimen is a horror puzzle game based on the popular concept of escape rooms. When trapped in a hospital the main character known as Frederick Irwin is awoken by screaming, he hears someone offering something a meal and it doesn’t take long for Frederick to realise that he is the intended meal.
The whole idea come around from an idea of being trapped in a room with a monster attempting to break in while the main character must escape and run for their life. We expanded on this concept using story, we really focused a lot of our attention on why Frederick is being attacked by a monster, this is where we decided on a surgeon that was performing experiments on people which lead to manmade monsters. We pushed past the idea of an evil doctor being evil and really went into his backstory on who he is and why he was doing the things he was doing.
We decided this was the best idea for the game as the gameplay will be mostly simple puzzles and needed a good story, however the story is hard to tell from just the gameplay. Therefore, the idea we have chosen to use is where the story is written all over the walls.
It sounds literal however it can also mean the walls have items such as newspaper clippings and photos which when added together give a much clearer context of who the character was and why he is doing the things he is doing. This technique was decided on after seeing how well the game Left 4 Dead managed its story.
A picture from Left 4 Dead where a message was sprayed on a wall highlighting a part of the story which players can use to piece together a much bigger story. (Aldershot 2009)Another game we have taken this idea from would be Bioshock 3, while the game does not have any direct story within the environment it instead uses landmarks and architecture to convey the story, in a sense it’s a way of environmental storytelling, a way to tell the story without telling the player directly.
An example of Bioshock where everything in the scene paints a picture of the game, to the overbearing statue in the middle of the frame to the airships just off to the side to even the buildings and how it’s all constructed together. (Edwin McRae, 2018).
The style of the game we decided that the story should be taking place in the late 1960’s and so while it is horror and dark it will also be taking place in a time where some of the technology was not as high tech as it is now. That is also matched by some of the furniture around at the time which was very retro-modern. We believe that this will be somewhat jarring to look at for players and feel unnatural for many of them, which puts them more in a place of uncertainty, it also allows us to experiment with the machinery a little bit making it more horrific or scary looking and using the décor we can pair it with the lighting to show off certain shapes or patterns which may look far worse in dark lighting.
Alethea Drexler (2016), a blog post showing some old photos for a series of hospital images taken from the 1960’s, the image on the left shows a hospital room which was typical with recent advancements in technology at the time. The image on the right found on Pinterest from user Regina Graves, (2018) showing off waiting rooms around the 1940’s.
Simple Living Room Site, (2018) talking about how simple and attractive the 1960’s style was for living rooms and how it can still be used today. Pintrest, (2018), with an image showing a living room on the right.