- [Gamer] I'm not moving there if you're standing there waiting for me [panicked screaming]. Oh my god! [laughing]

- [Thomas] Players started making up things on their own. There are no monsters around, they could just waltz through the map, it's all a facade, and our hope is not letting the players like, look behind the curtains and see what's really going on. 

I am Thomas Grip, Creative Director at Frictional Games and designer of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. We set out to make a great horror game and realized we could trick the players into scaring themselves. 

The Penumbra franchise, what we started at Frictional Games with, we formed a three person team and released our first game Penumbra: Overture in 2007. The game went so-so, and we made a sequel called Penumbra: Black Plague, and after that we also made an expansion called Penumbra: Requiem. One of the games that I was really influenced in was Silent Hill 2, had made, or Silent Hill 1 even, had made great marks on me. There was just something about that game, in how it frightened me that we were trying to recreate, and then another thing was also text adventures, and I've been playing these for quite awhile and I was still quite into, and what I liked about text adventures is that their puzzles made sense. 

So in Resident Evil, you, and for that matter the Silent Hill games, you have like a piano that you have to push some keys on and then a door opens. Why does that happen? No one knows, it's just a very, like, it doesn't really belong to the world, but these text adventures, they were all about making their puzzles belong with the world, and they also have these vivid descriptions of environments and so on, and I was like shit could we do that in a 3D game like with Silent Hill and so on? So that was the frame of mind at that current moment. 

There was a bunch of these false starts when starting Amnesia, the whole production was filled with them and one of them that I remember was light puzzles. So we thought the game is a horror game, and we know from the past that the play between and light and dark is very important for creating good horror. So the next idea then was, which felt was obvious, why not make gameplay based around light and darkness, and it felt like this was gonna be great, so we envisioned the player having different light sources: opening windows, and putting fires into fireplaces, lighting up lamps and whatnot in order to create light environments that the player would then be safe in. But that looked crap. That didn't look scary, it felt artificial and so on, so we just went through a couple of quick designs, and then decided that well, we won't be able to have this sort of game, so we were extremely disappointed because talking it through it sounded great. We started thinking okay, so light and dark is not gonna work directly as a gameplay system, so we thought what would? And then, well, the player could perhaps just lose sanity. 

So we don't have any clear gameplay loop here, but if there is something just generally bad about being in the dark such as you losing your sanity. So we went with that and we tried that out and it worked much better, so let's base the game around sanity, and we added like if you were low on sanity you got slower and there was other gameplay factors into it. We added special items the player could find, sanity potions, in order to increase your sanity, and we felt if we had this sanity mechanic like darkness can be an enemy the player would have to play with in order to progress in the game and try that. But then it turned out that players didn't like that at all because there was a really hard time having the right balance here. So players, for instance some players were too much in the darkness, had very low sanity for a big part of the game, had real issues completing it. Other people were really good at avoiding the darkness, and then, you know, the spooky environments and all of the ambience we were trying to build up so they didn't get a scary game experience, and the game got too easy for them. So we had balance issues. 

So what we did was that sanity was still a number, player could still go insane, hallucinate, and so on, and eventually collapse on the ground from lack of mental health. But that didn't influence the game at all, if the player collapsed, he could get up and continue going, so there was no balancing need for us anymore, so instead we had basically nothing. We had a sanity meter, we had some sanity effects, and then there was no real fail state, and it worked better, and then we don't really say what the consequences are for this but the player assumes, right, if you're gonna lose your mind I'm not gonna be able to play him, he might die, he might, you know, be harder to control, he might attract the attention of monsters and so on and so forth. I even think that, if I'm not mistaken, it was a long ago since I went through all of this, there's a hint that says if you go too insane, monsters gonna have an easier way of finding you. This is a lie, there is no logic at all like that in the game, but we are planting an idea into the player. 

What really is happening in this sanity system, is that there's a meter, it goes down as you're looking at certain things, and as the player is in the dark for too long. If it hits certain levels, we're play certain effects. There's a library of what we call sanity effects that just plays up randomly when you're at a certain level, say if you're below 0.5 insanity certain effects are gonna come online and so on, then if you reach 0 you come to the end state where you collapse, you go up and regain some sanity. For the player, they see it as a fight of remaining sane, but in reality the game always makes sure to have them at a certain spot. So you can really just play the game in any way you like almost and you're gonna have the same amount of insanity drop for the game as a whole, but players are not gonna notice that, so they're playing, they're playing the game based on totally different rules from what there really is underlying this gameplay loop. 

It's sort of like making soup on a nail. There's this fable, at least in Sweden, it's called "Making Soup on a Nail", and it's about this guy who comes to some family and tells them "Oh I'm gonna be making soup for you just on this nail", and then he like "Oh um," he pours some water in and says "It could taste better with a few potatoes" and they like, throw in some potatoes, and then he like, makes them throw in more and more of their own stuff, and they're like "Wow you made this tasty soup just out of a nail!" and what really happened was that the family added all of the ingredients on their own, and we found out that with Amnesia and pulling away mechanics, a similar thing happened. 

My major takeaway from making Amnesia is a deeper understanding just how game mechanics, or that may or may not be there shape how the player experiences things. I didn't have, like I had more of a, for me personally I had more like a classical way of thinking about it, like you had a system, that system does things, and didn't really think past it even though made horror games made on that with fear and so on, but with Amnesia I started to realize just how important the player's mind was, and I hadn't really taken that into account to that extent that we had before, and, for company wise, the major thing for us was that, well, now we're not just a company making horror games, now we're a company that messes with players heads. Amnesia had an incredibly important part in influencing how we developed Soma. There was tons of takeaways that we used later on. 

So, first and foremost, it was how we shape the player experience, like in Soma we wanted the story to be about something a bit deeper than just scaring the player, and had we not done Amnesia before it, we would not have the ideas and even the, in some sense, the language to speak about it because at this point we started to think about things in what's in the systems, and what's in the player's mind, and that sort of thing, whereas before system and player's mind was basically the same, but after Amnesia we learned how to split them, and we learned how to use that to our advantage. This was crucial for the development of Soma where the players should start thinking about consciousness and about morality with robots and so on, and in order to achieve that we had to have like a really strong understanding of what went through the player's head as they encountered different situations. The other way in which Amnesia inspired Soma was that we wanted Amnesia to be about deeper themes, like we had this idea that it should be about what makes someone evil, and I didn't feel we got that across. 

So we got the scariness, we knew we had a tool in how to trick the player's mind here, but I didn't feel that we used that fully, so in making Soma I wanted to like, take much larger focus on achieving the thematic things, and then using lessons in Amnesia from doing that. So it's sort of interesting how I both felt Amnesia was a failure on one end, but at the same time it taught us so much about how to make these sort of experiences, and hadn't we done it we wouldn't have been able to do Soma at all.