How "horror on the contrary" was created — the history of Carrion development
This summer, the Polish studio Phobia Game Studio released a horror-metroidvaniya called Carrion. How the idea of the project came about, what I had to face when creating a navigation system for an amorphous monster, and whether there will be Carrion crossovers with other titles — said level designer Krzysztof Chomicki.
Start of development
- Phobia Game Studio is a young and very small studio from Poland. In total, there were four people in the “horror on the contrary” team: Khomicki himself, project manager Sebastian Krośkiewicz, composer Chris Velasco and sound engineer Maciej Niedzielski.
- At first, the developers weren’t even sure what their new game should look like. They were inspired by the movie “Something” (1982) and knew for sure only one thing — there would be an amorphous creature in Carrion, becoming bigger and stronger from eating people.
- To understand how to develop the project, the Phobia team decided to share gifs on Twitter with prototypes of the future monster’s movements and eating mechanics. Carrion authors tracked readers’ reactions and took notes for themselves. How many monsters should there be in the game? Should it be a real-time strategy or not?
- As Khomicki says, in the end, Carrion did not have any of the mechanics that they tested on Twitter. But the comments to them still benefited the project. They convinced the developers that they needed to make a platformer puzzle game in which there would be as few mechanics familiar to the genre as possible and at the same time a lot would be taken from classic metroidvaniy.
Nuances of creation: graphics, management and navigation
- The developers did the previous Butcher title on Unity, but for Carrion they decided to go the other way and built the engine on the MonoGame platform. According to them, this made it possible to run the game “on relatively crappy computers.”
- The graphics in Carrion are simple and, according to Khomicki, this has benefited the project. According to him, extremely realistic graphics would only deprive the game of a touch of charm and comicality. In this case, a real horror could have turned out, and the Phobia team did not want to scare gamers.
- In 90-95% of situations, the Carrion monster behaves as set by the physics of the game (how it lies, how it moves and how clearly it is displayed). Although there are several well-defined sprites like eyes and mouth. This approach has led to certain problems in terms of responsiveness of management. But the developers have tried to give the player maximum control over the creation within its nature.
- On the other hand, the management should not have been super-precise, Khomitsky believes. He justified this by saying that the creature from Carrion is quite ugly.
- The authors of the title had to go through a lot of difficulties when designing levels. This was especially true of the final of the game, where the monster grew to huge sizes. And what if the user presses some lever and accidentally closes the door? This should cut his monster in half, because part of the character was left outside the door.
- Khomicki also adds that the development of levels for a monster character is very different from the development of levels for humanoid characters. For example, working with gravity. The monster can climb anywhere, so he needs completely different obstacles on the way.
- Carrion has a complicated navigation system, and it’s no coincidence. Although the players complained about the lack of a card, Hovicki believes that it would be superfluous. He compares the title to games like Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls and Metroid, where there were no maps either. In them, gamers had to be more attentive and try not to miss the hints so as not to get lost.
- At the same time, the level designer from Phobia is glad that people create location maps themselves and share them with each other. In his opinion, it strengthens the community.
- For the same purpose — to strengthen the Carrion community — the authors of the project added a level editor to it. This feature has proved popular. At the moment, one of the users has even created his own two-hour campaign.
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Little is known about the future plans of the creators of Carrion. They do not deny (but also do not confirm) the possibility of launching a crossover between this title and the Butcher action. Khomitsky also did not tell what the studio is working on now.
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