Howdy guys and girls. I started work on chapter two earlier this week and whilst I am making good progress with the development, I keep hitting a few annoying, albeit miniscule road blocks. When you are developing a horror game the genre itself seems to try its utmost best to guide you in certain developmental directions. Think of learning your first song on the guitar. Now you know that one song, doesn’t everything you try to play from that point forth seem eerily similar to it?

It is a fool’s job to recklessly throw around words like Innovative and *revolutionary** *because in actuality, when it comes to video games, straying from well-trodden path is a profusely hard task to follow through with to the end of a game’s development. It has been said that there are only seven different, basic plots for any given story and that applies to video games too.

On Wednesday I was working on the opening section of Citizen Plague chapter two. I had created what you would call a *repetition scare.* In simple terms, this is when the player believes that something of somebody in the game’s environment is either inanimate or simply has no purpose. After multiple encounters (having the player backtrack through the same area multiple times) the player will become familiar with this seemingly docile object and will simply ignore it existence. Now he player’s defences are down, they are very susceptible to being easily frightened. So, on the fifth encounter with the object, it does something unexpected (imagine the iron maidens in *Amnesia* flying open at you). Well done! As a developer, you just matched the scare-power of a blown light bulb…

The fact that I even had to call the above mentioned tactic a *repetition scare** *adds greatly to the point I am trying to make here. I can do that, and I already have, but what else can I do? Without putting a cat in a well lit room, how will anybody know there’s a cat in that room? Teasing the player using audio and the environment can only go for a certain amount of time before you, as a developer have to reveal something for there to be any kind of emotional payoff. Yes, you can have the player use their imagination, which in the horror genre works extremely well but after a while there has to be some existential evidence of a threat present in the experience. Otherwise they are going to catch onto the fact that they are dealing with nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

Obviously there’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t go into here, but I hope you got the gist of what I had to say. These are only my thoughts. Please let me know what you think.

Have a great day friends! :D