“I’ve rarely been as impressed with an indie horror game as I am with Storm Child. Despite its short length and modest visuals, it delivers an absolutely outstanding horror experience. The minimalistic controls, subtle narrative background cues, and exemplary sound design add up to a damn good game.” – Last Level Press

Storm Child is my first completed Game project. Production spanned from June 2013 until December 2014, throughout my last year at school. It is a short horror experience that uses a sound-driven atmosphere to create suspense and tension with minimal ‘jump-scares’. Since its release at the end of 2014, it has garnered over 15,000 downloads and an average rating of 4.4/5 based on 96 reviews. I built the game primarily in the FPS Creator X9 Engine, a Level Design-focussed arm of the DarkBASIC platform I had been using throughout my teenage years. For my first project I wanted to stay within my current knowledge base, and so stuck with what I knew best and worked from there. The engine was riddled with technical inadequacies which led to me having to be creative with my use of scripting and sound cues to construct a cohesive narrative.

I realised that I needed to generate a significant amount of fear from the game’s environment, and so set about constructing level designs that were capable of creating this kind of terror: dead ends, sharp corners, dark hallways, narrow doorways – things that minimise the amount the player can see. Featured overleaf are the completed floor layouts for the Orphanage level in Chapter one, along with screenshots showing how I implemented the paper designs in the 3D editor.

You can view, download and play Storm Child at Gamejolt:

https://gamejolt.com/games/storm-child/23484

Level Plans: