Creating Ghosts

One of my roles in the group was to design the enemies for the game. Although the majority of the design and its connectivity with the rest of the game is left to group meetings, I still deal with the smaller details and the individual visual design, story background and mechanics each one works by. I decided to start off with the visual designs.
We all agreed upon how the enemies would work. Each and every enemy would have AI that allowed them to follow you and hide from you. Although we haven't quite decided how the enemies would hide from you, we have pretty much agreed that they should be invisible for the most part. You would be alerted to their presence through the appearance of frost or icy breath. You would see their location from paper moving, wet footprints and clever sound design. We also discussed how enemies would only become visible just before you catch them.
With this in mind I wanted each enemy to be unique. Having hordes of copied and pasted zombies or enemies may be good for an action game, but for a horror where you don't need hordes of enemies you only need a few, if not one. This means you can give it a backstory and it's own way of moving. Since our game is split into multi-linear side quests that eventually link with a main story arc. Each story can have anywhere between 1 to 3 enemies. Enemies cannot be killed/exorcised without completing the story they are linked with. The only way to repel them is to use the camera flash. This uses up your limited supply of battery and will merely buy you time.
Since all the enemies are unique and have a fairly simple way of repelling them, I can make each one wildly different from each other. When I was developing the main character I had a fairly strong idea of what I wanted her to look like so developed her by layering sketch over sketch until I had one I wanted to work on and paint. With enemies the wide variety and strong visual element led me to use the silhouette method to design 6 different ghosts, then allowing the group to pick two to develop further. Because of this method each enemy would be instantly recognizable and have a strong visual starting point for further development. I used a tutorial by the concept artist Feng Zhu as a base for the technique I used.

This gave me a very good idea of what I was doing. An especially useful piece of advice this tut gave me was that I should keep everyone different from the next with enough detail that a good 3D artist could create a model just from that silhouette.
In my search for inspiration I borrowed two books from the Norwich Forum Library: The Most Amazing Haunted Places in Britain (Readers Digest, 2009) and The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits (Guiley. Rosemary Ellen, 2000 2nd Edition). The former wasn't particularly useful simply because the stories were too brief to give a real visual feel for the ghosts. The latter aloud me to look up obscure spirits and stories which lead to almost indirect inspiration. After spending a couple of hours reading this book, I found that everyday things would naturally form the idea of a ghost in my head. Most of the ghosts, however, take very indirect and subtle influence from many places.

The ghost silhouettes with colour added to any that I want to draw particular attention to.

  1. This design was based loosely off of "The Skullkid" from the Legend of Zelda series (Nintendo, 1986).

SkullKid from the Zelda series

The character is a young boy who carries a butchers cleaver and wears a ironically cheerful mask. He is lost in a perpetual game of hide and seek meets tag. He will deliberatly hide in rooms waiting for you to come close and face away. He then creeps up and takes you. The idea being that he will give clues as to his rough location by singing or appearing in front of you briefly. You must then try to deduce where exactly he is hiding and flash him with the camera so that he cannot get you.

2. The "Hanged Man" was just an idea I had in my head and decided to work upon. A part of this was the idea of Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 (Konami, 2001). The idea of an enemy that drags himself around shows both agony and the anger and vengeance to force himself to continue to drag it.

Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2

The Hanged Man drags the beams from the gallows around with him with the noose still around his neck. Clues to his location are given from the sounds of dragging and chocking noises. Despite being slow, he can throw the beams of the gallows at you, knocking you onto the floor preventing you from snapping him with the camera. He can easily be outrun, but he can try to anticipate your path and try to cut you off or trap you.

3. This character is based on a section on Hermitage Castle in The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits (p181). This article mentions an evil lord, Lord Soulis, who was bound in a lead sheet and chains and then boiled alive. He is an alternative to the hanged man. He behaves in much the same way, dragging around his ball and chain.

4. The drowned woman has very little direct influence, rather an "organic" idea. She appears as a pool of water which runs like normal water. She can drag herself half out of the water and slowly drag the pool around. She can also appear out of existing pools of water. This means the player should avoid water and run away from any moving pools. The only clues to her arrival is the pool she dwells in.

5. Based more directly off of an article from The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits (p201), Jimmy Squarefoot. Jimmy Squarefoot is a spirit that has a pigs head and wanders the earth on square peg shoes. I decided that this was too "otherwordly" and instead had the idea of a butcher who was murdered by being shoved into the front half of a pig and choking on pigs blood. The ghost moves like a giant boar. It will charge you extremely quickly. It will be invisible but give off visual and audio clues as to it's location such as dust trails and stamping. This will give you a chance to flash it with the camera before it hits you.

6. The Old Hag is something I have known about for a long time from no specific source. The old hag is a fairly common dream shared by many people for a long period of history. The Old Hag is a nightmare. The dreamer first experiences sleep paralysis where they are aware but cannot move. They then see an old hag in the corner of the room who slowly approaches the bed. The old hag then slowly climbs onto the dreamers chest and strangles them. This will be difficult to implement into gameplay but will be interesting if we do.

A painting of the old hag dream