Lighting

One of the biggest things in creating fear is using lighting to your advantage as i said before people are sacred of what they think they see in the dark, what could be lurking in there and ultimately what their imagination tells them is there. I did a vast amount of research into lighting in this module looking at how practitioners use it in film and video games to get the desired effect of horror. A game from scare night that was played on (for research in my dissertation and practical) was F.E.A.R.2, this game utilised light very well as you can see below, I've also included some more screenshots of games i took inspiration from and played and studied -

F.E.A.R.2 - 2009

 Gone Home - 2013

See below this scene is lit very well it looks spooky because the only light source is coming from the T.V it makes you on edge and think to yourself whats behind that curtain over there? 

Silent Hill Homecoming - 2008

Good use of shadows and light above ^^^^^

What I've found works well is very dim lighting and then using the correct light in unity for example when i lit my lamp i thought about how the lamp would also be lit not just the light source coming from it, when a lamp is lit it has a source of light coming from the lamp itself, also the lampshade is lit because of the light source, there is a spotlight of light source from the shade of the lamp. In my practical i used three light sources to show this, a point light to light the entirety of the lamp, a spot light to light the actual lamp shade creating more realism and another spotlight to show the downward spotlight an actual lamp would create, from this i believe it shows my research into lighting and my understanding more of how its used in horror games-

Here are some more of my screen shots showing what i did for lighting in my unity scene -  

I used a spot light on my torch model to give the players a feel of more control and to utilise the feeling of fear through dim lit rooms, i feel that the torch worked really well in my level and i couldn't have hoped for it to work better, next time i will definitely try a none lit level and use other tactile effects such as cam corders to see in the dark or i may strap a torch light source onto a camcorder.

As you can see from the screenshots just above and below I originally was going to fill the Illusion corridor with lots of torches and orange lighting however when i testing this they looked out of place and over powered the Illusion that players were supposed to experience, after asking Jeff and Tim to try out my level they agreed with me and so i decided to get rid of them, i stand by my decision as having the Illusion corridor be a psychological strip into fear it didn't need lighting up with ill placed torches.

 I learned from games such as Alan Wake that less is more especially when it comes to lighting for horror games dim and dark is the way to go especially if you want to get into someones mind-

 I'm very happy with the outcome of my level lighting wise i feel that it portrays an understanding of lighting in horror games and links very well to my dissertation. From the screenshot below you can see that i have used less to create more and spaced out my scene well with lighting to give the feeling of the player being alone in this strange maze of a place.

I also like the effect i used with the torches adding an orange glow gave the illusion particles a more darker feel as they were just plane white before they have a dark shade to them also now with the light contrast.