Is bigfoot scary?

I'm considering making a survival game where you're stuck on an island. I'd like to not remake my ocean survival game where sharks and a sea monster were the main enemies, so I'm trying to think of a good enemy that would be frightening to deal with on land. A nightmare last night reminded me that big foot / Sasquatch is a pretty scary monster.

It's humanoid, so the amount of intelligence is unknown. It's also an animal, so it's aggressiveness is unknown. It's something of mystery - some people believe it's real, so it's senses and abilities are unknown. It's not quite a giant, but it may have the strength or jaws necessary to turn you into a bloody splat on the ground.

It's an unpredictable monster with more danger than other wild animals, but it has enough intelligence to not constantly attack you, so it will build more tension and atmosphere than wild animals. It makes different kinds of noises, both vocal and with the environment because they're so heavy. It's humanoid figure leads me to believe that it hunts for food like you will need to - so when choosing a hunting ground, you need to be careful not to be in the same one as it.

Would being stuck on an island with bigfoot scare you?

I know this isn't the most frightening image of bigfoot, but this is probably the goriest bigfoot movie there is xD
http://www.cryptomundo.com/wp-content/ABominableMouth.jpg

 

yeah if people are afraid of 5 nights at freddy (animatronic murder machines) why not, and even if its not the youtubers will eat it up like candy - 19 million views

 

Bigfoot reminds of of the Sims so not scary. I think ghosts are scarier.

 

@Aiursrage2k whoa whoa there, that video is popular because of Markiplier and for no other reason

Bigfoot is terrifying in the movies I've seen lol. That picture I posted a link to is right before he bites someone's face off... literally. People use that expression sometimes, but this movie just... he bites off the front half of the guy's entire skull. Super strong, variable intelligence, above you in the food chain.

Ghosts are scary in their own way, but I want the player to feel tense & in danger, not spooked every few seconds. That's the big difference between 5 nights at freddy's 1 and 2. The first one was creepy and atmospheric. The second one had more jumpscares than whac-a-mole.

 

Yeah but not every video of his gets that many views. I am sure he could play any game it would get so many views - heavy bullets only got 1 million views LOL

 

I've seen people play it with under 1000 views. If you search for that game, he's always in the top links. Markiplier is the face for that game lol. It's a mix of his popularity and the game's popularity. It promotes his play of it more than pewdiepie's!

 

Is it any scarier than a pack of wolfs? If the solution to any problem is a 12 gauge shotgun, I don't think anything is really scary at that point.

 

I've seen some movies that show people shooting hunting rifles at him without much success. It's a mythological creature (to most), so the vitality is unknown. Also there will be no guns lol, maybe a bow / crossbow at the most. Also this project took a dive because I'm waiting on unity 5 so in the meantime my trees are cubes that follow you lol. When you're more than 60 units from a tree, it deletes that tree and instantiates a new one near you. This makes the illusion of a forest, but my tree models suck

It's nice that the terrain can hold 5000 trees and not lag at all, but I need interactive trees so I'm settling for 1000 junk trees that follow you as long as you're in the forest area. And I'm using fog to stop people from seeing that the forest is only a handful of trees in the last 30-60 units around the player lol.

The movie "Exists" had a bigfoot die from 1 shotgun blast to the face, but then several more came out of the woodwork + a larger father one. It did not end well...

 

After seeing that picture, this should come as no surprise, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm bad with outside terrains and handling large amounts of objects. I give up

Maybe I'll give "survival island" another shot when unity 5 is out if there's a better way to handle trees and things. I'll stick to what I know until then. @Teila I've never tried ghosts before, so I'll give that a shot with what I can already do with horror games taking place inside of rooms & houses.

 

Depends on how you design your game If you design your game to be funny (I mean the standard type of funny, not "there's something funny goin on here lemme get my gun and enter this dark wood with a torch and observe the 3 headed midgets" funny, Bigfoot won't be scary; if you design your game like, say, slender, and antagonise Bigfoot he will be scary.

 

I'm guessing you haven't seen this one:

 

I would design it around mostly audio cues that signal the approach and position of bigfoot. An encounter wouldn't always be fatal, but he may choose to lift you off your feet and pluck your head off

@shaderop to anyone who's seen a scary bigfoot film and knows what that thing is capable of, that movie is seen as a ruse that he is performing so that he can murder them in their sleep. Bigfoot in the movies is the epitome of evil! lol

 

These wonderful videos may give you some ideas

 

My first thoughts were the TV show Lost and the game The Forest, maybe with a touch of the Blair Witch Project movie and the Alien: Isolation game. The mystique of Bigfoot is the mystery of whether he exists. I would be the most scared on a mundane island, simply trying to survive, and then hearing a strange noise -- perhaps, later, catching a glimpse of something in the dark, or finding a gutted animal, or strange markings -- and being left to wonder what's out there, or if it's just my imagination. And if I came back to my makeshift camp after a day of foraging and found it ransacked? Who knows....

 

@Uberpete I'll check those out. I like tension for the fact that it lingers more than a jumpscare. I should have specified the audio cues will normally be subtle, I am aware of the effect that anticipation has on building up a good scare In a handful of movies, as a monster finally smashes a door in, the camera shies away from the sight of them and follows the main character(s) into a little huddle beside the wall, hoping it doesn't get to where they are.

That's exactly what I was going off of with the nightmare I had

Day 1: normal survival essentials - securing water and lumber
Night 1: windy, obscuring all noise beyond a few feet of me and snapping branches
Day 2: finding a gathering of animals to stalk later for food
Night 2: a very brief cry of pain from an animal that I wonder if I imagined
Day 3: find torn up remains of an animal I was planning to hunt for food
Night 3: noises I'm not familiar with near the camp
Day 4: large areas of brush cleared around the camp
Night 4: wake up in a cold sweat like I had heard something nearby, and hide under something. Large legs of something walk by and stop near me, but a rabbit scurries away and the monster gives chase.
Day 5: Lots of ambient noise all day, being followed. Run out of the woods into a clearing so nothing can sneak up on me, then a large figure pounces and all vision fades to red, then black and then back into my room.

Detailed nightmares make for good inspiration, usually for short stories. I wish I wasn't so terrible with handling large amounts of objects. I'll give LOD another shot. I was concerned initially because without lod, my "trees" were brown cubes with slightly large green cubes on top. That's pretty low poly, yet with a few thousand of them, my fps was ~25-30. I'll be checking out unity 5 (again) on wednesday and see how many trees I can get in with a crappy 2D image for the tree and a relatively short culling distance.

 

Sounds like you're off to a good start plot-wise. With a bit of prep work, it's possible to get a dense forest with Unity 4. Look at The Forest for example. I found this thread informative because a couple people actually ran tests and provided numbers. I would've used Unity's Terrain system and tree tool, but I might use GameObjects instead if I need to do a forest in the future. Using LOD and meeting all the requirements for dynamic batching appears to be the keys. Anyway, good luck!

 

Thanks. I definitely wanna chop down and destroy trees, so the built in terrain is a not happening lol.

Do you think iterating over the trees now and then and disabling colliders on ones very far from the player will help more than hurt performance? I don't know how dynamic batching works, but I do have 1 prefab instantiated like 1000 times and the scale is the same. They all share the same single material and there's not even a color tint.

In the future I probably won't vary trees too much either, so hopefully I get a better grasp on batching. LOD I'm doing ok with and I played life is feudal and saw crazy good performance with an environment totally loaded with trees, rocks, grass etc because of well setup LOD groups.

I've been programming for over a decade and using unity for over a year. I feel so strange when I run into something I have zero experience with

 

In my personal opinion bigfoot isnt really that scarry. But its really matter of personal feelings..same as I dont find scarry lochness or dracula.
The thing is, that it really doesnt matter about the creature thats after you. Everything is about the tension that you can build up in player. If you try to breakdown a scenes from any horror movie, there is a couple things that makes the audiences scared. There is a tension building up towards the scary part, there is some kind of dark atmosphere going on, music and soundefects are making the atmosphere even scarier etc... If you are able to implement these things right, even angry pack of mad squirrels could be scary. E.g. slenderman..there was just something in that game, that made whole situation really tense for some people. Survival games these days makes me feel that, the player has a lot of power (as you should have in game), but as I think about it, it would be really hard for me to cut down tree or build a wooden house from logs, or even make a fireplace with wet wood in cold winter with matches. If I would try to make a bow, it would take me like 50 tries before I would make bow that could really kill something. If you give player the ability to be warrior hero, he will be one, that rushes everything and tries no scope 360 headshot with bow. But if he will be barely surviving and for example create some weapon mainly for selfdefence, he will be sh*t scared for his life.
Anyway, I guess this is matter of personal opinion about these kind of games.

 

I agree with this and your other point. As you said, what's important is what you do with the scenario. There's a certain folk mystery -- does Bigfoot exist or not? -- that a game might be able to tap into.

 

People already have a concept of bigfoot, so you might want to think about how you want to surprise people, and then come up with clever ways in which to show this.

In terms of the player's view going through the game, is bigfoot:

more violent than you thought?
bigger / smaller?
stronger?
more savage?
more intelligent? if so, in what ways does this intelligence pose problems?
is there more than one?
does he have a hidden motive for you to discover?

 

This is also why I think it's potentially frightening. There's a lot we don't know.

"Is there more than one?" is typically the one that gets me in my nightmares

 

Maybe I'm a bit late on this, but anything can be scary if done properly. Stephen King fir instance seems to have a knack of making things scary that otherwise wouldn't be, mainly through the use of tension. As for Big Foot, I certainly wouldn't feel safe on an island with that creature. An 8 foot tall intelligent ape shrouded in mystery? Yes, this is a good candidate for sure. For inspiration I suggest you learn a bit about gorillas, as they were thought to be demons by many people before they were recognized as a species.

 

That's some interesting information about gorilla. I like doing horror stuff, and I want such a game to exist more than I care to profit on it. To make up for my terrible art skills, I may use free and non-commercial free models for trees and other things.

A variably intelligent, ~8 foot tall ape

Does it have enough intelligence for peace, or are you just food?
Does it have medium intelligence and will coexist with you unless you get in its way?
Is it sufficiently intelligent to recognize your humanoid figure and work together with you for survival?

Obviously the third option wouldn't make a great horror game, but displaying behaviors that hint at each of the 3 at different times sounds like a good recipe for a nightmare.

 

Well ... the 3rd option could be a tension point if you are not the only human and you can't tell if bigfoot has sided with you or with the other guy. Or if he's got something else in mind.

Or if you're starving and he's bringing you food so long as you follow him ... maybe he's feeding you carrots while he leads you into the canyon that is surrounded by his hungry bigfoot family.

Or if you want to give it a Robert E. Howard type turn, maybe bigfoot is the remnant of a long-lost occult civilization and he wants to sacrifice you to his dark god.

Or, if you want to give it an HG Wells turn, maybe bigfoot is an escaped prisoner from a research facility where a doctor is conducting forbidden experiments in evolution.

 

Having multiple bigfoots (bigfeet?) is definitely an option I've considered. But something I would definitely make a sort of event to occur after surviving a number of days to ramp up the difficulty and tension.

 

Want the easy answer or the real answer? The easy answer is there's many games like this, with "The Long Dark" being the most recent Indy success. People like them and they are plenty scary, even using simple wildlife. The real answer is that it's too early in your journey to create this game. You may consider succeeding with SMALL projects first.

Gigi

 

I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm not a newbie xP

I'm about to finish my undergraduate degree, I've been programming for over a decade and I have a few completed games in a folder on my desktop. I have C & SDL games, I have java games and I have unity games. But I made them all for desktop so my resume is, at this time, totally offline.

My last complete project was a slender-ish clone of a robot where I programmed the pathfinding to be intentionally slow to provide tense moments for the user to consider sneaking past the robot. The project before that is a 2D infinite runner based on attack on titan with 3D models interacting with & destroying the 2D houses, and my current work in progress is a game where you play as a guard to a safe haven in an apocalypse. Your moving space is restricted to your guard post and you have a gun & some buttons to operate the gates to let people in, keep zombies out and shoot any zombies that follow people inside.

The point of this thread was choosing a good creature that would provide the right amount of tension to survive with on a small island. Bigfoot looks like it's going to be a hit or miss for first impressions, but with more factors considered, it looks like it will be scary.

 

I'm in the camp of people where, when I hear "bigfoot" I think Harry and the Hendersons and kooky conspiracy theorist nutjobs.

This doesn't mean it's not something that couldn't be made to be scary, it's just not my first blush reaction. It would certainly be best if it's an unseen or only barely glimpsed.

 

Then go watch a terrible sci-fi flick based on big foot

 

No thanks!

 

AHH! That image is creepy. I think being on an Island with Big Foot would be kind of scary. You would have to make Big Foot look all messed up to make it really scary.

 

Big foot = my mom.
My mom = scary.
Thus, Big foot = scary.

 

Hahaha!

 

Is she available for mocap?

I probably should have put some kind of warning around the image. At least it's not a gif, in that scene he literally bites the guy's face off. Almost as if you had your head only half way on the guillotine execution block haha.

Having the right model is definitely important, but it's totally just going to be a large cube during the initial stages lol

 

In you're game you should make Big Foot bite the players face off. That would give the player a fright!

 

How does one witness such a thing?

Creepy bigfoot face -> mouth opening up -> darkness

 

Yikes! That's creepy.....