Inspiration

Halloween
Silent Hill
The Grudge

Year

2023

Methodology
  • Articulate Storyline 360
  • Adobe Firefly
  • Adobe Photoshop 2024
  • Runway Gen-2
Additional Credits
All artwork in this experience was created using Adobe Firefly. Music and sound effects from Pixabay (CC0 licence assets)

This experience is best played alone, with headphones, and in the dark!

It’s long been a personal goal of mine to craft a true psychological horror experience within Articulate Storyline 360! As a fan of the horror genre, games like Silent Hill have provided a source of inspiration for the narrative and set-pieces that you’ll encounter throughout your journey in this game. Another key influence on this project was The Grudge series, which, much like Silent Hill, excels in its ability to sustain a slow-building, consistently unsettling atmosphere, punctuated by sudden shocks that linger in your memory long after the screen goes dark…

While I appreciate the jump scare moments in games like Five Nights At Freddy’s, I firmly believe that including such elements in my Articulate Storyline horror experience would have undermined its quality, as there would ultimately be vey little skill involved in simply triggering a ‘Show Layer’ action on the timeline containing a screaming ghost! Instead I’ve focused on crafting scripted moments throughout my game that aim to be equally chilling while embracing a more subtle and sinister approach, which I believe to be a far trickier challenge to accomplish when building interactive experiences like this.

You will also gather some horror movie trivia along the way about staple horror franchises making the experience as informative as it is intimidating!

Additionally, developing this experience allowed me to delve into the fascinating realm of video generation AI applications like Genmo and RunwayML for the very first time. I’m planning to share a tutorial on how I created the animated opening scene of the game very soon, which began with imagery generated by AI, subsequently transformed into an animated sequence again through an AI processes. Stay tuned for this exciting tutorial coming your way soon!

Now step into the darkness and prepare to be truly haunted.

P.S. Hope you don’t mind that I turned down the lights on the page for you. The Invert CSS function is really an amazing thing!