Wrapping up the LEVEL 7 [ESCAPE] dev diary series

My developer diary series covering the creation of LEVEL 7 [ESCAPE] wraps up today. I’ve covered all the fundamental aspects of the game to give you a glimpse into the game’s creation process, and soon you’ll get a chance to try the game out for yourself and see what I’ve been talking about.

For this insider, I’m going to talk a little bit more about the game as a whole by focusing on the two hyphenated words in the tagline: semi-cooperative and survival-horror. These two concepts were the guiding force behind all our work on the game, and as the things came together they became one intertwined concept.

The semi-cooperative aspects of LEVEL 7 [ESCAPE] are half of what creates the fear that really makes it a survival horror game. Like I explain in the Soldiers and Aliens diary, we chose not to have a player running the enemies because we wanted all the players to feel like they were in the situation together. That decision introduced another very important thing into to the game: distrust among the players. That’s where the real fear is generated.

The players must work together at times, but in the end you win or lose the game as an individual. It is possible for every player to win or every player to lose. What is most likely, though, is that some players will win and some will lose. As a matter of fact, the average survival rate for most of the scenarios with four players during playtest was fifty percent. Sometimes your path to victory involves making it harder for someone else to win.

Players aren’t actually rewarded for doing something bad to a fellow player or the group as a whole, but it is generally a choice of having something bad happen to you or to someone else. For example, one of the fear events in the game forces you to place a clone on a tile adjacent to a player, and then all players adjacent to clones raise their fear. You could take one for the team and place the clone near yourself, you could try to manage the amount of fear all the players have by placing the clone where it will do the least damage, or you could be entirely spiteful and put it adjacent to someone who did something bad to you earlier. At other times, you may be presented with event challenges that hurt you if you fail by a small margin but hurt everyone if you fail by a greater degree. You could choose to use less of your resources attempting a challenge because its outcome isn’t very bad from your perspective, but failing that challenge may have serious repercussions for other players.

Some of my favorite horror stories focus on what is happening between the people in the scary situation rather than on the scary situation itself. LEVEL 7 [ESCAPE] incorporates both the monsters in the dark and that distrust of your fellow man. All the mechanics in the game are designed to present even the most cooperative group of players with choices that will sometimes force them to act against the interest of other players.

Have fun!