Silent Hill f is a part of a new generation for the legendary horror franchise, one that sees the ethereal and eerie titular setting extending its horrific manifestations into different places around the world. This title was an opportunity for us at NeoBards to harness what makes Silent Hill the psychological horror staple it is and shape a fresh new experience that brings the terror in both familiar and new ways.

I’m Al Yang, studio creative director at NeoBards and game director for Silent Hill f. I’m excited to share a slice of my Game Developers Conference (GDC) Festival of Gaming session for the PlayStation community, giving you all a behind-the-scenes look into the systems behind the first melee-only Silent Hill title.

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Creating a different Silent Hill

In Silent Hill f, the secluded town of Ebisugaoka is consumed by a sudden fog in 1960s Japan, transforming lead character Shimizu Hinako’s home into a haunting nightmare. We initially spent some time considering what types of weapons we wanted to use from Showa-era Japan, doing some prototyping work along the way. With many horror games that emphasize action, there’s gunplay and other ranged combat in the majority of them. What if we flip the script here? It isn’t something horror players are entirely unfamiliar with, but not quite to the extent we’re proposing.

When players say they want to play a horror game and that they want to be scared, I think what they really mean is they want to feel tense. Jump scares are scary, but if you’re giving nonstop jump scares, players become numb, and it detracts from the atmosphere. The real fear lives in the anticipation and build-up, which became a guiding philosophy for how we built story and combat in Silent Hill f.

Injecting tension into combat

There’s intentional design that yields crucial tension for the typical survival horror experience. Slower rhythms with things like aiming and reloading, resource management and scarcity, and pacing. How do we translate these things into our game?

There is a lot of data across the history of survival horror on how to create tension despite the power of guns. For example, let’s look at resources when you encounter a monster in your path. Having 4 bullets in this situation creates a very different feeling from seeing that creature and having 100 bullets. The player’s fear and approach change entirely.

There are no bullets in Silent Hill f, so we showcase resource management with weapons breaking. Every time you hit a monster, you see the durability bar go down. But you don’t know exactly how much damage you’re doing. It isn’t like an RPG where you see numbers or a bar above the enemy’s head. Having concrete values shown significantly decreases the tension, as a large part of the tension of horror games relies on giving the player incomplete information.

How enemies behave is key as well. With guns, monsters will take shots to different body parts and keep shambling unless you hit them in the head or another critical spot, causing them to react differently. We deliver this with the Focus system. With patience and the right timing, you can do a counter or focus attack. It is like aiming down the sights with a gun, so you can hit those vulnerable spots.

If you get in a really meaty hit, you’ll see it in how the creature reacts. You’re not quite sure how close you are to defeating the enemy, but you know that your attacks are having an effect.

A delicate, horrific balancing act

Just as important as building tension, it is important to have a period of release. A way to impact pace and inject those moments of tension release in combat is something we call a master key. It is a system breaker, entirely subverting the gameplay rhythm the player has been engaging with thus far.

Many combat systems can be distilled down to a rock, paper, scissors design, where certain weapons work better against certain monsters. That rhythm builds tension and, to release it, we have the master key. In a horror game with ranged combat, a master key could be a grenade or rocket launcher—a weapon or item that doesn’t care about balanced design and just damages your enemy no matter what. You don’t have to think; you turn your brain off and get this thing out of your way. Players are diverse and are challenged by different situations, so it’s important to have systems where they can choose when they want to break out on their own terms.

In Silent Hill f, that is the fox arm, which is a part of Hinako’s transformation throughout the game. The focus hit system I mentioned before is also a much lighter sample of that master key experience.

Thanks from NeoBards

GDC is a major knowledge-sharing hub where developers and other industry professionals share insights into the many different things that bring your favorite games to life, and I appreciate this opportunity to give some insight into how the NeoBards team crafted a new survival horror title while respecting and engaging with the long history of horror gaming that has come before us. For those who have played or those who have yet to play, I hope you enjoyed getting some new insight into this game that we’re very proud of.

Silent Hill f is available now on PlayStation 5.

I’m Tom Guillermin, co-founder and CTO of Sandfall Interactive, and I’m excited to share some insight into how our team created the community and critically acclaimed RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This blog draws on our session at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) Festival of Gaming, where video game professionals from across a range of disciplines come together to share knowledge and experiences.

Our talk, which was delivered alongside our senior gameplay programmer, Florian Torres, explores how our small technical team aimed to give designers maximum creative freedom by enabling them to create and combine gameplay elements. Here, we will highlight examples that we believe this great community will appreciate.

The team and our reality

Creating video games is a marriage of many disciplines, and the skill set available changes as the team changes. From the bombastic abilities you see in combat to the assets that make up the game’s world map and beyond, efficient and smart structuring and planning put us in the best position to bring Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to life.

The earliest versions of the game were made by Guillaume Broche, CEO of Sandfall Interactive, alone in his bedroom, with occasional help from me. Then we moved on to more advanced prototypes, growing the team with the ultimate goal of creating a vertical slice. Suddenly, there were twelve of us, and in 2022, we went to GDC in hopes of finding a publisher to help us continue development. There, we met Kepler Interactive, whose support meant we could develop an Alpha build and continue adding necessary roles: artists and programmers, especially.

Now for an important confession: We’re not much for coding. Our development philosophy at Sandfall is based on the reality that we have limited programming bandwidth, so we focus on what’s most important to delivering a good player experience and helping the creative team achieve their aims.

For that reason, we’re big fans of the Unreal Engine for its many core features. It also offers many additional benefits, such as bug fixes and performance optimizations. You have to do some integration work on each update, but as a small team, you try to keep the engine as-is to keep the process straightforward. During production, we also used quite a few external plugins for engine features not native to Unreal, as well as to prototype gameplay features.

Unreal Engine Blueprints

Because not everybody on the team is a programmer and we needed everyone to be able to contribute to the logic of the game, we used Blueprint visual scripting instead of C++ programming language: it’s a system in Unreal Engine that uses a node-based interface to script gameplay elements directly in the Unreal Editor. Essentially, you have a collection of recipes made of code that you can creatively deploy to get the results you want. It gives designers the ability to use many concepts and tools generally restricted to programmers.

With the team able to engage with this shared language, Blueprints allowed us to craft everything that goes into showcasing a skill in-game—character movement, visual effects, camera movement, etc. It’s really similar to any 3D software. You control the camera’s location and rotation, as well as the focal length, which can be animated. We have camera shakes, visual effects, and time dilation… All this contributes to a feeling of intensity over the course of the skill activation.

Creative solutions

There’s a lot of work that goes into the assets your team makes for these engaging and exciting experiences. You can deploy them multiple times and get very creative in different situations. A different perspective, visual deployment, detailed changes, etc.

The world map is a great example of this for us, and it was a major focus in development. It was one of the last levels we created, but it is also the biggest, with the most features. We used elements from other levels to create this one, even if it doesn’t appear that way. Technically, everything related to enemies and battles is the same—interaction, looting, NPCs, dialogues, and so on. We also repurposed art elements from the other levels, in keeping with our emphasis on efficiency.

Coding is an incredibly important part of video game development, and Blueprints, which are themselves a different way of coding, are one of the modern ways for aspiring developers or the infinitely curious within the PlayStation community to start creating their own projects.

At Sandfall Interactive, programmers create the building blocks—like the Blueprints nodes—and we let the designers play with them. Usually, that means using them in a way different from how the programmers imagined, which is exactly what we wanted. As programmers, our job is to make designers’ lives simpler.

There’s truth in many cliches, and we certainly stress this one: Teamwork makes the dream work. It sounds simple, but you need to truly need to lean on each other and create workflows that recognize, encourage, and benefit from that teamwork. We chose an engine that gave us a lot to work with in its base form, grabbed a few external enhancements, simplified the set of tools in our toolbox, reused elements we crafted, and more, all to achieve our goal of realizing our shared creative vision. That’s game development.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available now on PlayStation 5, and there’s also a two-hour trial for PlayStation Plus subscribers.