BIGFOOT: Developing Scary and Atmospheric Survival Horror Game

Introduction

Hello everybody! My name is Dmytro Zinchenko. My brother Stanislav Zinchenko and I are the founders of CyberLight Game Studio and the main developers of the BIGFOOT game.

CyberLight Game Studio is a Ukrainian studio that was founded in 2017. BIGFOOT is the first project that we are working on.

BIGFOOT

We have a small team, the main developers of the BIGFOOT game are me and my brother. Sometimes we hire freelancers to create graphic content, but this is a small part of the work on the project as a whole.

The idea of creating such a game came to us rather unexpectedly in 2016. The main inspiration for the creation of the game about Bigfoot for us was the show Finding Bigfoot by Discovery. At that moment, we had no development experience at all. We were just starting to learn game development, 3D modeling, Unity, and Unreal Engine 4.

Then we were only 18 years old and we were students at the university. Initially, it was just a hobby, but over time it has grown into a full-fledged and successful project that we are still developing and making great efforts to bring it to the release. 

Survival Horror Genre

Horror is not only a very popular genre, but also one of the most convenient for small indie teams to develop. Indie horror games are characterized by the presence of a small number of NPCs, simple graphics, and dark locations. They are also very popular among YouTubers as viewers who like watching their favorite bloggers get scared. Most of the time the player spends waiting and exploring locations, this makes the genre suitable for teams with limited resources that find it difficult to create a large amount of content and complex mechanics.

Therefore, our choice quickly fell on a scary and atmospheric Bigfoot hunt. The game had to be suitable both for YouTubers who prefer to play alone as well as for team players.

BIGFOOT's Gameplay Mechanics

The first game mechanic that player encounter is the collection of loot. Player spend most of their time exploring locations, trying to find the necessary equipment to hunt down and fight Bigfoot. This mechanic solves an important gameplay problem – players should not be able to defeat a monster at the very beginning of the game. In turn, AI Bigfoot at the beginning of the game has a small amount of strength and health, and also behaves carefully and rarely attacks players.

One of the problems with the game's balance was that hunters can't run faster than Bigfoot. This created situations of Bigfoot superiority in combat so that players couldn’t escape. One of the solutions was to create zip lines that are located in different parts of the maps. With their help, hunters can quickly move to the other end, shortening their path or escaping from danger. But Bigfoot can destroy the zipline by preventing them from doing so.

To keep the attention of the players, we tried to make the forest alive and interactive. In addition to the animals that live in it, players may encounter random events such as the rustling of bushes, falling stones, birds that take off from the grass, as well as constantly changing weather conditions. 

BIGFOOT's Various Game Modes

One of the most difficult tasks that we had to solve was the creation of a mode where Bigfoot is under the control of the player. Our mechanics were originally built for Bigfoot AI and it was hard to make them work in that mode too.

For example, in order to control the frequency of attacks, we decided to implement an energy scale, and in order for luring to traps to work, during this, control over the Bigfoot is intercepted by the player, the Bigfoot, intoxicated by the smell of the bait, goes to the trap, and the player can escape with the help of a quick time event, regaining control over the Bigfoot.

Balancing Difficulty and Accessibility

The difficulty of balancing BIGFOOT lies in the fact that the game has not only asymmetric gameplay, but there can also be a different number of hunters. In terms of gameplay balance, we rely heavily on feedback from our test group as well as regular players. In addition, we collect statistics about gameplay and win rate. This helps eliminate subjective perception errors and make smarter decisions about changes. We are working on improving the balance and trying to make Bigfoot strong enough, as described in the myths.

Working on Enemy NPCs

The big challenge in development was to make Bigfoot a realistic and interesting character. Since this is the main enemy and at the same time a wild creature, players should be curious to observe him.

Animation is the main factor, of course. We used motion capture for most of the Bigfoot and hunter animations, which gave a great result.

Players familiar with Bigfoot myths expect high intelligence from him. Bigfoot AI went through many development iterations before we achieved enough realism.

Now he has an advanced player detection system, he listens to sounds, looks into the windows of houses where the lights are on, remembers where he saw the hunters last time, and examines these places. But at the same time, the game has a stealth system, which allows the player to outsmart the Bigfoot and hide.

In general, we are satisfied with the AI, but we have some ideas on how to improve it. 

Player's Tools and Equipment

Most weapons that players can use to fight Bigfoot can be found simply by searching the area, but some of them, such as M4 and AWM, can only be obtained by the player in safes that can be opened with a code. Each weapon has its own characteristics that make it effective in certain situations.

Hunters also have a whole arsenal of special equipment. Some of the main items are cameras for tracking Bigfoot, traps for baiting and dealing damage, a harpoon with a GPS transmitter, and dynamite with a remote fuze. The design of these devices looks like they were created by hunters with their own hands. This emphasizes the fact that they are not professional Bigfoot hunters, but people of different professions united by the idea of solving the mystery. 

Audio and Visual Design of the Game

The audio and visual design is critical to creating the right atmosphere and tension in any horror game. But the good news is that there are many free assets in the game development community to help you achieve the quality design.

For example, we actively used the Megascans Library as well as assets from the Unreal Marketplace. But it's important to remember that players love exclusive content, and they don't like seeing the same tree in 10 indie games. Therefore, we created the design of our characters, as well as their equipment, all buildings, and many other objects from scratch.

The Early Access Program

As soon as we developed a working version in 2017, we released the game in Early Access. We knew that a lot more work was needed to make BIGFOOT the game we wanted it to be. But it was also difficult for us to assess how much this project might be interesting for the players. Therefore, feedback at the early access stage was very important for us.

Early Access has its pros and cons. This is a good solution for young indie studios who want to understand where to go in the development of their project, understand the mood of the audience, and get additional funding, but for a number of reasons, some players will be wary of a game marked “Early Access” because there is an opinion that such games will always full of bugs, problems and most of them do not reach the full release.

Novice developers should understand these risks when choosing early access.

Promoting the Game

When we released the game in Early Access, we did not expect it to become popular as this is our first project. For us, it was a very important experience. We wanted to go through the whole cycle from the beginning of development to the release in order to understand what it is like and gain valuable skills.

However, it turned out that a couple of weeks after the Early Access release, a video with our game from PewDiePie appeared on YouTube, followed by other popular YouTubers. It was extremely unexpected for us and in some ways frightening. At that moment, we realized that our life has changed – yesterday, we were unknown students and today, top YouTubers are playing our game! Of course, we rushed to fix all the bugs that we noticed in their video as with great power comes great responsibility.

Collecting and Using Feedback from Early Access

In our case, Early Access was a very good decision. This allowed us to change the game in time and quite seriously based on the wishes of the players.

This was mainly due to the fact that, due to lack of experience, we could not immediately build a good code architecture and this caused bugs. But the community also pushed us to make serious changes. For example, the addition of the "Team VS Player" mode might not have happened if we had not seen in the comments the desire of the players to play the role of Bigfoot.

Now the game looks much better than the first version in terms of graphics, gameplay, and quality.

Bottlenecks When Using the Early Access Program

I believe that early access is only useful when a small indie studio uses it for a short period of time, fixes bugs, and then releases the product in full.

As I said above, the attitude of Steam users toward Early Access is very ambiguous. For many players, this is nothing more than a note and they expect from their purchase a fully working game, without problems and bugs, not realizing that early access is just meant to fix problems. When buying such a game, the player must understand that the game is still in development.

But basically, even without bugs, a game that is in early access will appear to players as an unfinished and problematic product.

CyberLight's Roadmap

Since 2022, development has slowed down a lot, as we had to leave Ukraine due to the Russian invasion. But we continue to work on our first project because we want to have a reputation as developers who keep their promises and release quality games!

At the moment, we are working on new maps and improving game mechanics. Feedback from the players is very helpful in identifying the weak points of the game and we have quite a long list of improvements that will make it into the release version of the game.

We have a lot of exciting ideas for the next projects, but we will start them only after the full release of BIGFOOT! 

A Good Word to Readers 

I would like to say a few words to those guys who are just starting their journey in game development or dream of creating their own game. Game development is not an easy task, but if you are really excited about the idea of creating your own world, it will be interesting for you to solve all the problems on your way, and you will never give up.

You can follow the development of our first game on Steam, Discord, Twitter, and YouTube.

Dmytro Zinchenko, CEO and Co-Founder of CyberLight Game Studio

Interview conducted by Ana Kessler