Carnival Hunt: Developong a Psychological Horror

Beer Night Studio's Badraa Baatar talked about their upcoming psychological horror Carnival Hunt, discussed the development process, and told us about the key components of a successful video game trailer.

Introduction

Hello, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Badraa Baatar. In 2014, I graduated as a professional pilot at California Flight Academy. In 2018, I completed my degree in Aviation and Aerospace Management, minor in Marketing from Metropolitan State University of Denver. I love to make creative things

Before I went to the U.S., I and my 3 friends gathered to start a company, called Nigun Entertainment, which was concentrated on making commercials and advertisements including music videos. After successful few projects such as Evderhii Hun and Bor Arist Gump by Rokit Bay, our team was formed and decided to give a shot to make an animation sit-com series.

That is how the ONNTS DUMD series was born and it aired for 2 seasons. However, since we are game enthusiasts, the shift to make a video game was natural and our passion was to create games with soul for a worldwide and diverse audience.

Our very first video game was Fragile which reveals the story of a 10-year-old girl who was abducted and brought to a place that one could see only in nightmares. Our goal was to deliver the connotation that children’s minds are fragile, they ought to be handled with care, and ultimately raising awareness about child abduction. 

Carnival Hunt

Carnival Hunt is actually related to our previous project, Fragile. We pay a lot of attention to issues such as violence and human trafficking against children who are unable to defend themselves. In this game, we represent the children in wind-up toys, in which children in distress support each other psychologically and overcome obstacles together.

We wanted to challenge ourselves to make next-level video game videos for us so we could compete in the next one or two years in the world. As a small team, we were working so hard to produce great video games to compete with AAA games, but it still wasn’t easy and we knew we had to think bigger and better.

Because our game is a horror game, we aim to make the feeling of dread more real, as it can be dangerous to anyone, anywhere. And since players play in first-person, it gives the players a feeling of tightness, intensity, and nobody has the advantage of better situational awareness.

Carnival Hunt is a horror, first-person asymmetric social multiplayer game. One player takes on the role of the Carnival Monster, and the other players play as the Bunnies.

Players must wind each other up before the charge runs out but beware of the sound generated from the charge-up. The sound is so loud that it can alert the Carnival Monster of your location. Bunnies’ goal in each match is not to get caught by the Carnival Monster and exhaust all of the wind-up keys.

Bunnies need to cooperate and survive till the Carnival Monster’s charge runs out. If you get caught by the Monster, you will lose your wind-up key and eventually run out of charge. But other players can share their wind-up keys with you or you can loot the limited number of wind-up keys lying around the map. 

Making the Trailer

We made the trailer with 5 people in 3 months. We've rendered the trailer in real-time on Unreal Engine 4.26. This means that the trailer is similar to the game in terms of graphics. The Unreal Engine's ray-trace, virtual camera, and render helped us a lot to make it more realistic. 

During the production of the trailer, we took every single aspect seriously. The keys to a successful game trailer are: 

  • Obviously, get it done well. 
  • Gathering your assets. 
  • Plan the work well. 
  • Open with a-bang! Consumers only care about the content if you earn their attention. Try to hook the audience with a spectacular intro. 

Funding the Game

This time we are seeking to cooperate with the right publisher. So that is sort of an initial income for us. We think that as long as the game’s gameplay is top-notch, the story is well-written, respect graphics are
interesting, it shouldn't be that difficult to find funding. Since the previous project, we became more confident in ourselves.

Even though we didn’t reach our goal for the Fragile last year, we completed the game and published it on our own. We are going to start a Kickstarter campaign again for Carnival Hunt.

Once we signed a deal with the publisher, we would like the publisher to take care of the marketing and distribution to make this game match its potential.

Badraa Baatar, Business Development Director at Beer Night Studio

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev

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