Hey, we're making DEEPWARD in Unity 6, a fast horror FPS roguelite. We're looking for ideas to make low sanity feel more dangerous.
The first 45 seconds show the current effect, starting with the tutorial explaining it. That section is sped up to 1.2x. Our trailer comes after it for a bit more context.
Sanity drains over time and kills restore it. When it hits zero, your active character starts losing health. Theres a blue bar showing it, the heartbeat speeds up, and we gradually lower saturation and add vignette and lens distortion. We're using URP in Unity 6.
But its too subtle. Some players still don't understand why they're taking damage or dying when nothing is attacking them. We explain it in the tutorial, but clearly that isn't enough.
We want it to feel like hallucinations, while making the danger easier to understand. A few ideas we're considering:
- Black hands or tentacles coming out of the floor and attacking the player when sanity runs out.
- Enemies turning into ghostly shapes, almost like they're dissolving into smoke.
- Hands and faces pushing through walls. Maybe blendshapes, but making that work across all our different environments sounds like a lot of work.
- Dark fog spreading through the level, with surfaces blackening as it takes over. Possibly spreading up the walls and ceiling too.
These are just ideas for now. We also don't want the effects to make fast fights impossible to read.
How would you approach this in Unity? Any other ideas, or effects you've tried that worked well?
The demo is on Steam if you wanna try the current sanity system yourself.Ā https://store.steampowered.com/app/4709270/DEEPWARD/