[Question] What makes a dark, scary atmosphere?

Yeah, I want to make a game with dreams, reality and nightmare. Dreams would be fairly easy, a bright and bouncy place amongst clouds and the surreal. Reality is even more straightforward, no frills but still content is there.

Thought nightmares, I want them to be lowtone and horrific. There's the obvious, such as dark lighting, a cramped, claustrophobic feeling... but what else adds to it?

I'd like you to express your thoughts, thanks.

Let's see, what I can think of. A lack of sound, or just use sound only when necessary. Less color, seems to be general in horror. Stick to the undead building soundtracks for the ambience. Oh, and before I forget, less vision. It's actually scarier if you can't see so much in front of you.

Its all about the sounds, if there aint no scary sounds even a place like hell would be like heaven. With the right sounds you can even make a place like heaven turn into hell. As always you gotta build up the fear in the people.

Ok, heres my input:
Visual effects:
Heavy dark fog, if you can use a consantly changing red fog doodad to overlay and create a restless feel. It needs to feel like night time, but as if there is a pressence.
Objects:
Dont go over board, for example a usual looking house that has a large pool of blood, and a corpse hanging from the celing is scarier than a house filled up completely with corpses.
Sound:
Try keep it quite, with some gentle dark back ground music. But have sound effects every now and then, like a far off torture taking place.

That should make it nice.

Nightmare can be absolute Chaos, there is a map called "Vale of Nightmares".

You could use it for reference.

Then again, there are thousands of survival horror games out there you could use for reference. A recommendation would be "Siren: New Translation", that game will make nearly anyone's hair go on ends for a day.

Also, a nightmare actually depends on how you personify it. My second suggestion:

Music - Don't put in music, that just disrupts the eerie feeling.

Ambience - Try those using the sounds of all things dark and demonic.

Units 1 - You may have to darken their color tones, nearly all units have a bright coloring, if there are 2 same models with different color, go for the darker, blue colored one. An example is the Zombie and Dalaran Mutant.

Units 2 - Rather than relying on invisibility all the time, you could try to mix invisibility and active camouflage, the effects might be interesting.

Doodad - Since nightmares usually involve cold, dark areas, try those from Northrend, Icecrown & Underground.

Misc 1 - Try using shadows as places to hide units, it usually may hide them from your eyes until it's too late.

Misc 2 - If this does any good, you could try announcing the presence of a unit with a bit of sound. For example, try viewing those "Half Life 2 : Ravenholm" videos, you'll understand what I mean when you see fast zombies.

Make the player feel vunerable. Give them limited sight or stealth detection ranges, so they don't feel they have enough time to react to threats, even if they easily survive.

Make the player feel paranoid. Have zombie corpses or whatever stewn around the map, but make them actual targetable units with no distiction from sleeping, ready to jump-in-your-face zombies. Make the player expect everything attack him. Maybe the sword he picks up starts to boomeranging firebolts at him, maybe it doesn't. Maybe that helmet the boss dropped actually slowly drains mana and randomly flashes your screen, or plain simply just turns it black for a while, without any explanation. Those crates over there? Well, they aren't dangerous. Those over there however, will smash themselves into your head if you come to close. That statue you passes in foyer 20-something times? Well, now it attacks you!

Make the player feel weak. Make his enemies powerful enough to drop him to bellow 25% life every time they attack, but give him powerful versions of "healing salve" so he isn't crippled by the attacks. That way, he will think "Oh god, if there was one more eneym, I'd be dead!"

Sound and lighting, definitely the two biggest factors. Someone mentioned flashing/blacking out the screen - in the F.E.A.R. FPS, you would randomly encounter ghosts that would fly at you and cause images of corpses to flash across the screen - that sh*t was bad, especially if the timing caught you while trying to battle something else.

Another thing is corpse resurrections - walking past a dead unit, only to have it get up and attack you from behind - you'll get very paranoid very quickly.

To be fair though, I'm having trouble seeing this being done in WC3. The game just wasn't built that way... Unless you make a dungeon-crawling map, with many small rooms and extremely short-range sight for your hero. You'll still need tons of custom sounds though, to at least get the ambience right. The existing soundsets are too worn out by now, no-one finds them scary any more.

Generally people are universally afraid of unknown or loud unpredictable sounds.
Limit their sight range. Also keep music low and as a chaotic as possible. In moments of ultimate horror place screams or weepings. Vary this a bit. After few runs of before mentioned method just play scary music without screams and weepings. Do it a few times to condition the player that scary music= bad. Then just play the music and add a creepy aerie atmosphere but do nothing. If conditioning works as expected he will anticipate the danger but nothing will happen. Then just rape him 2-3 minutes after the scary music ends, out of the blue.

Best suggestion I can give is to make it as random possible without any recognizable pattern. That way it will probably keep him on the edge of his seat.

You could try looking at The Sandman for inspiriation.
http://books.google.com.au/books?ct=...G=Search+Books

For doodads, put lots of doodads which suggest something terrible happening, but give absolutely no specific indication of what that happening might have been. The unknown is terrifying.

totally mundanely horrible things too... not like, horrible creatures eating people, things like, someone was chained to a wall, with no water nearby, but the sound of tickling water just out of sight in the shadows. The guy spends days struggling to reach it, and when he finally does, he realizes that its blood. The whole, time, in another room, the guys chains are wrapped around some other guy, and the blood squeezed out of him is the blood drained into the other room.... Now you come across this scene in the light, a few years later, and you wouldnt know wtf happened, but youd have some horrible ideas....

and do make sure to account for many different kinds of nightmares... wondering what the fuck people were thinking when a dude with a spoon tries showing you his little collection of maimed corpses or a group of incredibly slow people holding shampoo bottles full of blood and fruit baskets in the other hand follow you wherever you go, but never catch you is half the terror

make sure that lots of the units and things dont actually hurt you, just do weird, paranoia inducing things

remember that the half imaginings and mutterings of peoples minds will always produce something more terrifying than you could show them in the game, rather than try to recreate these images and thoughts, try to induce them

and read H.P. Lovecraft and the Dexter books

Amen! Lovecraft is GOD, and Stephen King and Dean Koontz are his holy disciples.

Alrighty, make a vulnerable feeling...

So I should make the terrain darkened, limit sight radius, silence the area and only play sounds of "significant" things, mix things up, randomize things, give the surroundings a dead and/or cold feeling.

I'm yet to figure out how to edit fog (not terrain fog, the actual stuff that fucks up the camera at heights) in a GetLocalPlayer() block, but how would making the fog thicker, darker maybe more red proportionately to damage feel?

If that's not a great idea, how about those camera filters? As in, the dream or something-or-other filter. Close peripheral vision more and more when damage is taken.

How would visual effects like that add to the atmosphere, or would they subtract?

Also, what would make good hellish or haunting spirits? Banshees seem to cartoony to haunt, Avatars of Vengeance seem like a touch of both...

Just my opinion.

What you should not use for evil spirits.
- Banshees
- Shades
- Voidwalker, maybe, maybe not, but it lost its touch on me already.

What might work for evil spirits.
- Avatar of vengeance, try to get rid of the color as much as possible.
- Metamorphosis demon hunter, if you could make it a little more translucent.
- Nether dragons, less color.
- Spirit of vengeance, but try to get rid of the energy ball on their claws.
- Ethereal units, I refer to those like the spirit walker and banished units, just get rid of their other color tones save the ones used for ethereal colors.

Hm, why use ethereal when I can mess with transparency? Heh, good suggestion though.

Also, how about adding a sense of urgency to the vulnerability? How about making them have a lantern or a torch that would only last X minutes on one given batch of oil or whatever, and their sight slowly gets lower and lower?