Best Practices for Making a Horror Game (for the Purpose of YouTube Promotion)
Introduction
Horror is a booming genre that has been popular for decades. The allure of horror is so pervasive that it even extends into children’s media, and as such it needs to be handled carefully and with tact. Following is a brief list of guidelines which I consider valuable to any developer intending to get their work promoted via YouTubers, especially those whose audience is mostly children.
Epilepsy Consideration
Light and shadow are important in horror games. It’s very critical to remember, though, that epilepsy is a serious condition, and flickering lights and some graphical effects can prompt seizures in some players and viewers. It’s a benefit to YT creators to include an option to disable this sort of effect, or even simpler: not including them at all.
Copyrighted Music
If your game contains copyrighted music, it’s very helpful to specify this early in the game, and to provide an option to disable this music within the options menu. Alternatively, using non-copyrighted music is a very dramatic advantage, and can be accompanied with a notification at the beginning of the game specifying the lack of copyrighted music, allowing YTers to enjoy the game guilt and anxiety-free, and taking some weight off the backs of any editors involved in their productions.
Mental Health
Mental Health is a tough topic, and one that frequently arises within horror games. Navigating it requires nuance and empathy for those with mental health struggles. Conditions like Dissociative Identity Disorder, Schizophrenia, and Addiction often come up as means of explaining the behaviors of antagonists, and this sort of practice should be avoided. It demonizes real people who are suffering under these conditions, and it perpetuates harmful stereotypes about them. People suffering mental health crises are far more likely to suffer from abuse and violence than to be perpetrators themselves, and consequently, horror games interested in covering these topics would be better served making use of this fact to draw horror from instead.
Common Assets
Many free assets are available online for developers to use. Beyond this, many packages of assets are available for purchase. However, this is a double-edged sword. While using these assets can cut dramatically down on the difficulty of development and implementation, it can also undermine the game’s originality, and can potentially be called out by the YTers playing your game. I recommend taking the time to modify assets like these extensively, or at least lampshading their unchangedness as a point of oddity. Familiar assets can be subverted with unfamiliarity at a later point, and this can be a very powerful strategy for unnerving players and viewers who are well-acquainted with common assets. Conversely, used inattentively, these assets can undermine immersion and undercut scares.
AI VoiceOver
AI is a difficult presence to avoid these days, but AI voiceovers in horror games are often highly questionable. A real human can deliver voice lines much more convincingly, especially able to catch grammatical issues or skate past odd sentence constructions in order to more effectively deliver a line. If you aren’t a native English speaker, enlisting a native English speaker to give your dialogue a once-over can save you some ill-will, and can potentially save your players from significant confusion. Ambiguous instructions and similar can be devastating to maintaining a healthy sense of pacing in a horror game, and voiceover can contribute to a failure of pacing.
Checkpoints
Maintaining regular checkpoints is a very important piece of most horror games with a longer run-time. Not every YTer will be willing to spend a tremendous amount of time with a single game, especially if there are other things bothering them about the game. Ensuring that they have regular checkpoints and aren’t suffering from excruciating “walkbacks” to their lost progress can make both recording and editing significantly easier, and make the game look more fun to play, encouraging viewers to check the game out themselves. Checkpoints also generally provide excellent stopping points for YTers who don’t do entire playthroughs.
Guidance
As noted above, light and shadow are important fixtures in horror games. Using environmental signals such as light and shadow to guide the player can be very effective and shouldn’t be underestimated. In situations where players are struggling to figure out where to go, developers should consider adding environmental signals like lighting, signs, or blood, to give players a better sense of where to go.
Suicide and Self-Harm
YouTube is very sensitive to both suicide and self-harm. Graphic depictions of either will often result in demonetization, and as such, I’d recommend avoiding direct and graphic depictions of either. This said, there’s still some nuance to it. Hanging bodies are seemingly consistently algorithmically demonetized, as is self-harm to wrists, however, most abstract implications, or other methods of suicide are not treated equivalently. This is worth keeping in mind if these topics are going to surface in your work.
Mascot Horror
Allow me to frontload that Mascot Horror is not, in itself, a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with making horror specifically for children, and many Mascot Horror projects are being made by children themselves. However, I had to observe a trend toward very merchandisable horror, and I think this belies a very concerning focus. It’s very clear to me as an adult trained in this field, that many Mascot Horror products are not simply passion projects, but are also vehicles by which to prey on childrens’ lack of financial knowledge by selling merchandise, or deploying predatory sales tactics on children, especially those vulnerable to these strategies. I would caution anyone considering making a Mascot Horror game against making this approach, due to my ethical concerns, but also in expectation of potential incoming regulation, which may cut these projects off at the knees.
Conclusion
I love horror. It’s my favorite genre. That said, it’s still very possible to step on toes with this genre, despite its reputation for pushing the envelope and being “edgy.” Being able to maintain a welcoming and inclusive, but still scary atmosphere is going to become more and more of a vital element of new horror games, especially as it relates to earned media in the form of YouTubers. This is not to say “you can’t do this” or “you can’t do that” but rather, that you should be mindful of your audience and their needs as you build your project, and be considerate of them as a means to expand your potential audience. As well, keeping an eye on YouTube’s guidelines is a valuable piece of this puzzle. Avoiding things which will demonetize people will make the videos more watchable and reduce the amount of editing necessary for influencer marketing to take root. These considerations will improve the level of marketability of a given horror game project, and will make it more reliable as YouTube content. With this said, it’s still important to be making projects that you as a creator love, and which you personally think are important, so these guidelines are not “hard” rules.
Happy Development!