The Utility of Humor in Horror: My First Game Jam
I come from a writing background with very little experience in the technical side of things, aside from a coding bootcamp I completed years ago that I’ve retained little from. This GameJam was the closest I’ve come to programming in a very long time—notably, I still did none, but I watched as others wrote code and fiddled with 3d models.
Given the tight turnaround and my own relative inexperience with coding and programming, I stuck to my purview and helped write narrative aspects of our game, The Drowning Machine—namely, I wrote approximately half of the potential radio play snippets the player would hear in between levels, and a handful of the potential scares that would be inserted in said levels. Only a handful of each made it into the submitted version of the game, unfortunately, but several comments mentioned the radio play specifically as something that made The Drowning Machine stand out.
Part of that was, of course, the voice acting by our team’s most experienced coder, Keegan. He also made some minor modifications to the snippets. We had written longer scenes that he could then selectively choose from, and he changed the tidbits he chose to make them work better in their shorter formats
As for the content of the snippets, that was half my doing and half the work of our other writer, Zack—we each wrote three scenes for a total of six, and his three were some of the funniest things I’ve read in recent years. The cast of characters was, to toot my own horn, my creation.
The point of the radio play was to help break up the tension of the horror elements of the game. Our team agreed that if a horror story is nothing but scare after scare, tense moment after tense moment, it dilutes the experience and becomes monotonous. The human adrenal system can only be triggered so many times in such a short period of time, and if someone grows accustomed to the constant frights and anxiety, they’ll be harder to catch unawares.
That’s where Zack and I came in. It was our job to help break up the horror elements with something a bit more relaxed and goofy. This serves two purposes, by our team’s reasoning: 1) It lures the player into a false state of contentment and relaxation, making the impending horror more impactful; and 2) It provides a welcome relief and cooldown period after the horror that lets the adrenaline stop flowing. The goal is to create a cycle of, to put it simply, good vibes leading to bad vibes leading back to good, ad infinitum.
We plan to continue developing The Drowning Machine and refining the number, variety, and intensity of the scares to hopefully hit that mark dead-center.
