Designing for Horror

Creating an environment for a singleplayer horror game presents many challenges. It is important to create an environment with few dead ends, allowing players to plan ahead for escapes, and also with a corridor-centric approach to keep players in suspenseful tight areas. In particular for Shiver, the largest challenge is lighting. Areas need to strike a balance between low/no visibility, and a scene that's overly bright. While the player has a limited use flashlight, forcing them to constantly use it is a poor idea. Contrastingly, the flashlight still needs to be useful in gameplay, leading to some dark areas being included as a neccessity.
The environment as well needs to work with the narative we have created to help tell the story about the location. Incorporating this is important, but currently not a focus as gameplay elements are considered firstly in the current development stage. However, the end goal with my design is to show the player where they are and details of the narrative, without requiring them to read or be told these story points.