The Brief

Warning

If you are going to play, or think you may play the game I am intending to run DO NOT READ THIS BLOG. This will contain spoilers about one of the significant monsters that will appear in the game, and thus could spoil the surprise when it turns up at two in the morning.

The Brief

This monster must fulfil several criteria and constraints:

Criteria 1: It must be scary (duh!)

This is actually a lot harder than it sounds. Not everyone is scared by the same thing, and it is actually very hard to avoid the “it’s just a guy in a suit” effect. So this leads to:

Criteria 2: It must look as little like a guy in a suit as possible.

Another way of freaking people out is by creating a sense of more movement than two arms and two legs can provide. Hopefully you can tickle the “arachnid reaction” and make people’s skin crawl a little.

Criteria 3: It must create a sense of movement outside the normal range of human capability.

More criteria will probably crop up as we go along.

Constraint 1: It must be 100% operable by one person.

We don’t have a team of puppeteers handy to operate this thing. The guy operating it must be able to operate it completely by himself. (To be more precise – I have to be able to operate it by myself).

Constraint 2: It must be able to fit through a normal doorway.

This is a fairly important constraint that puts strict upper limits on the size of the thing.

Constraint 3: Budget is very limited.

I don’t have a great deal of money to play with, so I’m doing this on the cheap. I’m aiming for the Arduino itself to represent a significant portion of the spend on this thing.

Summary:

The Monster must meet the following criteria:

• Criteria 1: It must be scary
• Criteria 2: It must look as little like a guy in a suit as possible.
• Criteria 3: It must create a sense of movement outside the normal range of human capability.

The Monster must fit within the following constraints:

• Constraint 1: It must be 100% operable by one person.
• Constraint 2: It must be able to fit through a normal doorway.
• Constraint 3: Budget is very limited.

Next post, I’ll aim to put up some early design sketches.