LO4 - Treatment

Title of Game: DARK
Length of play time: Average game time will be seven hours

Genre or type of game: Adventure Horror

Brief description / synopsis: The protagonist travels to a mansion she has been left by a distant relative. During the game the player will traverse the mansion and gradually discover more about it’s previous occupants, as well as turning the lights on as you venture further in. If you get left without light for too long your character may begin to imagine things in the dark…

Platform chosen: PS4 and Xbox One



Target audience
Intended age of audience: Rated 18

Other target details: Whilst this is the age that we have rated our game it is likely we will actually have an audience of 14-20 years olds as horror heavily appeals to this age range. However, the target audience will be more niche than this as our game appeals to people that like horror as well as games with interesting stories.

Game style: It will be a first person game with no combat; it will rely more on the fear the player generates from being unable to defend themselves against the ‘threat’ of the dark. Most objects within the house will be interactable for you to discover more about what happened in the house via notes or to pick up keys, which open locked doors in the area.



Resources required
Human: Around 30 members of staff (concept artists, graphic designers, level designers, coders, etc.) and five actors to play the three main characters and friends visiting the house.

Equipment: Unreal engine 4, further necessary software and hardware, a computer for each staff member (to work on designing the game and costing, etc), recording equipment for the voice acting.

Location: A relatively small working facility in Sheffield.

Production time: With 30 staff members it should take us a year to make the game.

Additional information

Content of game (items, features and articles): The game will have a single player campaign with no DLC or multiplayer features, a small instruction booklet will come with the game featuring how to play and some examples of concept art for the game. The actual game will feature an first person open ‘world’ (mansion not broken up by levels) with many opportunities to interact with objects within the world, but with none to properly interact with people- instead the story is told through the ghosts and ‘echoes’ of people that resided or visited the location.

Examples of challenges and themes: This game carries the general horror theme and plays on fears of the dark and childhood nightmares; however it also touches upon more relatable topics such as family, abandonment and depression. You will face the challenge within the game of having to find the keys to locked doors by solving riddles left on notes and scouring nearby rooms for ways to move forward. As you progress forward you will unlock achievements in game achievements for completing specific tasks (e.g. lighting your first candle) or for reaching narrative pinnacles (e.g. discovering the affair that broke the family apart).

Styles of comparable games: Games similar to ours in the style of horror would be: Until dawn, Layers of fear and Amnesia. Layers of fear and Amnesia are also adventure horror games that have very open worlds with interactivity being a key part of the gameplay, we have tried to take a lot of inspiration from these games to aid the design of our own. They are both also very story driven but the plot is not as pivotal as other games such as Everybody’s gone to the rapture and Gone home; both of which are similar to our game in style but less so in genre. From Gone home and Everybody’s gone to the rapture we wanted to take the emotional and poignant aspect of the story that has more of a profound effect on the player than a typical horror game.

Profits/Costs 

We should be selling our game at the price of £40, which is lower than the typical price of video games in this age but seems more profitable (as more people may buy it for being cheaper) and more suited to the lower hours of gameplay.
During the production of DARK we will need to pay our actors and workers- we should have about 5 actors (including extras playing the parts of visitors to the mansion) and 30 devs in total. The average staff cost for the production of our game should accumulate at £1,981,666.67 by the end of the production, this includes any equipment they need to use to rent during the development for instances PCs or tablets. The actors we are using will be paid £35 per hour. The overall cost by the end of their time working with us should be £1,050, relatively cheap in comparison to other games as there are only a couple of voice actors necessary in the actual game and, as they are not always present, less time is required to record each line.
There is a fixed engine cost of £18,524.62, the cost of this including the other actual development costs leaves the creation of DARK at a total of £2,955,316.20.
The marketing budget also needs to be factored in which totals £35,000, as well as the dev royalty rate which is at 13% meaning the rest of the money goes to the publishers instead of us. All in all we would end up with a profit of £1,437,641.38 after the full development of the video-game.