Think about every scary game you have ever played. You could always step away when the horror became too much; turn off your screen. Horror is confined to your screen. Usually.
Novum Analytics is developing a game where the environment you play in is YOUR home, and the star is YOU. There is no walking away from Night Terrors.
Their aim is to create the scariest game ever played in a highly immersive, photorealistic, and stereophonic augmented reality environment. All of this on your mobile device.
The game controls what you see, what you hear, and where you go. Your camera and microphone feeds are analyzed to create photorealistic images in real-time and an immersive binaural experience with your headphones.
The plot is simple: there is a girl trapped somewhere in your home. Your job is to survive an onslaught of ghosts who can hide behind walls based on the game’s recognition of your environment.
The developers built a system that understands the environment that it analyzes making the ghost placement more realistic and believable.
The developer decided to use practical effects to create the enemies instead of 3D rendering. They said that mobile platforms are just not fast enough to 3D render an augmented reality environment:
“3D models are not the way to go with augmented reality right now. The mobile platforms just aren’t fast enough. You can’t make the elements believable. It’s a bad idea.”
Novum Analytics has an IndieGoGo campaign to generate funds to complete this project. They plan to release the game on iPhone 5, 5c, 6, and 6+ by June 2016, but they eventually want to release it on as many platforms as they can.
