More Than Just A Ghost Story: Creating Horror In ‘Shadow Of A Soul’

When we discovered the thrilling trailer for Vivec Entertainment’s debut game, Shadow of a Soul, we were instantly drawn back into that familiar state of fright that Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent conjured up.

Naturally we were eager to find out more on this promising first person survival horror and took no hesitation in bombarding the developer with questions. Our intention was to find out whether this was a game worth building our hopes up for; we couldn’t stand yet another disappointing title in this favorite genre of ours.

We soon got a response from the developer: 29 year old Ferzan Kanat Aygen helming from Istanbul, Turkey. We were surprised to find out that Ferzan was working on Shadow of a Soul by himself. He works on it obsessively, etching away at his masterpiece and writing down every inch of progression in his blog every day, without fail.

“I don’t know why exactly but I’ve always wanted to work for myself” said Ferzan as he began to detail his life as a working man.

“I was 23 years old when I founded my first business. It was called NetHostOne and was a web hosting company. I learned PHP, MySQL and Linux, which took me a year, before opening the company. However, due to my lack of experience with the marketing side of things, I failed pretty badly – didn’t earn any money at all.”

Things didn’t start off well for Ferzan then, so why would he pursue a life as an indie game developer? It wasn’t easy, Ferzan had to teach himself everything, but eventually settled on an International Marketing Master’s degree in Sweden. He seemed to be on the right road and founded another company, Infinitum, to sell his services, but something didn’t feel right and another passion was calling him.

“I decided it was much harder to work with people than to do 3D animation. So I turned Infinitum into Vivec Entertainment and started developing Shadow of a Soul: Chapter I.”

It was a passion for design and distaste for working with fellow man that drove Ferzan to life as an indie game developer. As comfortable as Ferzan was with such an arrangement, he admits that it is far from easy, especially when working by yourself.

“It is hard to develop a game of any size as a sole developer. You need to know a lot of things to make that happen. I’m not very bright, so I’m always forgetting how to do certain things, like how to modify audio files, what a certain C++ function does, etc.”

Far from complaining about this less-than-perfect setup, Ferzan enjoys taking his time and constantly learning over the course of a long project; something he has grown accustom to due to his previous experiences. Coping with failures and forgetfulness is a regular task, one that is managed with plenty of screaming and cursing. “I also follow a regular diet of panic attacks” adds Ferzan.

In many ways then, the development of Shadow of a Soul is a tale of survival horror itself: as one man battles against the odds, with failure leading to a less than fortunate outcome. Indeed, survival horror is an apt metaphor for the struggle of many indie game developer’s, yet Ferzan says the irony is merely coincidental, “it was not a deliberate decision to make a survival horror game” he reminisces.

“Basically, I asked myself: which projects can I finish in two years, and which of those do I want to work on the most?”

“I also feel like there is a positive energy surrounding horror games” Ferzan admits, partially revealing the reason for his decision. “People like to get frightened. So when I say that I’m making a horror game, people really respond positively. As the sole developer of a game, it is really great to get encouraging feedback from forums and gaming websites.”

While Ferzan admits that there are many positives to promoting the game early, feedback and encouragement mostly, he soon discovered that this also created anticipation and the need to drip feed those who had responded with more details.

“I don’t like watching any gameplay videos and I almost never look at screenshots. I just like watching trailers, so I figured other people were like me. I was very wrong. Now everybody who visits my site wants to see screenshots and gameplay videos, which I don’t have.”

This lack of foresight on Ferzan’s part has put him in an awkward position as he now must keep up the momentum gained from the release of his trailer, but has to start from scratch when creating additional promotional material. The original marketing schedule has since been readdressed.

“My original plan was to start releasing screenshots/gameplay footage around the middle of April but with the pressure from gamers I’m going to have to release those early. How early I can’t say exactly but hopefully before March.”

It is clear that Ferzan is slightly stressed under the sudden need to change his rigid schedule; it’s not hard to see that he is a man who enjoys routine. Daily blogs, an organized marketing structure, even the layout of Shadow of a Soul as a three part series is all a result of his meticulous planning. Upon bringing this latter point up it was clear that Ferzan had some very definite ideas for the three chapters of Shadow of a Soul.

He mentions that each game will be a standalone story which ties into a bigger story; something he decided way before the game’s development. In his youth Ferzan read a lot of fantasy books, but has stopped since many of them have become very long series that require the reader to remember details between releases.

“This really pisses me off because I’m not very bright and waiting two to five years for each book to come out pretty much guarantees that I won’t remember anything about what happened in previous books, which sometimes includes the names of the important characters.”

The intention with Shadow of a Soul is to ensure that players can enter the series at any point and not have to worry about prior details in games they haven’t played. “I’m trying to make it so that playing the previous games adds another layer of enjoyment on top of what’s already there” explained Ferzan, clearly happy with his decisions.

At this point we were still very eager to get as many details out of the man about his game while he was under our questioning. We couldn’t leave the conversation without knowing whether Shadow of a Soul was going to be the survival horror we hoped it would be. So we tactically focused on getting him to tease gameplay details, starting off with his inspirations.

“In the case of Shadow of a Soul, I think I’m more inspired by horror short stories than any other medium. I try to read as many horror short stories as I can” he said, fueling our imagination. “Although most of them are pretty bad, there are some very good ones too. It’s really a hit-and-miss situation and you can’t usually say which it is until you’ve read the final word of a story.”

These are just spooky stories intended to frighten children though, what we desire from a modern survival horror game is something more intense and adult. We tried to pin down a more pertinent source of ideas.

“I can’t name a definite source of inspiration. I believe that there’s a kind of bond with Silent Hill and Jacob’s Ladder.”

The mention of Silent Hill instantly widened our eyes as we are reminded of its incredible horror atmosphere, which has been inspiring developers of the genre from 1999 onwards. Jacob’s Ladder, again, another disturbing tale of a man haunted by demons, but ones invented by his own mind – a psychological threat. Finally, we were on the right tracks.

“I want players to feel really tense and really unsure about what may happen next. As a game designer, having a ghost at your disposal pretty much guarantees that. On the other hand, I want players to feel curious about what is really happening all around them and why they’ve become the target of this malignant presence.”

Then, we saw our opportunity to ask the most vital question, the one whose answer would determine the fate of Shadow of a Soul. For a survival horror to work the player needs to feel vulnerable. Amnesia: The Dark Descent did this by removing combat altogether – something the more famous series’ in the genre had forgotten. Is Ferzan following Frictional’s stellar example?

“There is absolutely no combat or fighting in the game. However, I can guarantee that there will be plenty of running and hiding. I’m calling it a survival horror game because at a certain point early on in the game the tables turn and you pretty much run for your life for the rest of the game. That is for me the very definition of survival horror.”

That confirmed it then. Shadow of a Soul is the type of survival horror we were after. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves of course; we are still yet to see in-game footage and another important aspect of the survival horror game is sound, so as to inject that sense of perceived fear. Luckily, Ferzan is of the same thinking.

“Sound is absolutely one of my first priorities. There is no music in the game per se (like the music of Silent Hill), but there are what I call dark ambient tracks which instill the fear that anything can go wrong at any moment.”

“It is also impossible for me to play the alpha versions of the game without sound and music, so I’ve made some ambient tracks to put into the game before most of the other things are ready. Actually, the only things I can say that are completely finished about the game are those tracks. Those who pre-order the game get the chance to download three of those tracks.”

Undoubtedly there are many people who are unwilling to pre-order a game of which they have been shown no in-game footage or screens whatsoever. We brought up this problem and Ferzan agreed with the sentiment and told us that he is working to resolve the issue as soon as he can.

“I’m going to start polishing up some sections of the game as soon as possible so that I can put them on the site. I think some people also feel that it’s a little bit fishy that I don’t have any screenshots of gameplay videos. I feel the need to ease the fears of those folks.”

Well, we wouldn’t want you to ease that fear too much Ferzan! There was one last question we had coming from the direction of Xbox 360 players, in that the game was not coming to their platform of choice. We sought to find an answer for the exclusion of Microsoft’s console while both PC and PS3 players are being served.

“As an independent developer, I think it is very important to choose your battles carefully. It is not difficult to support these three platforms by using OpenGL, but Xbox is a completely different beast. I would really like to release to Xbox one day, hopefully before Chapter 3, but I can’t make any promises.”

So there is some hope for Xbox players, but this is obviously not going to be for quite some time. On the other hand, PC and PS3 players can look forward to the release of Shadow of a Soul: Chapter I one week before Halloween, October 24th 2012 to be precise.

For more information on Shadow Of A Soul and Vivec Entertainment, head on over to the official website.

You can pre-order Shadow Of A Soul for the discounted price of $15.99 from the official store, the price will rise to $19.99 once the game is released.