Ouroboros (Prototype)

The Game

The scariest monster is always the one in our own imagination. Steven Spielberg knew this when he decided to practically never show the shark in Jaws (the shark has a screen time of 4 minutes in the whole film). H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is based on the same idea: It revolves around horrors that lie beyond human imagination and comprehension – and yet all this premise does is stimulate that very human imagination: Let me try to imagine what that might look like…

Ouroboros is a first person auditive horror game, in which you have to navigate through the levels purely based on acoustic feedback. The idea for this game has been in the back of my mind for several years. As a proof of concept, I created a first prototype you can play right now in your browser. The game only works with headphones!

The Development

The prototype was implemented in Construct 3 which is great for rapid prototyping but not the best choice for complex mechanics. Getting the positioned audio working properly took some trail and error, but I got it working eventually by rotating the whole level around the player.

In the video below, you can see how the game looks under the hood (the level layout gets spoiled, so I recommend trying the game for yourself first).

During playtesting, it became obvious that multiple sound sources are needed for proper orientation. This is especially good to know for a horror game, where a lack of orientation could be employed on purpose. In the prototype there are several sound sources: The electric hum of the fuse box, the sound of rain from the window and the record player.

The position of a sound source in my prototype is solely expressed through the relationship of the audio levels on your left and right ear: If you are looking north and the record player is standing east, you will hear it louder on your right ear. If you turn around, facing south, you will hear it louder on your left ear (and so on).

This works quite well already, but there are more auditive phenomenons to utilize for a more realistic experience. To take our example again, if you are facing north with the record player to the east, the sound wave from the record player will reach your right ear slightly quicker than your left ear, resulting in a phase shift. Our brains can use this phase shift to work out the position of the source (crazy, isn’t it?). There’s also the modulation of the audio signal by the actual physiology of our head and ear, which can be modeled by something called a Head-related transfer function (HRTF).

I already played around with a more sophisticated implementation inside of Unity using the Steam Audio. Steam Audio is a plugin for realistic spatialized audio and offers advanced features like HRTFs or reflections based on material properties.

The Future

The combination of audio based gameplay with the horror genre still strikes me as a perfect fit. I think there’s a lot of potential here, and I’m definitely going to revisit this project in the future. If you have any ideas or suggestions, let me know!