The monster – from dreamscape to code.
I was in my late twenties when I had the dream. It begins with a view of a medium-sized bedroom, about six by eight metres. It's sparsely decorated: there's a double bed and, by it, an old, white, washing machine. There's only one door. There are no windows. This is a stage, I realise, and I am the audience.
On the bed jump a gaggle of joyful children, their frenzied leaping accompanied by shrill bursts of delight and a staccato of laughter.
After some time observing the children I become aware of another presence in the room. Unlike the children who appear more as NPCs going about their routine, this presence strikes me as different, more like another consciousness, sharing my dream. I can feel it, but the connection is faint.
As I focus on it, it emerges as a physical form. A pink, glowing torus, lengthened slightly height-wise. There is an ominous, low base-like sound, first surrounding it, then filling the room. It is like a harbinger of dread, and it brings with it the sense that something is terribly wrong.
The next thing that I'm aware of is that the children are gone. Suddenly, their happy sounds are a memory and nothing more. I'm alone with that thing, the troubling rumbling of it.
Then the door opens.
A man shuffles into the room. He's middle aged, dressed in a workman's grey overalls, and is otherwise unremarkable. He ambles up to the washing machine, crouches, opens its door and begins tinkering, his arms deep inside the drum, sonorous, metallic clanking resounding from the tools he's getting to work.
And all the while, the thing looms forebodingly over the scene, the terrible deep-toned hum of its existence feeling like a coiled spring, like a threat yet to be realised.
As the workman toils away inside the machine, he gulps suddenly and his body spasms for a second as he reacts to the unexpected.
He's trapped.
The thing throbs increasingly as if in excitement or, if not quite that, relief that what it has been awaiting is finally, at long last, now happening.
The workman screams out in terror, high-pitched and almost comical.
Then a beep. The washing machine turns on.
With violent jerks the man is pulled inward, consumed by what is now clearly no ordinary machine. Blood and viscera spray outward, splattering around the room in nauseating eruptions that coat the walls, floor and bed.
Before long, and it is a mystifyingly short time, the man has been shredded in his entirety.
The evisceration is complete.
Horrified, my attention turns once again to the thing. The pink, glowing monster. Finally, I feel what it is like to be it. There is no emotion, it is an expression of an unfeeling universe, vast, boundless in its existence. It is here now but it is everywhere, all the time.
That dream is one of the most vivid I've had (the other, involving a WWII Nazi offering me a beer after having cut off my right hand, I believe was my unconscious presenting a metaphor for my social anxiety).
I first harvested its imagery of the torus for a novel I conceived of, though I later shelved the project. But with the Bicameral Protocol I felt the concept of the menacing pink torus was ripe for incorporation as a hounding presence in the game.
In early versions, nothing more than a spartan sandbox really, I toyed with the AI of the torus – detection distances, vision cone angles, levels of persistence in chasing – until I found ranges that worked.
Eventually, the game took shape, and although I liked the abstract nature (a platonic form of terror?) of the monster, I felt its simplicity might come across as comical. The monster therefore became more complex, fleshy, yet still retaining some of the abstractness I desired (the flesh has essentially grown around the pink torus, and you can still see this at its core, inert at first but glowing intensely when the monster is actively chasing the player).
The pink torus would also translate into something more personal to the protagonist – a source, if you like, for the grotesquery of the monster.
So, fine, we have a monster for the game. But what purpose does it serve? What's the point of it? Obviously it must serve as an antagonist, something to fear and avoid, but at all points in the game? I thought that had the potential to became tiresome fast, and the mystery and threat of the monster would diminish quickly. Instead I decided it was best used in the Hub scene, which represents an area of Thrall's Wake centred on Isaac's childhood home. The Hub is where the player returns between visits to the enclosed, clue-based exploration scenes that form the bulk of the game.
In the Hub, the player must navigate to each successive "entrance" to the next scene. As this area is so wide and open, I thought this was the perfect place to have the monster roam.
Seeing as the monster is nebulous in its nature, the floor was pretty much open as to what gameplay mechanics I could implement for it. After experimenting with a sort of "warping" effect I could use to "jump" ahead of the player, I adopted instead a burrowing ability to achieve the same effect.
The idea was that if it had detected the player, but the player was outrunning it, the monster could, sparingly, re-appear ahead of the player, frustrating their efforts of escape. This system prompted the later deployment of a stamina bar – otherwise the player could outrun the monster indefinitely, thereby not requiring the player's agency in determining other methods of successful evasion….
But what of the consequence of the monster catching the player? I was adamant that there was to be no player death and therefore no "you're dead" style pop-up or end screen, though the consequence could not be meaningless. After some thought I came up with the idea of something effectively equivalent to death and subsequent restart via the player being transported to the Blue Rooms. I designed and implemented a variety of these zones, which the player would then have to navigate successfully in order to return to the Hub. This system bypassed the irritating design aspect of having to restart the level from scratch and introduced a sort of bonus by way of new content to explore.
So in the end, the monster serves the function of a hounding, terrifying presence while the player explores Thrall's Wake, the punishment for being caught unsettling but not annoying. All the while, exposure to the monster serves as a useful foreshadow to a fundamental element of suppressed trauma.
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