7 DEVS Make STARDEW VALLEY, but it’s a HORROR Game!

7 DEVS Make STARDEW VALLEY, but it’s a HORROR Game!

Welcome to Horrified. Seven developers, each given a specific role, such as programmer, artist, or sound designer, must take a classic game, and transform it into a horror game. In this episode, we’re going to take the beloved farming game Stardw Valley and horrify the heck out of it. So, without further ado, let’s begin with the first developer. Hi guys, I’m Luca. I’m currently working on a game called Icewine, and I have a YouTube channel with my brother. I’m responsible for the art in this game. So, I started by drawing the main character. I tried to make him as similar to the Stardio Valley characters as I could. I made the basic animations for him like idol and running as well as animation for watering the plants. The main thing in Stardio Valley story is that you inherit the house from your grandpa. So, the next thing that I drew were the inside and outside of the house. I also made a big yard where the player will be able to plant some vegetables and stuff like that. I was thinking about what could make Stardio Valley scary because with the assets that I made so far, you could make just a peaceful farming simulator, which is not the goal. The goal is to traumatize someone. I suddenly remembered that there is a cave in Stio Valley, and I thought that it could be made much scarier in our version of the game. I also remembered that in Stio Valley, you can watch TV. So, I made the cave with this scary guy that looks like the evil version of Crobas from Stardio Valley talking to you from the TV. The idea is that he will threaten you, so you will need to farm for him or something like that. I was also thinking that he can have some kind of minions that scare you throughout the farming process, and the only way you can get rid of them is to make a scarecrow from pumpkins and wheat that you harvested. But when you make them, they chase you down and kill you. Now, you might be wondering, why is it daylight outside if it’s a horror game? Well, in Stio Valley, we have a dayight cycle, and that has to be programmed in a game engine, and I also kind of ran out of time. So, I will leave this for the next developer. Hello, I’m Radnick. I’m making a game about little guys, and I’m making the sound effects for this challenge. I was given these sprites to work with. There’s definitely a story here, and it was my job to imagine what this story sounds like. You just heard the cave sound effect. So, let’s break that down. We have this drip sound from freesound.org. I made it echo a little more. Next is this wind effect. The original sound was too big. Here’s a sample. Sounds good, but it’s taking up a lot of frequency space. It’s got high pitches going all the way to 20,000 hertz. And it’s got this hot spot down here below 100 hertz. I want to layer the drips up top and other sounds down below, but there’s just no room in the frequencies. So, I used the EQ tool, cut off the high end, and trimmed the low end. And now we have room to add more detail. Lastly, I opened FL Studio and found this sound called Goblin and I lowered it down. And that makes our ambience cave audio. While I still have the time, here’s the rest of the sound effects I made. [Music] [Applause] [Music] And remember, if you’re making sound effects, go crazy. I’ve been Radnick, Wishless Little Guys on Steam, and see you later.
Now, really quick note. 80% an incredible game, largely in part to how much interesting content is in it. So, I wanted to utilize every asset we have and stretch it as far as it’ll go. I land on a game that focuses on surprise and atmosphere. You garden and collect as efficiently as possible, just like Stardew, but instead of the days counting up, they’re counting down. You have 7 days to prepare for the harvest. The game play works by having phenomena occur throughout the day as small as a flickering silhouette to being chased by this guy. It’s a ton to do in the given time. So, good luck. Hi everyone, I’m Pab. I’m currently working on a citybuer game called Icewine with my brother Luca and we also have a YouTube channel called Milo made a game. It seems that I’ll be starting this project, which is great because I’m not good at finishing games. I got the art assets and sound effects as well as some game design document that I should follow. Since I’m the first developer, I get to choose the engine. So, I choose Unity. I made a new 2D project and added a square that represents the player and made the table able to move. I added the animations and now it looks really nice. I added the environment and the house that you inherit in Stardew Valley. Right now, it doesn’t look that scary, but we’ll worry about that later. Usually, in the real world, you can enter houses, especially if the house is yours. So, I added that the main game play should be to collect as many sticks and vegetables as you can while being stalked by some monsters. So, I added a system that spawns these white squares that represent those vegetables for now. I added a stick, a potato, a carrot, and wheat. You need to wait for everything to grow except for the sticks. You can pick up the sticks immediately. Then, I added a counter that counts days. You can sleep on the couch to trigger the next day. Your goal is to reach day seven without being killed by the stalkers, which I’ll add later, and then bring everything that you collected to the cave for the harvest. You can’t enter the cave before day seven. So, I added this text that tells you what you can and can’t do. Since your goal is to collect as much stuff as you can, I added a score screen at the end of each day to tell you what you collected that day. I added the cave, but you can’t do anything in it for now. I added that you can water the plants so that they grow faster so that you can collect them as soon as possible. But then I noticed something. The game is pretty quiet because I forgot to add sound effects. I added the sound effects that were provided to me. Take a listen. [Applause] I think that the walking sound is a bit annoying, but I need to leave that to the next developer to worry about because my time is up. The next dev should also add scary stuff like stalkers, jump scares, and a scarier atmosphere. Hi, I’m Bigs and I’m an idiot. So, I’m the second programmer on the Spooky Stardw Valley project, and most of my contribution came over the course of two Twitch streams because I had a great idea. Stream it, I thought. Make some epic clips that we can take out and use for the footage for this video. I thought, back in my day, we used to have to walk 15 miles in the snow to get to school. Uphill both ways. Mistakes were made. But hey, I was excited to join this project because I am a massive Stardw Valley fan. Wait, hey, don’t look at that. Don’t look at that. I started off with boring but important stuff like Y sorting, an audio manager, singleton manager, the kind of stuff that nobody really cares about or notices until it breaks. God, I hope it don’t break. And then I tackled the night because this game is all about the spooky nighttime where things start creeping out of the woods and things like that. And we didn’t actually have a nighttime by the time the project got to me. So, I made a dayight cycle, but we couldn’t just have a standard dayight cycle because then the the game would just progress through whether the player had finished or not. So, I made it so that the dayight cycle paused at 2:00 a.m. So, like you you would go through the day from wake up until 2:00 a.m. and then it would just be in a perpetual night until you went and slept because, you know, sleep is safety unless you have a really aggressive sleep paralysis demon. I also made the item spawning a little bit smarter. So, like for example, reads now only spawn near the pond. I added a pond. And like sticks only spawn around the base of trees. Oh yeah, I added trees. Take that, Mr. Beast. Mr. Beags. It was there the whole time. And then the fun stuff, the haunting phenomenon. So, technically, I wasn’t supposed to do any art. I am a programmer on this project, not the artist, but we didn’t actually have any art for the phenomen. Okay. So, I found out during these streams that I can’t actually say the word phenomenon. So anyway, I I I may have drawn a couple things. I’m not proud. I’m sorry. Well, I’m a little bit proud. So, I think I got through most of the spooky monstery things that were listed out in the game design document. Not all of them, but hopefully there’s enough game to uh be a game. Thanks for having me. Hi everyone, I’m Sloopy. I was the musician for this challenge, but I realized in order to properly score an atmospheric horror game that I needed to implement the sound design into the game to really tell the story. The game opens in silence. The TV draws you in and you get insight into your purpose to build the scarecrow for the upcoming harvest. Each morning you’ll hear this innocent theme called Sunrise. The first night is a calm clarinet theme called moonrise to lull you into a false sense of security. [Music] [Applause] [Music] But then the cracks form. The phenomena now have their own voices, shrieks, unsettling drum beats, and risers. A system coded to randomly select from a list of noises based on danger level. By the fourth night, even the TV turns on you. But I kept sunrise untouched. Every morning it plays again, bright as ever, making the nights feel even more raw. until the final morning. [Music] At last, you descend into the cave. And it’s on to the next dev to give the game its final polish. Hi, I’m Liam and I’m the last dev. And that means my role is to polish the game, which is both super exciting and kind of scary because anything I add to the game, well, it’s final. So, after playing through the game for just a little bit, I noticed that one of the things you could only do was pick up sticks. And I saw that other devs had implemented carrots and potatoes and wheat, but you actually didn’t have to pick any of those up. And they were kind of rare to spawn. So, I think one of the important changes I made was make sure that there was an area next to the house for the carrots and potatoes to spawn specifically, as well as making it a requirement to pick up these other types of items because we don’t want the game to be just a stick pickup simulator. It’s supposed to be like Stardw Valley. So, we actually need the plants. I also added wheat in around the pond in the area cuz I thought it was cool to have like this different area for the wheat to grow. I also added a path and moved the house and trees around just a little bit um cuz I thought it would be a bit more interesting. Another one of the things that I really thought I should add after talking to some of my friends was adding a bit more ambience, especially at night and playing with the lighting. So, I adjusted the lighting and added this really cool smoke effect that’s literally just a single sprite like grayish blob that spawns around. And when since it spawns so much, when the player walks into it, it kind of fades away. So, it’s like the fog fades away as you walk into it, which I think looks really cool. And I made sure this only plays at night. So, it adds a little bit more to that spooky ambience at night. And I also was like, I’m on a roll with this ambience stuff. I think it’s looking great. So, I added some rain that plays on days 2 and three, and I just think it looks pretty cool. But besides ambience, I also added a few little polishing things. One of the things I did was add like this animation to the text as it goes away. And I also made it so that the player would get little hints if they haven’t done what they’re supposed to. If they need to go to bed and they haven’t gone to bed in a little bit, it’ll tell them, “Hey, I need to go to bed.” Or maybe they haven’t checked the sign at all, it’ll tell them to check the sign. Hopefully, this helps people from getting less stuck because there wasn’t really too many instructions. I also added a interact indicator because it actually wasn’t clear what you could interact. So, I think this is quite important because it does tell you what can be interacted and you know what button to interact with. I also added a main menu because that didn’t exist. Um, it’s super basic because I didn’t want to spend too much time on it. But, you know, it does its job. And really, after adding these things, the game definitely feels a lot better. I mean, you actually have a little bit more depth in the fact that you have to actually plant the crops now. And it’s a little bit nicer at night with the ambience and the rain. I think it looks pretty cool. That’s all for me. I’m Outcloud and I make games on YouTube. So, go check that out if you like. And that’s all.
I put some spooky stuff in this game design document. and I deeply regret it.
The game is much more polished. I’m pleasantly surprised by that, man. The music is nice. I didn’t expect it to look that good because when I worked on it, it was all like made in daylight and uh when you guys added the sound effects and uh the lighting and everything else, it looks great and feels great.
All right, still raining. That’s nice. Go six sticks, three potatoes. Okay, just sticks. I’m a stick man. a man who goes for sticks.
I feel like at the end there like the thing that could really make a big draw here for it is making kind of more of a unique system around like the planting and the things kind of maybe like chasing you more when planting. So it’s like, oh man, I have to go gather potatoes now. It’s like I have to go over to this portion and there’s a thing I have to avoid. So kind of just expanding out the threat and kind of forcing players to stay out later at the night.
Oh man, I regret everything. should have made this a fun game about hanging out with friends, seeing cute little animals. That’s scary.
If we could add something that pressured the player more, like you said, like something that chased you, that could definitely add a lot, especially at nighttime when you’re scrambling to collect those things. Yeah. So, I know it’s supposed to be a twist that you get to the end and you find out that you were the sacrifice all along. But one thing I thought when I was messing with it is that it might have been good if if you had a goal where you could avoid being the sacrifice. Like maybe if you harvested enough things then you weren’t the sacrifice. Like maybe if there was an alternative path that you could aim for. Oh wow. I am a coward. What’s up with the TV? Oh [ __ ] [Music] My favorite mechanic that surprised me was when you stay out too late, it inverts your controls. I think that’s the perfect way to like stress the player out but still give them a chance. Oh, my controllers inverted themselves. Why did I come up with that?
More little ways to like screw with the player like that I think would be really fun.
I think that adding multiplayer would be fun so that you can play with your friends and build your farm together. Heck yeah. Make that some kind of competitive element as well so that somebody has to get sacrificed as a team against each other.
Oh my god. I don’t know if you can hear these sound effects. They sound like dying on acid. Wa.
I think it was really cool to work with having like a lot of the art already and uh a lot of the things so that you could just add on top of you know what other people had. I think that was really cool when you’ve got like limitations, right? you’ve got a very specific theme or you’ve got a set of art or a design document you have to do the best with what you’ve got. I feel that’s really a great challenge. I love that.
On the one hand, it’s really good to have a specific task that you have to stick to. But on the other hand, when you hit something, it’s like, oh, I kind of need this art asset and we don’t have it. Oh god, am I allowed to just make a little bit of pixel art?
That was pretty frightening. It’s a little pixel art game. The sound effects really got me. You guys put it together really well. I think you really fulfilled, you know, whatever vision we were going after. Let us know in the comments which other game you would love to see horrified next. Make sure to like and subscribe to the channel. It’s a huge support and stay tuned.

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CREDITS:

Luka: https://www.youtube.com/@milomadeagame
Radnyx: https://www.youtube.com/@radnyx_games
Joe Sullivan (Night Shift at the Universe Factory): https://discord.gg/sqMBzMgSMG
Pavle: https://www.youtube.com/@milomadeagame
B3agz: https://www.youtube.com/@b3agz
Skloopy: https://www.youtube.com/@skloopy_dev
Outer Cloud: https://www.youtube.com/@outercloud

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TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 – Intro
0:22 – Luka (MiloMadeAGame)
2:04 – Radnyx
4:23 – Joe Sullivan
5:28 – Pavle (MiloMadeAGame)
7:58 – B3agz
10:13 – Skloopy
12:40 – Outer Cloud
15:09 – Reactions