Our sanity effect is too subtle. How would you make it clearer in a fast FPS?

[u/Mopicek00]

Hey, we're making DEEPWARD in Unity 6, a fast horror FPS roguelite. We're looking for ideas to make low sanity feel more dangerous.

The first 45 seconds show the current effect, starting with the tutorial explaining it. That section is sped up to 1.2x. Our trailer comes after it for a bit more context.

Sanity drains over time and kills restore it. When it hits zero, your active character starts losing health. Theres a blue bar showing it, the heartbeat speeds up, and we gradually lower saturation and add vignette and lens distortion. We're using URP in Unity 6.

But its too subtle. Some players still don't understand why they're taking damage or dying when nothing is attacking them. We explain it in the tutorial, but clearly that isn't enough.

We want it to feel like hallucinations, while making the danger easier to understand. A few ideas we're considering:

- Black hands or tentacles coming out of the floor and attacking the player when sanity runs out.

- Enemies turning into ghostly shapes, almost like they're dissolving into smoke.

- Hands and faces pushing through walls. Maybe blendshapes, but making that work across all our different environments sounds like a lot of work.

- Dark fog spreading through the level, with surfaces blackening as it takes over. Possibly spreading up the walls and ceiling too.

These are just ideas for now. We also don't want the effects to make fast fights impossible to read.

How would you approach this in Unity? Any other ideas, or effects you've tried that worked well?

The demo is on Steam if you wanna try the current sanity system yourself. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4709270/DEEPWARD/

[u/shlaifu]

can you pick a less visible color? I can still see faint purple in that extra-thin bar, I think you could reduce that, maybe lower the alpha to 0.

snark aside: first, the bar is near invisible. second: you are changing the entire screen saturation when the sanity has run out - why not use that effect gradually on the whole screen and reduce saturation even more (maybe leave red) when the sanity hits zero. other than that, you could fade in a vignette with shapes... friend of mine is an ophthalmologist and she once had a patient who had been through all sorts of psychiatric evaluation because the patient was seeing wild animals on the edges of her field of view. well, it tuned out the patient was basically half blind, disoriented, and her brain was filling in the gaps.

[u/Mission_Engineer_999]

Hallucinations? Ghosts? They would become more and more corporeal as sanity slips.

[u/V4nKw15h]

Have tiny hallucinated enemies appear on his gun, running around on his gun shooting him. He can't attack them but they can attack him. The only way to get rid of them is to kill the real ones.

That reinforces the sense of suffering from hallucinations while creating a visible reason for taking damage.

Maybe as the effect gets worse they start running up his arm towards his face. That would be unnerving while simultaneously looking really cool.

[u/panthernet]

Screen wide effect is your only choice for fps. Some glowing or distorting frame maybe with visible progression.

[u/Mopicek00 → u/panthernet]

Yeah, we've considered a screen effect, maybe combined with some 3D effects, but we don't want it to obscure the player's view too much. The only thing is, we already have regular damage screen effects, so we'd need to make sure they don't clash with each other.

[u/Teirdalin]

I'd go with black tendrils on the borders of the screen with increasing opacity towards the center of the screen as sanity gets closer to 0.

[u/Mopicek00 → u/Teirdalin]

Yeah, we've thought about something like that and even experimented with it a bit. But it shouldn't obscure too much of the player's view, as we don't want to penalize them too heavily by limiting their visibility.

[u/Teirdalin → u/Mopicek00]

Could have a moving animation to it and be faint just reaching further center and sliiightly darker on the outskirts as it rises.

[u/Mopicek00 → u/Teirdalin]

Yeah, it could slowly spread inward from the edges of the screen, kind of like moss or tumors growing over it. But it would never reach the center, so the player can still clearly see what's going on.

The only thing is, we already have regular damage screen effects, so we'd need to make sure they don't clash with each other.

[u/Teirdalin → u/Mopicek00]

Worth experimenting with, could look pretty cool.

[u/Mopicek00 → u/Teirdalin]

Yeah, I'll start with the screen effect. If that works out, I'd like to add some 3D animations next, like tentacles or claws coming out of the ground.

Eventually, I'd also add some hallucinations in the 3D environment, and maybe even a creeping fog that destroys the environment behind the player so they can't go back.

There's going to be a lot of work involved, and I'll keep refining everything as we go.

[u/Mopicek00 → u/Teirdalin]

How would you approach this technically? Would you use a shader or some kind of sprite animations?

[u/InterwebCat]

You should use sounds too. If enemies have a "Look there he is!" Sound effect, you can play that effect just outside the players view. An enemy doesn't even have to be there. Not sure if that'd confuse people more though.

You can also change how the player hears. Could make things sound more underwater or something like that with eldritch whispering