Horror Rendering in XNA

Soon we’ll be looking in more depth at post-processing in XNA, particularly how its done and what you can do with it. In the meantime, I thought I’d show an extremely simple example of using post-processing to get a very specific genre look.

Ever played Silent Hill? If you have, you know that creepy, scary, bugs crawling on your arms look that the SH games just nail. Let’s see how easy it is to take what you’ve already got in your toolkit and make it happen in your game.

We’re using as our base the NonPhotoRealistic sample from the XNA Creators Club website. That example goes through a couple shader and post-processing effects, and the one we’ll use for this example is the color cross-hatching example. If you run the example as-is, you’ll notice this is the one that gives your model a sort of colored pencil type look.

We’re not going to change this example at all, except for dropping in a new model. All we need to do to modify the existing example to get a horror look is choose the right texture.

I’ve made a simple cube model in Blender, and wrapped it in a very simple, but very grungy looking texture. The texture I’ve embedded in this article is exactly the one I used in the project.

The next step is to take our model and replace the spaceship model in the XNA project. Just load the cube instead of the spaceship, build, and run.

The key to selling “horror” in your game is to get the right look, and pair that with creepy sound effects, music, and a compelling, scary story. I’ve added some gloomy music to this, but you can imagine rounding this out with a little more atmosphere.

Here’s a video showing the render:

Simple, but effective, isn’t it?