Building a Better Sanity Meter

The Sanity Meter is one of those game mechanics that is conceptually one of the best things to ever happen to horror-themed videogames. As your player character witnesses more and more unsettling sights, from dismembered body parts to freakish monsters to Alien Geometries, they become that much more insane and lose touch with the world around them.

In theory that is awesome. In practice what we get with most Sanity Meters tends to be either a motion sickness inducing wobbly screen or a second health bar that just ends the game when we reach 0 sanity (no, you didn't die you went insane! But it's functionally the same).

We can do better than that. I think we can design a Sanity Meter that can change gameplay in interesting ways as it rises and falls without resorting solely to the blurry screen and health bar methods above. So what do you think? Would it be interesting even as just a thought experiment? Shall we set some ground rules before getting into the nitty gritty details?

Don't Starve has a sanity meter pretty similar to your ideas.

edited 29th Aug '13 8:29:21 PM by Swampertrox

The Sanity Meter should actually start affecting your characters dialogue. Example being that in the early stages, you can see the Protag becoming a bit unhinged and nervous, mid-way we have Madness Mantra, and lastly it ends with acceptance, where your character seems to change completely and utterly, with no way to revert it. The Deep End

A good implementation of a Sanity Meter might cause the pros and cons of actions to be altered as the character gains or loses sanity. For example, sources of health and stamina recovery might gain damaging effects.

We could also have the player character respond to inputs in a different way, such as being 'frozen' with panic when the attack or interact key is pressed at lower sanity levels.

Of course, the easiest effect to implement would be hallucinations. Make enemies look and sound like harmless NP Cs or allies or make traps look like safe spots or, well, just make the character's perception differ from the 'reality' of their surroundings in some way.

edited 29th Aug '13 8:40:55 PM by recon5

Well first remove the visual indicator of the Sanity Meter. No really do it.

Next instead of blurry screen. Have other effects instead. Like the creepy whispering. Enemies showing up to attack you and suddenly disappearing. Sounds of being hunted by a known nasty and scary enemy. Have time shift more rapidly temporarily for games with day/night or time cycles. There are all sorts of tricks involved.

There was a game on the Nintendo Game Cube that made good use of unconventional insanity effects. Eternal Darkness I think it was?

I haven't played Don't Starve in a while, didn't know it had been updated to have that. I'll check it out, thanks.

That's a good idea for a horror-tinged RPG like Bloodlines. The Malkavian PC has some great examples of just plain insane dialogue. The difference with your idea is that it would be possible to (maybe) to become more and less sane over time so the dialogue options could be different at the same points in multiple playthroughs depending on how you play!

I was just thinking of including Interface Screw elements. Like maybe the key you're looking for is sitting on a desk but at a certain level of (in)sanity it instead looks like a gun.

I'm starting to think that this kind of more dynamic Sanity Meter would require a ton of programming and memory space just to hold all the different possibilities.

edited 29th Aug '13 8:46:23 PM by AnSTH

I would advise against messing with the player controls. That just ends up being annoying at best. (Or the player thinking the game's buggy at worst.)

Seconding the omission of a sanity meter (I mean, that the player can see). The player should know that one exists, but have no clear indicator for exactly how insane they're getting.

Another idea might be a gradual shift in the visuals. For example, at full sanity, you're looking at a normal town, bright houses, sunshine, kids running around, all that good stuff. As you start to lose it, it starts getting a little cloudy, the trees a little less green, the paint starting to flake. When your sanity is dangerously low, all the people seem to be gone (except for plot-relevant NPC's), it's perpetually overcast, all the plants are dead and withered, houses are in ruins.

edited 29th Aug '13 9:13:26 PM by KylerThatch

We're starting in a horror setting. Probably better to invert that and have the scenery change from a stock horror atmosphere to a candy coated wonderland as sanity decreases.

Teufel: Eternal Darkness was the Trope Codifier, in fact, which makes it really funny to me that motion blur and jittercam are considered sanity effects, because they're lazy and annoying and the game that gave everyone else the idea used neither of them. Eternal Darkness mixed together 'background hallucinations' (which just altered the environment) and 'room hallucinations' (which would contain something that would mess up your entire game, if it didn't cut back to just before you entered that room while your character cries This... isn't... really... HAPPENING!), and screwing with both the character AND the player. It's glorious. :D They range from simple things like bleeding walls, creepy changing paintings, and statues that turn to watch you as you go by, to more cunning tricks -

• Eerie noises and quiet laughter
• Books flutter across the library as you enter
• Props change location behind your back
• The new room is upside-down
• The character's head falls off, eventually followed by the rest of their limbs
• You slowly sink into the floor
• Your character is suddenly a zombie
• The audio settings mute themselves
• A message pops up informing you that your controller is unplugged while you get mobbed by nightmarish terrors
• Flies crawl about the inside of the screen
• And, my personal favourite, the game cuts short to inform you that Eternal Darkness will be continued in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Redemption!

Actually, I ran across the original patent for the sanity meter the other day, and it lists some ideas that weren't used in the game itself.

edited 29th Aug '13 10:14:32 PM by Noaqiyeum

edited 29th Aug '13 10:25:23 PM by KylerThatch

One of the defining characteristics of Real Life insanity is the sufferer believing their actions are rational and justified. How do we cause a (supposedly) fully rational player to experience the same disconnect? I feel that would be the hallmark of the perfect Sanity Meter.

I dunno. Have you seen the actions players already see as rational and justified? If not, take a good look a Dwarf Fortress and Crusader Kings II.

Make crazy hallucinations happen around them, but don't draw attention to it. Make the player believe that they can just power through it, and let them be tricked by their own complacency and Wrong Genre Savvy. Throw lots of stereotypical effects at them like the wobbly screen and such, to distract them from the real, more subtle but more more important changes. Etc.

Gaining entertainment from an action counts as a benefit in a rational analysis especially since the whole point of a game is to be entertaining. Bait the player into an action which would have lulzy results in a different game - but nope, since your SAN is critical it turns out to have positively nightmarish results.

Kyler: Yep. Only without the 'following you around in order to kill you' part.

Isn't there a MMORPG that simulates the boost of confidence obtained from drinking alcohol by making all the enemies appear to be a few levels lower while the effect lasts?

One of the BBS-based games, Usurper, modeled alcohol and drug use through a combination of making your character more likely to randomly attack people when drunk and occasional blackouts where you'd lose your actions for the guy and the computer would play for you, often getting you into trouble with the law.

I like the idea of getting wasted altering your perception of enemies, perhaps with a side order of Your Mind Makes It Real (at least until you sober up) for any new abilities that the enemies might gain (such as if you hallucinate a zombie breathing fire while on a bad trip, well here's hoping your character isn't weak to fire damage).

edited 30th Aug '13 4:45:50 PM by Balmung

Didn't Ill Bleed also have something akin to a sanity meter?