Hi, I’m Peter, story/dialogue writer for Blight. I'm a huge fan of horror movies, particularly the films of the 70s through the early to mid 90s. My main objective for Blight is for it to feel like an 80s movie that you might see on the shelf of a video rental store.
I wanted to share some of my favorite films with you. These were big inspirations for Blight, be it story, visual inspirations, music inspirations, all that good stuff, we’re hoping that Blight will live up to the legacy of these great films.

The Fog
This John Carpenter classic is a big inspiration for Blight. We hope you can see the visual similarities in the gifs and videos we share on our Twitter account (https://twitter.com/BlightTheGame).
Carpenter does an amazing job with creating a suspenseful film with a mesmerizing atmosphere.
The Fog’s story, dialogue, and characters are, of course, great, but the two elements that stand out for me are the visuals and sound track, Blight’s soundtrack is heavily inspired by Carpenter and we hope to honor his work in our visuals as well.

Aliens
James Cameron’s Aliens is not only an impeccably directed movie, oozing with a grimy atmosphere, the film's characters and writing are equally iconic.
The movie creates a team of likable characters that you really want to see make it to the end, and it’s always a shame to see any of them die. I'm hoping that, with Blight, we’ll be able to make you care about the main characters in a similar way to this classic movie.

In the Mouth of Madness
My personal favorite of Carpenter’s filmography, a beautiful descent into madness that culminates into a disturbing and surreal final act.
Carpenter’s creative imagery is complimented by Sam Neil’s amazing performance.
As you can see from the gifs and videos we’ve been sharing, we took a lot of inspiration from the chaotic, mind bending final act of the movie.
Blight will similarly unravel as we move through the story, making a journey from the natural to the extreme unnatural as madness becomes the new reality.
Sadly, a lot of people I talk to haven't seen this movie, if you're one of those people, do yourself a favor and check it out, you won't regret it.

The Evil Dead 2
The Evil Dead 2 for me is the quintessential horror comedy, it has just the right balance of funny moments and scares, it’s not too scary to be funny, and not too funny to be scary.
ED2 also has one of my favorite horror protagonists, Ash Williams is groovy, but he’s also human and you can see that he’s being affected and traumatized by the events that are unfolding around him.
In Blight, I hope to achieve a similar balance, along with cool characters who are also human, who won’t finish the story the same people they were at the beginning.

The Thing
A recurring theme on this list is isolation. The characters in The Thing are trapped in the arctic base with a monster. If they stay, they will likely die. If they leave, they will definitely die. No one is coming to help them, so their only hope is to figure out some way to solve the situation for themselves.
You might draw some parallels when you play through Blight.
Also, the creature design in The Thing is utterly amazing and a masterclass of practical effects.
The atmosphere is eerie and oppressive, with one of the most underrated soundtracks in movie history.

TerrorVision
TerrorVision was the 80s, most movies are little more than films, few can claim to be an entire decade, TerrorVision was one of those movies, fitting many of the archetypes of the decade into it’s 85 minute running time, along with being an homage to the horror genre, it’s the sort of movie that feels like it was made in the late 2010s as an homage to the decade.
Many of the characters in Blight are inspired by archetypes of the 80s; The punk rocker, the boxer, the nerd.

Return of The Living Dead
This gory, violent, exploitation classic, reanimated the zombie film genre with a punk rock attitude that set it apart from its predecessors.
With a dark sense of humor that provided comedy relief to the disturbing antagonists of the film, along with an oppressive feeling of isolation as the colorful cast of survivors are cut off from any chance of rescue, they must work together to survive as best they can as running away alone only brings death.
With its grim atmosphere, nihilistic humor and punk attitude, along with a stand out performance from Linnea Quigley, it's a Halloween staple for me.

The Crazies (1973)
Unearthly creatures invade the world of Blight similarly to the virus that rampages in The Crazies. I feel that the last days of Blight’s city went down in a similar way to how they unfolded in the movie, with the military doing all that they can to contain the situation through whatever means necessary, but they can only do so much before the situation evolves beyond their control.
The film captures the intense frenetic panic that would be felt upon finding yourself suddenly in an apocalyptic situation, where you need to first find out what is even going on, then either try to get out or solve the problem somehow.


I hope this watch list will help let you into our creative head space.
Thanks so much from the bottom of my heart for all of your continuous support.

Greetings from your local neighborhood console cowboy! I'm Dave, and I've been the lead programmer on Blight for the last 18 months.

As part of our efforts to promote the game, I'd like to take a moment to introduce our character system. Blight features 5 main characters and several different types of enemies.

Like most games, our characters and enemies have a lot of data associated with them - they have meshes and materials which determine how they look, animations which allow them to move, sound effects which play during different events, and lastly attributes which control their health, movement speed, how stealthy they are, etc.

If you've been following us on Twitter, first of all, thank you for your interest and support! But if you found us there, you might be aware that we are using the Unity Engine to build Blight. One of the great features of this engine is the ScriptableObject class. This class is an excellent way to store data that will not change while the game is playing, and we've made use of this for our character attributes.

Below, we've got a short snippet from our attribute class. If you're not familiar with code, don't worry. Let me just go over a couple key points. We're marking the class as serializable, so that we can easily save and load this data later. We are also implementing 3 interfaces: ICharacterAttribute (a custom interface for this project), IEquality and IEquatable. These second two are useful when you store items in dictionaries or lists and when you want to be able to compare two objects.

*************

[Serializable]
public class Attribute : ICharacterAttribute, IEqualityComparer<Attribute>, IEquatable<Attribute>
{
[SerializeField]
private string attributeName;
[SerializeField]
private string description;
[SerializeField]
private float baseValue;
[SerializeField]
private float maxValue;
[NonSerialized] //Sprites are internal to Unity and cannot be serialized using System
private Sprite icon;

//we need to use field and nonserialized because otherwise Unity will try to serialize this, which is BAAD.
[field: NonSerialized]
public event AttributeChangeHandler AttributeChanged;


}

*****************
One other point worth mentioning is the special handling of the AttributeChangeHandler event. You can think of events similarly to subscriptions on an RSS feed or on Youtube - events that are used to notify other systems that something has happened. (A personal favorite example is the voice recordings in Dishonored 2: the robots in the clockwork mansion verbalize their internal state) When the movement speed is changed, for example, we can use this event to notify the animators or navmesh agents to change their speed, or if the health attribute is changed, we can notify the UI to update that, etc. Because we will be using this event in other pieces of code, and because the Attribute class is marked as serializable, when you try to save a character's data, the system will start going through all the code where you have used this event and try to save that code as well. This will lead to a huge number of errors (mostly because Unity has a built-in serialization system for its own data, and this system is not compatible with the native C# system), therefore we need to explicitly tell the computer not to save the subscriptions.

So, I mentioned that we are using Unity's ScriptableObject class, but you might have noticed that there is no mention of it above. That's because we are only using ScriptableObjects to store the data itself in Unity, as below.

*******************

[CreateAssetMenu(fileName = "AttributeList")]
public class AttributeSO : ScriptableObject
{
public List<Attribute> attributes = new List<Attribute>();
public List<Sprite> sprites = new List<Sprite>();
}

******************

Inside our characters, and that includes the enemies, we keep a dictionary of attributes which can be saved and loaded as needed. When we start the game, if there is no game save file, we can go through the attribute ScriptableObject and start assigning default values to the attributes. If there is a game save file, we can just load the data from there. Nice and easy! Because the attributes themselves are not ScriptableObjects, they can be saved both inside and outside of Unity. I think this provides a nice example of a way to use ScriptableObjects - they only contain a definition of each attribute, and the characters each have their own dictionary of attributes with their own values.

******************

[Serializable]
public class Character : ICharacter
{

private string id;
private string name;
private string description;
[FMODUnity.EventRef]
private string hitSound;
private Dictionary<string,Attribute> attributes;

//using float arrays because we can't serialize Unity's Vector3 or Quaternion class/struct
private float[] position;
private float[] rotation;


}

Thanks to some custom inspectors, when you make changes to the attribute list, the characters' and enemies' data also gets updated. So adding or removing an attribute from the list also adds or removes it from the characters.

There is a lot more we could cover on the subject of ScriptableObjects as data holders. For example, we are also using them to store the data for our characters, enemies, items, and weapons. ScriptableObjects provide a robust way for programmers to help the designers and the rest of the team get access to important data without going through lines of code. But for now, I think that gives a good overview of one way to use them. If you made it this far, thank you for your time and attention! We at Most Dangerous Games really appreciate your interest in Blight and we are hard at work pushing this project forward. We look forward to sharing more of the development process with you down the road.

I'd like to close by sharing a discussion the project lead, Peter, and I had many months ago. Blight is steeped in 1980's references, and Peter in particular is a huge fan of 80's horror movies. He was talking about a game mechanic idea that would involve collecting VHS tapes of fictional B horror movies, and I almost wet myself reading through the list of titles he had come up with. I'll only share one here, but I absolutely love how over the top they are and how they seem to pay homage to indie horror titles from the time. One of my favorites is "Attack of the Oversexed Monsters from Beyond the Colors of Space." As you play through Blight, you'll have his wit and creativity to accompany you and our 5 heroes on their adventure!