Nightmares have inspired everything from paintings to novels, and now a group of Georgia Tech students has turned to nightmares for inspiration for a new video game they've created called, what else, Nightmares.

The Flash-based game was created as part of the Game Design as Cultural Practice class, taught by Celia Pearce, assistant professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and director of the Experimental Game Lab. The design team is made up of undergraduate students Andrea Benavides, Harrison Leach and Nic Vasconcellos, with the initial concept being the brain-child of Vasconcellos.

“The game is basically a kid running through his nightmares, fighting off things as he’s trying to wake up,” said Vasconcellos.

A platformer that features a protagonist trying to escape from his dream world, the game begins with the character visible only by a small circle of light that envelopes him. As time passes or the character hits a nightmare creature, such as an evil dust bunny or a shadow blob, the window of visibility shrinks, making it more difficult to navigate the board. The only way to increase visibility is to capture small points of light, known as lumens, which are sprinkled throughout the world.

“We wanted to create something that illustrates an actual aspect of dreaming, which is becoming more aware in your dream, so we decided to represent the concept of lucid dreaming. We tried to build our mechanic based off that idea,” said Leach. “The constant shrinking of the player’s vision in the game world represents how a person slips from lucidity in a real dream. The circle that determines the player’s level of vision gets smaller over time as he fails to collect lumens. As lumens are collected, the circle grows in size, which metaphorically represents an increase in lucidity.”

 “The biggest challenge of the game is the visibility. You’re surrounded by darkness and you don’t really know what’s coming up on either side. It’s okay if you’re doing well, but if you’ve been hurt a couple of times, it gets pretty freaky,” added Vasconcellos.

A fascinating feature of Nightmares is the mood created by the music and sound effects accompanying the game. Carter and Leach recorded the music that shapes the player’s experience in a studio on campus. “We wanted to texture the game world with sounds of a dreamy timbre,” comments Leach. “In addition, we tried to integrate the sound effects in a way that seems emergently musical.”  

Another interesting aspect of the game is that at the early stages, the board actually tells you how to play by giving you diagrams, drawn on the background, of the key strokes needed to accomplish new tasks.

"I gave them a number of constraints in the class—no killing, no medieval fantasy, alien invasion, and no post-apocalyptic scenarios,” explained Pearce.  “I also instruct them to create games that someone other than just themselves would like. We spend a great deal of time in class talking about how ‘fun’ is different for different people. This is a pretty simple construct, but it's an eye-opener for a lot of the students. The result is that they come up with some really creative and innovative projects in the class."

The group recently submitted Nightmares to the International Festival of Independent Games, IndieCade (http://www.indiecade.com/).

Benavides and Vasconcellos went to Scotland this summer to participate in Dare to Be Digital, the United Kingdom’s premier video game design competition held at the University of Abertay.

All five students are seniors in Tech’s computational media program, a joint undergraduate degree between the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and the College of Computing.