Making Dead Space 2

What you're really talking about is the atmosphere of the first game. It was creepy and you didn't know what was around the corner. You'd hear a sound in the distance and you were scared as you were heading towards it, and then maybe there was nothing. It was that psychological playing that we did.

In Dead Space 2, we're certainly going to have moments like that. But the setting dictates some of what you experienced in Dead Space 1. You were in an abandoned ship where the infection had happened. It leant itself more to that style.

In Dead Space 2, The Sprawl is a space city. The moment when the game picks up, it's not exactly identical to Dead Space 1 in terms of what's going on. You'll see a progression through the game where you'll get to moments like that. You'll have that same dread and sense of the unknown, what may be around the corner.

But then there will be other moments where maybe that's not there intentionally, because we want to set you up for the later moments. If you think about a zombie movie or something, sometimes in those movies at the beginning there are people, and then as they get picked off you start to get more into that atmosphere of what's around the corner. That's a good way to envision what may be going on in Dead Space 2, without giving away the details.

On Dead Space, at the end, one of the tasks I had was focusing on the atmosphere and the horror. For me, at the end, it wasn't scary at all. I thought, people aren't going to think this game's scary. I was very concerned that people were going to think it's not scary.

Once you've played something or you've orchestrated certain moments to happen you know what's going to happen and you don't react to it in the same way. We're in the same situation now where we're in the mode where we're orchestrating and implementing a lot of these atmosphere-building, tension-filled moments. As a developer, you get desensitised to it. You look at something 10 times or 20 times in a day because you're trying to get it just right, you kind of get a little blurry-eyed.

Getting to show it to people lets you know, OK, we're on the right track here. It does make a person jump. Or, people are sitting on the edge of their seat while they're playing this segment.

It's extremely challenging to try to map out atmosphere and do those types of things. Even with the original game, where many people said it was very scary and they enjoyed the atmosphere and the tension, there were equal numbers of people who said the game wasn't scary at all.

Read the internet! There are people out there who say, "Ah, it was a good game, but it didn't make me scared." Everybody's different, right?

Well... It's challenging. It's not like doing a math problem where you know you either have an answer or you don't, it's right or wrong. A lot of it is up to the player's imagination.

Dead Space 2 will probably be a much scarier game if you're playing it in a dark area with headphones on, versus playing it in the middle of a shopping mall with a hundred people running around. A lot of that comes into play, too: where you're playing it, when you're playing it, who's around when you're playing it, and whether or not you want to get lost in that adventure, or you're going to be sceptical.

You do things and you take steps to try to channel them the way you want them to go. You can do things as heavy-handed as taking the camera and pointing it at something, which is effective. But a lot of the time we want to let things progress around you so you discover it.

There are lots of moments in the game where maybe you're looking the wrong way or you're dealing with something else. One of the things as we've been going through, now that we're getting towards the end where we're polishing, is to look at the set-ups we have.

For instance, let's say there's a set-up right there [points at window] where I want you to see something out that window. What you don't want to do is put a collectible or an object in front of it that's going to distract your eye.

So we're looking at things like that – but not getting rid of them all. Doing that can also be effective. You run over to get that collectible and then something happens because you're focusing on something else. So, just evaluating every step through the game and figuring out, what's the focal point in the scene? What are we trying to achieve? Are we setting a person up for a scare? Do we want them to see something important? Just going through each of those things and trying to not have competing elements in a scene to take away attention from what we want people to see.