Inspiration
"A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort."
-- Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
In spring of 2020, I took a class about writing interactive fiction called Garden of Forking Paths. In this class we created stories in Twine, an HTML based program for creating text-based stories with branching choices. For my final project, I wrote an interactive horror story called The Creek, which explores a trope I do not see often: the final girl joining the monster/horror, and what would push her to do so. I wanted to write about how real life horrors and abuse can cause a child to see the monster as a safer option.
The story was inspired by my time playing in the woods as a child in Colorado, as well a series of nightmares I had in 2018, which I sketched when I woke up. These dreams and my memories served as the setting for the story I wrote.
I was also inspired by surreal visual storytelling from various horror media. I wanted to adapt visuals from The Creek with Unreal Engine, and since the original story is fairly long, I decided to rely on montage instead of dialogue or narration to tell the story.
Original Story
The story follows Joy, a 12-year-old girl who loathes summer break. While most middle schoolers associate summer with play and a break from homework, for her summer is a period where she'll be trapped with her dysfunctional parents for months. In order to avoid her mother's ire and the prickly gaze of her neighbor, Joy spends most of her time playing in the nearby creek, only coming home to sleep. As the days drag on, she begins to suspect something may be watching her from the woods, but with the horrors she faces at home, she wonders whether the monster in the woods is really something to fear.
Visual Design in Unreal
I changed a few elements from the original story that I felt were beneficial for a purely visual adaptation. One change was to make it winter instead of summer, as snow is a bit more cinematic, and I think if the main character is not properly bundled for the weather it conveys that she ran into the woods in a hurry. I also think it communicates that the girl would rather face the harsh cold than the embrace of fire, finding comfort in the chill. I studied photos of rivers and the real location the story is based on, the creek and drain pipe I used to play in as a kid.
I used this scan of a drain pipe by Robert McGregor as a base to recreate the drain with megascans, lining everything up so the dimensions would match.
I started blocking out the main forest scene and sculpting the landscape. For the snow and embankments I used megascans, and a lot of the trees, cliffs, and water I took from Infinity Blade: Ice Lands and the Stylized Winter City Environment. I thought the water from Infinity Blade was a good choice because it has an ice texture that glides along it.
My story relies on a bear monster that is covered in a dripping tar substance. I used this rigged grizzly bear model by Freddy1231 because the model and textures are beautiful and the eyes can be assigned a different material. I removed the fur cards because it would not render well with what I intended to replace the base material with.
The dripping tar substance was difficult to nail down, and was the first thing I attempted before committing to this project. I spent some time researching the best way to achieve this without having to learn something like Houdini. This muddy brickwork material by Brian from FreePBR ended up being a good base to create a flowing, sludge substance by stretching the texture and using a panner to move it along the mesh. I tried to simulate the sludge bulging from the bear by creating a panner for the world position offset, but it caused separations in the mesh. I also kept the green undertones in the muddy texture instead of making it pitch black so the bear won't disappear completely in dark scenes.
I used a free HDRI of Outdoor Snow Mountains by Polligon to help me light the scene for nighttime. The forest is very dark, and I wanted the water to be more dramatic, so I created a secondary light channel that only affects the water plane to make the surface glitter. I kept to a deep blue color palette as I was inspired by my art and the blue passage hyperlinks from the original Twine story. I also used light channels for targeting characters in scenes, but kept the bear mostly in darkness to hide that the material isn't quite right.
Another thing I changed from the original story was pairing down the cast of characters to a little girl, her mother, the bears, and a vague impression of another little girl.
In the story the main character has road rash on her face, so I edited scabbed-over injuries in Photoshop by following this tutorial from Monoville. The injuries were an important part of the character's design because it communicates the unsafe situation, and injuries to the face sometimes result in a change of identity due to how people are treated, which contributes to the girl siding with the monster.
Since the characters are more symbolic in this version of the story, I decided to represent the mother with fire, similar to the dreams I had, and used that as a motif. I tried to replicate this fire effect from Hannibal season 1, episode 5 "Coquilles". This was one of the more difficult effects to achieve and took a lot of trial and error, but a tutorial from Manjil Thapa worked best, though the effect looks different with Unreal 5.3.
I also used assets from What Remains of Edith Finch.
Footage