The scary aspect of Starbound

Oh absolutely. Games that rely on sound are even more effective at scaring the shit out of people. You can't go another way in a 2D sidescroller either, you need to either stop, or walk towards whatever it is.

 

Do you mean something similar to this?

 

Spiders. A cave full of creepy, wall climbing, utterly terrifying spiders.
Then if you die, you spawn with spider eggs in your face that occasionally cause spiders to leap out of your face for 3 in game days.

 

I dunno, I never played dead space. But yeah, system shock counts.

Nah, it's just frustrating.

 

It was a dreary, December evening I remember, when I first smelled the smell. I was walking along the familiar streets of my home town; right near the grocery store in fact. It was normal business. The folk their were tending to their routinely activities, finishing up the days work and preparing for their commute home. Seemingly a perfect day, nobody, including myself, expected it to have been so good.

Nobody expected it to go so wrong.

The smell came without warning. There was no notice, no sound, or alert. "Is that old spice?" someone cried out. "No," I said, with a look oh so gloomy upon my countenance, "Its Ivory Springs". Panic broke out among the citizens. A great shadow was strewn across the earths surface, so large that neither man nor floran could possibly stand on one end of it and see the other. The last thing I remember is the look of utter misery and grief upon the faces of my friends as Tiys beard descended upon them. There was no hope for them. There was nothing I could do.

I sank into the shadows (because im a ninja) and reappeared miles away. Although I've grown old, that beard still haunts me. I spend my days gazing up at the sky in fear. I will never stray far from my home again; living in peace a shall nevermore.

 

well they weren't scary but i reacted like
"somebody do something about them, they're destroying the base "

 

To master fear in the image of a game I don't think monsters are needed; it is harnessing the power of loneliness and hopelessness, and the unknown. That is what truly stir one's head. I call it the 'Triangle of Fear'.

 

I think glitches in the game are the scariest. Things that are so creepy...And they weren't even supposed to happen

 

I think that we dont need a certain mob or something like that to scary , but if they could creat the right "felling" with sonds and a strange music could make the person run away from the computer easily.

 

Missing No.That's one of the scariest things I've seen.

 

The most basic thing to scare players, as has been touched at by previous posters, is building anticipation with fading in "creepy ambience", then if mob based, introduce a mob that takes away control from the player. Prime example of this is the old Clocktower games with Scissorman.
Endermen from Minecraft is another good example, though they suffer from overexposition.

A mob in a game will never be scary after you learn the mechanics of it. Therefore, if you want scary mobs in the game, they have to be diversive and play by their own rules. And be unique or at least so rare that the player never really adjusts to them. Get some panic and stress into the player. Make them start running.

 

I think the most frightening thing would be to find a dead planet, that has no sound effects except for your footsteps, or just the wind, or even your own breathing. You just KNOW something horrible killed off all the life, but you don't know if that horrible thing still exists or not. Every now and then, as you explore, you may hear a jarring sound, totally random and at odds with whatever it is you may be doing at the time. Then suddenly, you'd realize you were no longer alone. Maybe you see an abnormal shadow as you sweep your flashlight beam across the wall. Maybe you stop walking, yet still briefly hear footsteps coming from behind you. Be it a visual or aural cue, you'd just KNOW you were no longer alone. How long it would take for whatever abomination dwells on the planet to finally appear, I'm not sure about. Perhaps it never would, but those visual or aural cues would just keep intensifying until you just couldn't stand to stay there any longer.

That would be pretty frightening to me, at least. The constant build-up of tension with no release can really fry your nerves. Even if a monster would never actually appear, you probably wouldn't stick around long enough to find out one way or another. Or maybe you would. I'm not that brave.

 

Isn't the Bad Moon creepy enough for you guys? This game will already give me nightmares as soon as I come across one of those things.

 

The things people fear they most often carry inside themselves.

It only takes a trigger or stimulus to open their eyes to seeing it in reality.
That said, Plunging people into fear is easily done. Merely through a few simple track changes with a tense feel in them, as well as a slow but sure and above all intelligent terror coming for you is often all you need to make a fear-oriented game sequence. How you do it? Well, thats up to your style. I find infliucting people with Twilight Princess's Twili themes tends to be my trick in getting people in a state of fear.

 

IndentedOne way to introduce fear into Starbound would be to have the unknown entity that destroys your home world stalk you throughout the game. Also, if Starbound needs an endgame boss, said entity would work nicely.
IndentedI mean, anything with the power to cause global destruction (if I remember correctly?) is not something to be dismissed. Seems to me it'd only make sense to include It—that's what I'll call the entity for the meantime—throughout the rest of the game, since It is the reason why the game begins at all.
IndentedMaybe every couple of tiers, It would make an appearance. You could try to fight It but you would, of course, lose, time and again, until the suggested end-game boss battle!; this repeated failures would instinctively force you to beat a quick-as-fuck retreat at the very hint of the music changing to anything other than perpetually happy.
IndentedOr! A sub-plot to whatever story there might be in the game is that as you explore and become stronger, you come across further evidence of Its existence. The player's log could then double as a record of the puzzle which we're trying to piece together. ("Why did this happen?" "What does it want?" "Can it be reasoned with?")

 

Yes, the owl from Ocarina of time is a good example of this.

 

Scary? God I am horrible at handling that kind of stuff, but I think something scary would be something that doesn't happen too often, you don't know what it is, but you know its there. Even if it doesn't appear it would still be good at creeping me out. And I really hope they wouldn't anounce it even being there, and maybe not even putting it in the wiki, that would frighten me so much.

EDIT: Here is a great example of scary in my opinion, WaterWraith, first time I played... What could I do, its water steamrolling all my pikmen , what can I do? How do I beat it. All I can do is hurry up and get out of each floor before the time limit happens and it falls but then I scared it so bad on the final floor... heheh.

 

The thing that scares me most probably are things that are unnerving, and things that you don't expect. In Minecraft, for example, I get scared of caves because I don't want a creeper sneaking up on me. Yeah, I'm kind of a pansy when it comes to these things.

The concept of an entity that stalks you throughout the game, or something that you are helpless to fight against has been brought up many times. Being completely powerless over something that can easily overpower you is definitely a scary thought. Just look at Amnesia. Just don't overdo it, devs, we're not making a horror game.

 

I'm scared of anything that I can't kill. Like em' regenerate-till-end-of-time enemies found in Resident Evil and Dead Space. Or if the game takes away your ability to retaliate against enemies that hunts you down.

 

Especially in a game like this, where the terrain and land isn't designed for you to hide or run. All you can do is try what you can, and pray to (Insert Deity Here) that it works.