We're four people making a horror game set in Gdańsk, 2005. One of its locations is a falowiec, one of those enormous curved prefab blocks with external access galleries and a few thousand people living in it.
On Sunday we posted a single screenshot of it to our city's subreddit, with one question: what's the one detail without which a Polish block of flats doesn't look like a Polish block of flats?
We expected a handful of replies. We got around fifty corrections in one evening, several from people who live in the building ours is based on.
Some of what came back:
- Our stairwell light is too cold. It should be dirty yellow, behind frosted glass, with every other bulb dead.
- Our lift has a digital floor display. In 2005 those lifts were plywood and plastic buttons with no display at all. If we keep one, it has to glow red, the way retrofits did.
- Street lighting should be sodium. Sodium is nearly monochromatic, so it doesn't tint a scene orange, it kills every other colour in it.
- Our external galleries are completely empty. No junk, no bikes, no pigeon netting, no washing lines. Thousands of people supposedly live there and not one of them left a trace.
- A jar of water on the gallery, for stubbing out cigarettes. Nobody invents that. You have to have seen one.
What surprised us most: a lot of it was sound. Voices from the basement, pigeons cooing through the ventilation grille from the roof, fluorescent tubes buzzing, a security grille screeching. That's the cheapest work on the entire list and we would never have got there on our own.
If your game is set somewhere real, go and ask the people who live there. It cost us one post and one honest question ;^)