I wanted to know more about
last week's header, the fucked up Crotchrot Manor that's currently scaring people on
Rust Factions. So I asked its creator, and community update semi-regular
MadMaxGamer, to walk us through the manor's inception. In between ranting about demons, and apparantly hexing me, he eventually opened up about what lies in the depths of his haunted house. Below are his thoughts.
Mess With Their Minds
I had the idea during the last wipe. I had a lot of fun filling the corridors of my base with oddly placed shotgun traps and later heard from the people who raided me that they had a blast (ha!) trying to get in, as they
kept getting surprised by them.
I wanted to explore that further. This time I was building in a town where no killing is allowed, so I had to mess with their minds
rather than their health bars.
I began to build a winding corridor that would take the longest route through the 5x3 plot I was given, while having some sort of weird thing at every c
orner. After “digging under the floorboards”, I found a crawl space that was the underside of the town sidewalk that no-one was using, enabling me to extend the haunted house with a claustrophobic maze section right under everyone's noses. And because stone is too white, and
metal is too “shipping container”, it had to be wood.
I Photoshopped some surreal paintings, filled the house with
deployables to give it a sense of clutter and even more claustrophobia, and spammed spinners with a tiled picture of meat, to symbolize a corrupted tumo
r eating the walls. I later changed that to melded faces, because it worked better.
Then I
let people in.
I made a gate I’d be able to open/close from behind a wall, out of sight of any vict
i….uh…
visitors. People are more willing to come into a strange house, if they don't see you next to a door that can be closed behind them.
At first they just wandered in the open doorway, or because of my “I’m a little boy, help me someone please” act in voice chat. I'd slam the door behind them, and that would send them into panic and they'd beg to be let out, banging on the front door. Thing is, the house is always open, there is always a way out, though some aren't very curious to find it.
The first guests I had even managed to rally up some “good samaritans” from the outside, to bring a flamethrower and free the “captive”. After a while, though, word spread that the house is harmless and actually fun, and people started bringing their friends: laughing outside while the house “swallowed” their buddy, while I'd be howling like a demon and whispering “I'm gonna getcha!” in voice chat. Good fun. Some make the course in seconds, som
e get confused and die of exposure inside (flooded section is really cold at night), and someone even got one guy to give up his AK just to be shown the way out. This all happens when I'm online; God only knows what happens when I'm not…
All this would not have been possible without being surrounded by the fun-loving people of Little Italy and without RP servers like RustFactions and TheLostIsles, where a creepy wooden house with no loot is more valued than a fully stocked armored base, just because of the opportunities for interaction it provide
s.