Home Haunter
Overview
In Home Haunter, the player is a ghost that needs to scare away squatters that invaded their home. The player can do this by making objects creak. The closer a squatter is to the sound, the more it will scare them. Objects have a firmness, that decreases while the object is active. When an object is used too much, it will break, after which it can no longer be activated. The player needs to scare away all squatters before all objects are broken.
My contributions
This was a 1-person project, so I did all concepting, developing, audio and visuals.
Date/Period:
sep 2023 – okt 2023 (parttime)
Project type:
Student project
Tools I used:
Unity
Audacity
Team:
Solo project
Result
The game can be played here:
(In-game explanations are in Dutch)
Process
Context / Goals
This was created for a school assignment, in which the goal was to create a prototype based off a specific verb. In my case, the verb was cracking/creaking (‘kraken’ in Dutch).
Iterations
This is a sketch of the first concept. The player would be able to activate objects (making them come to life) using ‘Ghost Points’ that were floating through the space, which the player could pick up. The objects would stay activated, making the entire house slowly come to life.
Although I did like the concept of the house slowly coming to life, there were a lot of elements that did not actually have to do with the verb.
This is a blockout of the first prototype. To bring the concept closer to the verb, I chose to only let activated objects creak (instead of fully coming to life). The player can now activate an object using [space], and when the creaking sound is finished, it can be activated again. The squatter would get scared whenever they were in hearing range of an object.
Playtesters commented that it was fun to try out different objects to find out which sound they made. But at this point is was quite boring to play, as there was not yet any lose condition.
In the next iteration I introduced a lose-condition by giving the objects the ‘firmness’, which would go down while an object is activated. To give the player control over this, objects were now activated as long as the player presses [space] when near the object. While the object is active, the squatter gets scared if they are within hearing range.
The feedback I got was that, with this addition, this as a basis forms a nice challenge. However, it was very monotonous, as there was only one squatter and no increasing difficulty as it went on.
To make the game more interesting, I added two squatters, with each squatter having their own ‘scaredness count’. Now, the player needs to try to activate objects when multiple squatters are in range, as there aren’t enough objects to scare them away otherwise.
I also added that the scaredness of the squatters lowers when they are not actively being scared. This made the game more dynamic, as the player had to choose whether to keep focussing on one very scared squatter or take more time to scare all three at once.
They also start moving faster when they get more scared, which made sure that they would not keep walking in the same configuration. It also made it harder to scare a squatter that is already very scared.
Playtesters said that there was now a good challenge and the game was more interesting to play.
For the final prototype, I added some visuals to bring across that it is a squatted house. I also added more different types of sounds related to ‘kraken’ (before, it were all wood-related sounds, so I added crackling of a chips-bag, static sound of devices and the monster Kraken).
I got the feedback that the visuals seemed to give a good idea of the atmosphere I had in mind, and that the different types of sounds made a fun addition. For any future development, ideas were to give the squatters a more interesting path or behaviour overall, together with creating a more elaborate level (with different routes).
Process Overview
Here, you can see an overview of the steps I went through when creating this game.
