What’s going on?

Last year I made a small game with the purpose of being released on Halloween. This year I’m going to do the same. Since it’s only been 2 years it’s not a tradition yet and who knows if I’ll do it next year. This gives me a little time to work on something that can be released more reliably while giving me a break from my main project and flex some design concepts I come up with over the year.

Concept

Haunted Haunted House is a game where you play as a haunted house, or the ghost haunting a haunted house. You gain sustenance from scaring people (bonus sustenance if they are already terrified).

The game is broken up into days where each day has a different group of people of varying sizes and courage. Each day there is a sustenance quota that needs to be met or else your ghost gets too hungry (lose the game). With what sustenance remains the player can purchase traps to place around the house and activate in order to scare guests. This is where the strategy of the game comes from.

The player will be able to purchase global effects (such as increased global fear multiplier) or single use traps. The key is that the traps will have limited uses further promoting a planning scheming playstyle.

Guests in a state of terror will beeline out of the property but scaring them further will cause them to act unpredictably, running into a nearby room to hide. The goal is to trap or stunlock fleeing guests in order to maximise sustenance gain.

NPC AI

NPC AI is something that I am happy with at this stage. The NPCs navigate from room to room as a collective, they will prioritize visiting end rooms before continuing the complete path but may choose to ignore some end rooms. When scared (but not fully terrified) they have a chance to flee into a nearby room and hide for a little before rejoining the collective.

Terrified NPCs will guarantee flee into nearby room when scared while terrified. This plays into the juggling playstyle.

Fear System

There are a bunch of modifiers that affect the amount of fear an NPC receives. The biggest of which is the power of the group. NPCs grouped together in a room will receive less fear whereas NPCs isolated or in smaller groups will feel more fear comparatively. Terrified NPC will receive additional fear when scared as well. When an NPCs fear meter builds to the maximum they enter a terrified state. Any fear received in this state will build over their capacity and slowly decay back toward their capacity. However, being over capacity increases the multiplier for fear gained. What stops this from spiralling out of control is they will try to escape as quickly as possible essentially creating a time limit to maximise fear.

What’s next?

Next, I will continue to work on the overarching game flow. I already have a rough scaffold for flowing from a title state, preparation phase, spooking phase and a recap/postmortem (haha) state. I would like to flesh that out further. Also, I know someone has agreed to help out and will hopefully make the in-world intractability by next week.

One of the key benefits of this project is I plan on the art style being the same as the main project. This means any assets I find or use in this project I can carry across into the main one.