Hauntibles

Aghhhhhhh!  I do have a few creepy crawlies in HAUNTIBLES, but those aren't the bugs I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the bugs that cause the game to freak out and sometimes crash. Throughout development, I've gotten pretty good at squashing them as they appear. But every now and then I stumble upon a tricky one - a super hardy radioactive-immune cockroach with a stubborn will to survive. For the past few weeks, I've been battling a particularly nasty game bug. It appears randomly, so it's difficult to pinpoint the cause. And to be honest, it's driving me a little crazy. I'd much rather be working on story, graphics, anything really, but a stable game is vital, so I can't ignore it. Thought I should add this blog post to show that development is a bumpy road. (Though as camping has taught me -  bumpy roads often lead to cool places.) Update: Squashed.......finally! One itty bitty little line of code causing all that mayhem....

I've always wanted to include a story in HAUNTIBLES. But I also wanted to weave this narrative into the gameplay and do it in a novel way. The solution I chose turned out not to be a new way at all - but a very old one. Scrapbooking. For centuries, people have told their stories through scrapbooks. Even the famous author Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain as he was commonly known, was an active scrapbooker. He loved to fill volume after volume with newspaper articles, ticket stubs, and other miscellany from his travels. To simplify the process, he even patented a self-adhesive scrapbook that he sold under his name. Mark Twain's scrapbook patent earned him a small fortune, as much as $100,000 according to some estimates. Scrapbooks are goldmines for researchers as they're curated collections of history that tell personal stories. This storytelling power is one of the reasons there's a scrapbook at the heart of HAUNTIBLES. It also works extremely wel...

When I was growing up, my parents had a mysterious antique on the wall - a narrow drawer hung vertically, subdivided into dozens of little boxes. Each of these compartments held a different knickknack like a rock, shell, or tiny doll. This strange art piece sparked my imagination, and I wondered about the stories behind each object.      Typeset drawers were originally used to store printing blocks of various sizes. With the decline of block printing, many people recycled these drawers into curio cabinets to store family keepsakes. How does all this fit into my game HAUNTIBLES? Well, there's a typeset drawer at the heart of the game, and it's filled with haunted knickknacks! I found images for these objects during the course of my research through various archives, rare books, newspapers, and other ancient collections. Here's how it'll work in the game: each object in the drawer represents a haunted collection or "hauntible" of five or more re...

Can ghosts and spirits be captured on film? Several early photographers claimed to have accomplished this feat. Although double exposures are the likely culprit, their images still inspired the idea for HAUNTIBLES. People at the turn of the century weren't as savvy as we are about photographic trickery. Sadly, this attracted a number of charlatans who preyed on the susceptibility of those who'd lost loved ones. These photographers claimed to be able to capture portraits of dearly departed relatives and the results are pretty convincing. Not everyone believed them, however. Experts such as the magician Harry Houdini tried to debunk the images as fakes.  Houdini loved to expose the trickery of fraudulent mediums and other supernatural charlatans. An image Houdini created of himself and Lincoln, intended to show how easy it was to create an apparition with the use of double exposure. Despite evidence to the contrary, many people continued to believe these image...

 HABS imagery often shows buildings in advanced stages of decay. The photos might very well be the last record of these beautiful old structures, recorded by the government for posterity. One archival collection contributed more to HAUNTIBLES's visuals than any other. It's known as the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) . During the Great Depression, America's historic buildings were falling into ruin. So, the government hired architects to survey and document them. The program continues to this day and has chronicled thousands of buildings into a vast, spooky collection that includes - ancient asylums, crumbing lighthouses, derelict mansions, and every haunted structure you can imagine - all catalogued and meticulously archived within the Library of Congress. HABS is the nation's oldest federal preservation program. It includes not only photographs, but sketches and floorplans as well. Much of the HABS collection is digitized, but a few su...

Over the years, I've directed a number of historical documentaries for television. This required a large amount of research at the the Library of Congress & National Archives. It was here, among faded photographs and dusty card catalogues, that I first discovered the creepy imagery that would inspire the game HAUNTIBLES.  Early photos such as Civil War daguerreotypes break down over time. The figures captured in them now appear rather ghostly. My mind wandered as I searched through the old images. What were the people in these photos like? What stories could they tell us? How might they communicate from beyond the frame? The idea for HAUNTIBLES began to materialize. Many collections are digitized, but not everything's online. Sometimes, it's nice to take a stroll through the card catalogues and see what you find. Spooky old photos did more than just inspire the game HAUNTIBLES. Many ended up in the game itself. I incorporated these images direc...