Hauntibles

Closeup of my old BOLEX camera showing the framerate dial and part of the handcrank.  My film class was one of the last to shoot, edit, and project our movies using actual film stock. Nowadays they shoot everything digital (and in many ways it's much better.) Florida mosquitoes would attack me whenever my hands were stuck inside a change bag; sometimes the lab would screw up the negatives; and we'd never knew for sure if we'd exposed our scenes properly until days later. Filming a shipwreck movie on the Gulf Coast back in college. But there was still something magical about holding a reel in your hands, a frozen waterfall of time condensed into miniature rectangles. Although threading celluloid through Steenbeck edit tables was tricky, it also felt like we were practicing a trade, an ancient craft passed down to us from the legends of movie-making (or maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic.) I wanted to capture some of that old-fashioned mojo in HAUNTIB...

Antiquing with a spooky twist. Beware the haunted lobstah! So many of my favorite ghost stories, such as "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacob, start with someone obtaining a haunted antique. There's just something about these old relics that sparks the imagination.  HAUNTIBLES is chock full of these haunted collectibles or "hauntibles" as I'm calling them. They're mostly sourced from archival research I've done, and the game is designed in such a way that I can easily update it with new hauntibles as I discover them. Hauntibles have already been covered briefly under the Cabinet of Curiosities post, but I wanted to delve into a bit more detail 'cause I love them so much.  A batch of procedurally generated beetles! Here's where it gets a little technical. In order to use these objects in the game, I cycle them through a bit of code (which I'm calling the "pattern buffer" because I'm a Star Trek ner...

Early animation test of one the specters in HAUNTIBLES. Ghost have been depicted countless ways in movies, TV, and games. They run the gambit from fully formed Ghostbusters ghouls to the more ethereal forms of Paranormal Activity. HAUNTIBLES contains a number of spirits, some helpful - others malevolent. The question is, what form should they take? While I'm still ironing out the look, I'm drawn to the use of flowing cloth. The floating garments really sell the idea that these beings exist in another realm, with different rules governing the physics. I also like Victorian-era outfits, especially the creepy "mourning gowns" customarily worn at the time. 1861 photo showing the five daughters of Prince Albert mourning his death. After his passing, Queen Victoria wore mourning clothing for the rest of her life. Ghosts are such a staple of our storytelling, and have been featured so many times, that it's difficult to come up with an original look an...

"I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us." - Thomas Edison You read that right. Thomas Edison, the famous American inventor, might have built a ghost detector. There's no evidence he actually constructed a working prototype, but he did go on the record to say that he was thinking about it. "This apparatus is in the nature of a valve, so to speak. That is to say, the slightest conceivable effort is made to exert many times its initial power for indicative purposes."  Although Edison may never have gotten past the development stage, there are others who claimed to have created working ghost detectors. In fact, whole laboratories were set up to study  communication with the supernatural. A New York Tribune article about the "American Psychical Institute", which pioneered several ghost hunting apparatus.  There is a ghost detect...