Hauntibles

-
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 nerd.) This breaks down an object into 7 different criteria and then procedurally generates new objects and patterns for each puzzle. This way you'll never play the same puzzle twice. It also means that when I research new hauntibles, I look for objects with 7 distinct parts (ideally having 2 symmetrical pairs like wheels, wings etc.)

 So far I've assembled the following collections: toys, wheels, beetles, wilderness tools, and sea creatures, with a few more yet to come. I'm eager to keep adding hauntibles and am open to any suggestions / requests for future collections!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Archival Origins

-
Image
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
Read more

Lightbox

-
Image
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
Read more

Medium Mechanics

-
Image
With the rise of spiritualism in the late 19th century, mediums became quite popular. These psychic individuals claimed to have a special connection with the "other side" and performed seances to exhibit their paranormal skills. Many of the game mechanics in HAUNTIBLES are directly inspired by techniques employed by mediums, as I think they add a spooky layer to the experience. Here's a breakdown of the main parts I borrowed... Ghost Guides - Mediums traditionally connected with the same specter each session, who either possessed them or entered the room as an apparition. These ghostly guides acted as MC's of the spirit world, introducing other poltergeists or just imparting wisdom on their own. There's a ghost in HAUNTIBLES who acts as your guide to the spirit world. She doesn't say anything, choosing instead to communicate through the objects she materializes, known as apports . Apports - the mysterious appearance of objects due to p
Read more