A behind the scenes look at the development of a creepy puzzle game.
The (new) Official Launch Trailer!
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A new Hauntibles trailer has launched! This short film took a long while to make as it involved sourcing and dressing the set with antiques, lighting them to simulate the glow of vintage Edison bulbs, using my home-made dolly to get smooth shots, and then editing the footage down to roughly a minute. Phew!
I'm very happy with how it turned out, and feel it better reflects the vintage mood of the game. Thanks to @papersofthepast for lending me the scrapbooks and @orchestralis for their perfectly ethereal music.
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
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
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
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