The Ghostinator

Conceptually, the game is about a ghost hunter trying to locate invisible ghosts in haunted mansions. Only high-tech audio processing gear based on beamforming and direction-of-arrival algorithms can help the so-called “Ghostinator” follow the ghosts’ laughing to identify their actual location. The hunter has three probes available to locate ghosts, but in each mansion, a possessed phone is ringing to distract the sensitive equipment. When either a ghost is found or the hunter runs out of probes, the game ends. As a first step for our Java game, the level representations are loaded in java using the Gson library by Google. LITIENGINE is the engine powering our game logic to render our game world, player, and user interface, as well as play 2D sounds at the actual ghost and noise locations in Java. In each of the five levels, players are expected to catch a ghost following the beamforming and direction-ofarrival locators shown on screen. The room’s corners are rendered as an outline on screen, and walkable tiles are kept transparent, while invalid tiles outside the walkable area are coloured grey. Players can navigate with the arrow keys and fire a probe using the space bar, checking adjacent tiles for the ghost. If the ghost is not on one of the affected tiles, each checked tile is rendered in red to indicate which tiles have already been checked fruitlessly. If the player was distracted by the ringing phone and probed it, a phone is shown on top of an orange tile. In case the player has found the ghost with one of their probes, the level ends successfully. The probe has three charges and a level ends unsuccessfully when all charges have been expended. When moving to another tile, the beamforming and direction-of-arrival locators in the user interface update accordingly to the new location, continuously guiding players towards the sound source.