27Sep 2022 by Matthias Wilke
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The game is entirely free to play and open-source. If you enjoyed playing or have learned something valuable analyzing it, please consider supporting the creators!
About the Game
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.