Ghosts and Ghouls are trying to haunt your mansion!
You and a friend must use your flashlight to dissipate the ghosts, and your lasers to zap the ghouls!
You only have to survive long enough for the haunting to pass to another house.
-For two Players(or one ambitious player)
-best with at least 12 Blinks
-when you load the game, ghosts (white) and ghouls(red) will randomly pop up in your haunted mansion
-if any ghost or ghoul is not zapped or dissapated fast enough, your mansion will become haunted and you lose
-remove two blinks, and long press them to turn them into flashlights. double clicking a flashlight turns it into a laser
-Lasers zap ghouls, while flashlights dissapate ghosts
-one person gets the flashlight, one the laser.
-during gameplay you must keep all blinks flat on the table.
-survive until the haunting moves down the block to try another house!
-triple click at any point to reset the game
Been playing with this rough draft for a while and I’m liking the cooperative gameplay a lot! Certainly reminiscent of WHAM! but I feel like the gameplay is different enough.
To do:
-Balance ghoul/ghost spawning
-Balance gameplay time
-Let the Player double click to start the game
-Test out point scoring instead of survival mode
-Colors, colors, colors! (and animations)
You Remove Ghosts by touching them with the light from the flashlight (yellow), and you remove Ghouls by touching them with the light from the laser(green). The light and laser travel through the empty (pale) blink pieces.
You can arrange the blinks however you like! I have only really tested a pretty standard clump myself.
Sounds great!
I just ask cause don’t have yet blinks to try but I like the idea.
So you arrange the blinks as you want but they must be in contact, right? If so, reaching some blinks can be difficult (I’m imagining a blink surrounded by 6 blinks, you can’t touch it with the flashlight or the laser).
Also good idea (maybe is already applied) can be to make laser and flashlight only work on one face, so you have to actually “aim” the ghosts!
Yes they all must be in contact. The flashlight and laser signals move through the blinks, so even blinks surrounded can be hit. I’ve tried making the flashlight and laser only work on one face, but so far it only makes gameplay irritating without adding too much difficulty.
The Ghosts, Ghouls, and Goblins branch on Github holds the newest version of this game.
the game loads in the win phase so you have time to separate two blinks to long press and make into flashlights ( and then double click to turn one into a laser)
-then triple clicking starts the game (one minute survival)
Ghosts remain white, but Ghouls are now a purple hue.
As the title suggests there is a third mob that can spawn in your haunted mansion… a Goblin! It appears flickering and red. Unlike the Ghosts and Ghouls a simple flashlight or laser beam will not get rid of a goblin. Only when a Goblin is weakened by the flashlight can the laser zap it away
(TLDR; you have to hit the Goblin with the laser and the flashlight at the same time to get rid of it)
I’ve been playtesting a lot, and this game is not so great on six blinks, but proves super exciting on 12.
I’d love for anyone to try it out and see what you think!
I’d love someone to test this game out. In the play I’ve done with friends it has been a blast. I also kinda want to add animations, so I may need to save some memory (it’s at close to 100%). I’d love some ideas of how to save space!
GhostHunters
A cooperative game for Blinks.
An arcade style shooting gallery for ghastly apparitions
Players: 1-4 (or more?) Blinks: 12+ recommended Time: 6 Min to complete all levels, but infinite replayability!
Intro:
The haunted house up the street has been more active than normal…
A small child with a ragged nightgown and long black hair dares you to explore the house.
You find nothing suspicious about this, so you and some friends agree to go exploring.
The small child gestures to a box you were sure wasn’t there a minute ago…
Inside you find gadgets that appear to some sort of modified flashlight and off you go into the house!
As soon as you step inside you feel a chill down your spine… this house is certainly demonically infested.
As you prepare to use these strange gadgets to fight for your life and to contain this evil a thought crosses your mind…
why would a creepy child point you this way? and why would they hand you these tools?
Setup:
Blinks load in the level select phase, showing the current level on their face.
Arrange your blinks in any configuration to be the mansion floor and select a level by clicking a blink.
For any level below 4 I suggest only two players for optimal challenge.
Remove on blink per player to be the gadgets you will defend yourself with. It is important that you only
remove the player blinks once the level is selected because otherwise you will have options that only hinder you.
Long holding a blink will turn it into a gadget blink which can then be single clicked to cycle through the different weapon types.
The weapon types are:
Flashlight; appears WHITE
Laser; appears RED
GeistLight; appears BLUE
EMP; appears MAGENTA
When you’re ready to play triple click the mansion
At any point you can triple click to change back to the level select phase
GamePlay:
When the gameplay begins the mansion will appear dim and empty
Try attaching your gadget to the mansion to see how they work!
Randomly, apparitions will spawn in the mansion.
There are four types of mobs that will spawn according the difficulty (your weapons will be available accordingly. see above warning)
The mob types and how to kill them are as follows:
Ghosts; appear WHITE and are killed by the Flashlight
Ghouls; appear RED and are killed by the Laser
Poltergeists; appear BLUE and are killed by the GeistLight
Goblins; appear GREEN and are killed by being hit with the Flashlight and the Laser at the same time
You must kill them in time or else you will lose and the board will turn to lava
Survive for a minute and the house will be cleansed! appearing yellow and holy
HOLY MOLY! This is fantastic. I’m a sucker for a great laser mechanic and this is such a cool execution of it. I’m super impressed and can’t wait to see how this continues to develop.
I am curious, what does the EMP (Magenta weapon) do during gameplay? It doesn’t appear to have any mob type that it kills.
As for how to save space, I think the level selection idea is ingenious and very well executed, but I’m not sure how much playing at different levels effected how difficult I felt gameplay was (I tried a couple of different levels). Maybe there’s a version of this game that doesn’t have a win state, but rather it’s a “keep zapping ghosts until you get overwhelmed” kind of game, and the difficulty could ramp up as the longer game progresses. If the level selection feature was removed would that free up the space needed for animations?
Thanks for trying the game out! I’m glad you like it!
The EMP kills anything, but it does not travel through blinks, it needs direct contact.
As for the level selection, I’m still balancing it for gameplay. I like that you can make it two player at lower levels and then by upping the difficultly you can make it more players at higher levels.
And the level selection makes it so you can choose which mobs spawn. So it’s very customizable. Maybe each level will be endless? Just with different difficulty/mob spawn types and rates? @JSpamboni
I like the idea of endless play!! I think I’ll make that level 6…
Yeah my personal take would be to go for endless gameplay as then players are probably likely to invest more time in the game? It’s good to know that there’s flexibility though for having it be on a time limit or not.
And the level selection mechanic is so well done…maybe think of the level selection as a way to manually input how many players are playing (and limit it 1-4 instead of 1-6 perhaps) and set the mob spawning parameters based off of that?
Caught Ghost Hunters in today’s live stream and it looked great! Excellent work @Keirxl! Those laser effects really do look sharp! This will probably be one of the first games that I load up when my dev blinks get in, and I’m really looking forward to giving it a go.
Saw @jbobrow playing Ghost Hunters on the live stream. I’m glad it worked! It was intentional too leave discovering the weapon function up to the players, but I see that the EMP really threw everything for more of a loop than I intended.
The EMP is intended to kill everything, but does not travel through empty blinks. It obviously isn’t working to kill poltergeists right now for some reason. I was also considering having the EMP sweep the board with only 2-3 uses before your tool dies. I’ll probably remove the EMP because you don’t need it, and it adds time to cycling through the weapons.
Things not spawning in beams is intentional as well. I found the game near impossible if a ghost can pop up in the middle of a laser, blocking it from the intended target.
Sorry about the difficultly I’m still balancing it, and I haven’t tweaked 4-6 for two player.
I’d love to know how to speed up the cycle! A single click was the fastest I could think of!
Also… The true Easter Egg is still out there… Happy hunting!
I had made that assumption upon reading it was an EMP, but I do have to say, it was amusing to essentially have a short range weapon in the mix. I can also imagine a really amazing shockwave animation for the EMP (I’ll bet we can help you find the space for it )
Good call, I think it’s nearly impossible to use that to your advantage anyway, a couple of simple house formations like my single line effort, but still everybody needs to be on the same page. I wouldn’t change this.
It’s an interesting challenge balancing for different numbers of players, I have a feeling there are a couple of clever ways to try and balance for number of players. At the same time, the KISS rule always a good rule of thumb.
I can understand that. To my point above, there is something need about having that life saving tool, could be that the way to use it is to attach to the group, then hold for period of time and release with a shockwave (possibly proportional to the amount of time held down). One of my favorite games ~10 years ago was Geometry Wars and oh man, the bombs were so important to play at a high level. I think this game has so many legs that it is easy to go overboard, but then the fun is pruning it back and leaving the best part.
The way to do this is to use button pressed, which is fired every time the button is pressed (someone can check the exact limitation on speed here, but I believe we can count clicks as quickly as you can dole them out). Of course at the current moment, the triple click will fire if those fast clicks are in fact a triple click, so handling of the clicks will require a little bit of planning.
Easter Egg?!? Sounds like we have more ghosts to hunt. Looking forward to playing this more and seeing how it evolves!
@bigjosh among others here have lots of ideas when the time comes to really squeeze, but for the time being it looks like you are navigating the space nicely. Here is one quick adjustment that saves some space, compiling the map function can sometimes be overkill:
byte bri= map(sin8_C(index), 0, 255, 127, 255);
// creates sinusoidal value between 127-255
byte bri= (sin8_C(index)/2) + 127;
// creates sinusoidal value between 127-255
I couldn’t measure exactly how much memory it saves for every use case, in your game is saved me more than 50 bytes, in an empty sketch, this saved me ~ 32 bytes, and in another game I tested it saved me ~12 bytes… that said, replacing a map function with the math necessary for the specific case resulted in savings each time.
Thanks for the feedback! I like the idea of making the EMP blast dependent on the time it’s held down… That’s really fun. I also think that the way to balance gameplay right now could be paper rules more than anything. Depending on how hard you want the game to be you adjust the player number. Something fun I’ve found is that more players makes it harder in a way. People end up in each other’s way quite often, and the co-operative aspect of communicating what color you’re each covering gets hard. The Easter Egg isn’t complicated, but it affects gameplay immensely! It may even turn into an official mechanic, given tweaking.
And thanks for the space saving advice!
I’ve been tweaking the difficultly, and I’d love feedback on the progression through the levels. The thought process is this
Level one: intro to gameplay/easy mode
Level two: now apply what your learned
Level three: hardest mode for intro phase(no goblins)
Level four: introduce Goblin bosses
Level five: now apply what you learned
Level six: hardest mode for this phase
Also level 6 is now the “official” game where you would play the other levels for fun, but level 6 is what the game really is. In other levels after one minute you win the level, but this is not the case in level 6. In level 6 when a minute is up there is a small chance that a Win Token will spawn. It appears black with one rotating yellow face. If you hit the yellow face with a flashlight you win the game. If you hit any other face with the flashlight the win token will vanish. It does not interact with any other pieces.
I like how you build in the training as new elements are added and difficulty ramps. The combination of luck and skill for the win condition seems like a cool idea. Is there a scenario where the win token doesn’t spawn? or will it always spawn/respawn within a minute.
The win token has ~2% chance to spawn on any empty blink once every five seconds after the minute mark has been reached. If you accidentally hit a dark side of the win token it dissapears, but could spawn again at any point.
Maybe it would be cool to make you wait another 30 seconds or a minute if you miss a win token…
My curiosity about the timing was more about balance of play. How long does each round take? Would their ever be a situation where the win token doesn’t appear?
I’m still balancing it, and I haven’t tweaked 4-6 for two player.
(I’ll bet we can help you find the space for it 
)