Ghost Catchers

Patch: Added missing collision on walls of boss room. Didn't touch any of the code or other content.

This is my entry for the Mini Jam 117 Game Jam. It's an action ghost catching game where you must use your "Spectral" shotgun and ghost traps to stun and catch all the ghosts. The game features a short story, multiple rooms, and a boss fight.

All game logic, graphics, and sound were created from scratch during the game jam period.

The game supports mouse & keyboard, or dual stick gamepad controls (move left stick to activate gamepad). The gamepad controls may not work in all browsers. If the game isn't taking input, try refreshing the page once. There is also a native windows version with High and Low setting exports.

Controls:

Move: WASD or Left stick
Aim: Mouse or Right stick
Shoot: Left mouse button or Right trigger
Throw/Pick up Trap: Right mouse button or Left Trigger
Mute music: M

Development

It's been a while since I last participated in a game jam. The theme (Ghosts) and limitation (Shotgun) this time were both pretty straight forward. I felt that there are two things you associate with shotguns in video games; narrow broad range, and high knockback. These are the things I chose to focus on, even though I bent the definition so that it could apply to a ghost stunning gun.

It's hard to not think of Ghost Busters whenever ghosts are involved. Especially when going the more cartoony route like I did. I tried to imagine what an old school Ghost Busters video game could have played like with the loop of reining in the ghosts and catching them in traps. (Hopefully you'll find it better than some of the actual old school Ghost Busters games)

As I was working on the game I realized it also reminded me of an old 16-bit game called "Zombies ate my neighbors". I had the game on the SEGA Mega Drive (Genesis) when I was young, and I think some of those vibes got wrapped up in this game as well. One of the viewers of my development livestream even brought it up unprompted.

I have been working a lot with pixel-art lately for a different project, and I think it helped me produce more and higher quality sprites than my previous Unity game jam games.

I also tried making 3d environments this time because I figured it would be more straight forward to program it in Unity. Unfortunately even though "MagicaVoxel" worked great for quickly making crude 3d assets, there were a lot of pains with exporting them to Unity. Things like the models not being centered, being unable to name the objects before exporting, and several lighting glitches I couldn't figure out how to fix in time. Maybe I need to figure out a better pipeline between them in the future.

Finally the sound effects were made in Pico-8 again. It just happens to be the quickest piece of software I have for generating sounds from scratch. But this time I also tried out FamiTracker for the first time. I haven't figured out how to make good "instruments", but I wanted to at least try to create a music track. In the future I want to learn a more proper DAW.

Overall the development went pretty smoothly this time around. Aside from the aforementioned MagicaVoxel issues there weren't too many big problems. I did end up rushing by the end and staying up well past my bedtime. The title screen, cutscenes, ending, and audio were all part of this final sprint towards the finish line. Which is why the quality is a bit lower on those parts than most of the other stuff.

I hope you enjoy playing it!