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Salamanderrake edited this page Aug 20, 2013 · 25 revisions

Basic Idea

An asymmetric multiplayer first person survival game where human players must use their lanterns to illuminate a ghost and prevent its movement. Players have limited lamp oil and must scavenge for supplies. Lanterns will also extinguish if players move/turn too fast. The fewer humans looking at/illuminating the ghost, the faster it can move. If the ghost player touches a human, the human player dies. The first player to be killed by a ghost is the ghost for the next round. Or it might end the round. Inspirations come from amnesia, pacman, ghostbusters.

Brainstorming bullet points

  • lamp is directional
  • Players die permanently upon contact with the ghost (instantaneous or health based?)
  • there is incentive to work together (two light cones are stronger than one)
  • stopping and blinding the ghost with one, maybe teleporting it away with two or three.
  • Ghost invisible unless light is shone upon it (audio cues to indicate its presence)?
  • Ghost is much faster than humans (light slows it down, with all live players' combined light needed to stop it fully?)
  • ghost has night vision/awareness of humans' location and objectives
  • Ghost has other skills (create sounds, illusions, etc to trick humans into wasting lamp oil?) with cooldown?
  • scavenging for lamp oil makes you vulnerable. Incentive for the group to split up.
  • Possibly have single-use pickups like flares (droppable, omnidirectional) and flashbangs (temporary stuns ghost?) which open up additional strategies
  • Win condition for humans? Reach the save zone. Maybe find a key the ghost hides.
  • Humans don't know the location of objectives and must find the safe zone before they run out of lamp oil and/or the ghost catches them

Next steps

If you're working on one of the bullet points, please put your name (and possibly comments) at the end so we know who's doing what.

Programming Stuff

  • Get Source SDK running on Linux
  • Remove all stock weapons, we don't need them.
  • Make player classes (Ghost and Human), or maybe purely as a custom GameRules class
    • Make players die when they touch a ghost
  • Restrict teams to asymmetric player sizes (TF2 MvM does it, should probably be easy) (Tigge)
  • Make the lamp "weapon" (Gravity gun might be a good start for that) (weltall - trying to remove other weapons now)
  • Implement player outlines to allow the ghost to see humans at all times ( https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Alien_Swarm_Glow )
  • Flickering effect for lantern light?

3D Stuff

  • Figure out a workflow for making maps
  • Figure out a workflow for making models (with materials, and get them to load in the engine)
  • Player models (use HL: DM ones? John Freeman :D )
  • Ghost model (use a HL:DM model but rendered with some kind of see-through material, perhaps water?)
  • Make custom lamp oil ammo

Audio Stuff

Most of this stuff should be coverable by stuff already in the SDK, but freesound.org might be a good place to hunt for anything that's not

  • Lamp on/off/running sounds
  • Ambient ghost sound (no footstep sounds, just a general spooky sound that follows them?)
  • Ambient not-ghost sound (something that's similar to, but not quite the ghost sound?)
  • Ambient environment sounds
    • Cave
      • Drips
      • Wind whistling?
      • Echoey footsteps on rock
    • Haunted cemetery/brambly dead forest?
      • Ambient frogs, crickets, owls
      • Leafy footstep sounds?
      • Boggy footstep sounds?
  • Music?

2D Stuff

  • Splash screen/menu (could optionally use a map)
  • HUD?
    • Lamp oil indicator

Misc Stuff

  • Collect useful tutorials and docs for other people

Map Test

Done or no longer relevant:

  • Set up the project with VPC (eisbehr)
  • Create lamp model (salamanderrake)

Documentation