Hello! Welcome to Silly Little Guy Studio’s first blog post. We will summarize our game concept and delve into what our teams have been working on!

1. Background

There was a graveyard underneath the grounds of CMU. Those buried here became ghosts bound to their most important personal item, which are scattered around this ground. Now, this place is haunted with ghosts unable to have fun and enjoy their afterlife.

The player has a device (their phone) that allow them to detect, see, and interact with ghosts. Hearing their unfinished wishes, the player will set on a quest to fulfill them and free the ghosts from the long agony. The ghosts need the player’s help in order to accomplish tasks related to their wishes.

2. Story Flow

The player will first encounter the ghost of a little boy who is conscious. They will help him find his mother and bring the toy that he is bound to his mother’s ghost and reunite them (tutorial). Then, they will encounter various ghosts that tell or imply about their wishes (a young man wishing to make a confession to the girl he loves through a love letter), forgot their wishes and need the player to find clues related to them (the flight attendant wishes to deliver her last order of drink but she does not remember the order), or became resentful and need the player to fight them before being able to communicate with them (boss fights yay!). On the journey and exploration, the player will also find material for construction. Eventually the player defeat a corrupted ghost and build amusement parks for them.

To put it formally, due to the long time that the ghosts are bound to this ground, there are ghosts who are

1. Conscious: Player can talk to; would assign tasks or give clues to player.
2. Amnesiac: Need player to find clues related to their past and help them.
3. Resentful: Need player to use specific items/actions to cleanse and restore consciousness in order to proceed.

3. Characters

We will have 3 types of ghosts.

1. Main Quest: These ghosts will give you clues and puzzles that will progress the main story quest. Their locations are always marked in the overworld. Completing the quest will add to your photo book. After completing the quest, you can interact with these ghosts for some flavor text.
2. Side Quest: These ghosts have quests which enrich the main quest, but are not necessary to finishing the story. Completion of a side quest will add an entry to the photo book as a collectible. A 50% completion of the side quests is necessary to finish to story to encourage player interaction. Stretch goal is to have certain side quest ghosts locked by weather (i.e. raining) or time (i.e. night).
3. Random: These ghosts are corrupted and will randomly spawn within a radius of the player in the overworld. Clicking on them will take the player from the overworld to the AR world.
   1. Fight: Your goal in this sequence is to purify the ghost by “spray painting” a shape on the ground around the ghost. Stretch goal: different types of ghosts will have a different required shape, with “harder” ghosts having more complicated shapes (from easy shapes like a circle to a hard shape like a star).
   2. Winning: Winning the fight will give you construction materials. A faster win will give you more construction materials, and a slow win will give you only a few construction materials. Stretch goal: winning will also stack a buff for your next boss battle, where they will cheer you on. “Harder” ghosts will give you stronger buffs, such as a time buff (more time to move out of the boss attacks), and “easier” ghosts will give you weaker buffs, such as an damage multiplier.

Here are some specific characters we have brainstormed:

Little boy

A little boy who is very curious and smart. He is the first character the player meets at this graveyard. Although he asks the player to find his mom for him at first, he does not offer his item to the player to bring to his mother unless the player finds out his secret “password” with his mother, which is a line from a lullaby she used to sing to him before bed.

Personal item: a storybook that his mom gave him for his birthday

Task: find his mother and bring his item to her

Richardson

A young university student in literature who was in love with his classmate Miss Franklin, who was kind and helped him out an awkward social situation (I’m still thinking about what exactly). He took courage in writing a love letter in confession to her, but the letter was never delivered while he was alive. He hopes that the player could help him find it and deliver it to Miss Franklin.

Personal item: glasses

Task: Help him find his lover letter to Miss Franklin and deliver it to her

Miss Franklin (Rose)

A young university student in Chemistry. She was ambitious in academia and busy doing research work in lab when she was alive. However, she was unable to record the data of the last experiment she conducted. She asks the player to help her put the data down on her notebook. Miss Franklin was a kind-hearted young lady who was willing to help those in need. She was unaware of the attention she received from Mr. Richardson. Upon receiving the letter, she compliments him on his poetry and appreciates his affections. She asks the player to bring her kind and polite rejections to him.

Personal item: lab notebook

Task:

1. Help her record the data of her last experiment (help her re-conduct her last experiment?)
2. Help her bring her words of rejection to Richardson

4. Quest Mechanics

Here we describe the various mechanics players have to focus on when helping the ghosts. When outlined separately, like bellow, these mechanics can be thought of mini games, but it is also crucial that these mechanics to be integrated into the ghost quests’ narrative seamlessly, so that the player will not feel like there is a separation between the story and the mechanics.

The Ritual

The player needs to carefully trace a certain path using their phone camera in order to accomplish certain tasks. e.g. put on a performance for the ghosts to cheer them up, but the performance is dictated by a curve that player need to constantly move their body to perfectly trace.

Incantation

Using tone detection, we can make players sing a melody, or just adjust their voices to different tones, in order to achieve a certain task. e.g. there is a stone wall that the player need to break, and the method is to sonic attack to shatter it.

Floor = Lava

Using plane detection, an obstacle course will be layered on to the ground in AR space. Judging by the need of narrative, the obstacle will be made up of lava or poisonous swamp. The player’s objective is to traverse through the obstacles without standing on lava / swamp.

5. Ghost Fight

Pet not fight

OKOK, new idea! Charming! Beautiful! How about, instead of fighting the ghost, which does not fit into our goofy silly vibe, we want to pet the ghost so that they stop being resentful. This is way cuter than actually have to beat them;

Attack Pattern

During main quest resentful ghost fight, the ghost will attempt to deal damage to the player by various attacks. No matter what the attack looks like, it can be modeled by the sequence outlined here:

1. The ghost prepares an attack, play the before attack animation, and a circle / sphere / cube will appear to indicate the attack range.
2. After a set amount of time, the ghost land the attack, play the attack animation, and if the player does not leave the attack range at this time, they will be dealt damage.
3. After the attack, play the attack backswing animation, the ghost will be temporally immobile, and the player can come close to pet the ghost in various ways to calm the ghost down. After the ghost is 100% calmed down, the player can start to purify it.

Ghost Purification

After a successful fighting sequence with the resentful spirit, the player will be prompted to purify it to bring it back to normal. In order to do this, the player need to use their phone as a spray paint bottle, pressing the spray button while moving in real space to draw a circle on the ground in AR space. Additionally, each ghost also requires a special symbol to be drawn in the circle in order to be purified. The symbol will be something very simple such as a lightening. Which symbol does a specific ghost require will be part of the puzzle.

6. Art Style

We decided that the most important thing is for our art to feel “Scrungly” Scrungly is a state of mind, and means something is cute, but not perfect. Slightly damaged but still lovable. A little bit stupid. A good example of that is this

We also decided that our 2d art would have medium thickness lines, vibrant colors, soft shading, and that they would glow. We decided it was important that each character we make have some aspect to them that reminds us of their humanity. Examples as follows

For the 3d versions of the art, we decided that they should also be soft and simplistic. As well, they should glow. They should also match pretty well to the 2d versions. Examples:

For the environmental work we decided that the map should have a top down view with 2d lineart to match the character. We decided special places should have a 3d model attached to them but we will decide what that looks like later

Here is some of the work that we have done:

7 Programming Progress

For programming, we are able to build and launch the ARDK demo to iPhone. From now on, we will prioritize fundamentals and basics of the game. We discussed and will be looking to implement the following:

• VPS system for scavenger hunt to place things at specific location
• integrate Google Maps into game
• waypoint on map, player goes to location, views object/character in AR
• mechanics demos
• install unity package for “incantation” mechanic
• local transformed route in space for “floor is lava” mechanic

Each programmer will tackle one mechanic immediately, starting with floor is lava, ritual & VPS, and voice control.