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The Player, staring at the forest, embracing an attack
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The animated main menu, ft. our spoopy little guys
Inspiration
Our main inspiration was Google's 2016 Halloween game, which had a cat wizard fighting different ghosts, using the mouse to draw simple shapes. We then found some ghost assets on the Unity Store and decided to expand upon the game in 3D with a roguelike structure.
As well as this, we were heavily inspired by Dungeons and Dragons (AKA D&D), and decided to use some of the systems in that game to make our project more complex. We were also inspired by survival.io with the ongoing battle element.
What it does
The player controls a wizard in third person, and has to fight different types of ghosts using spells that they unlock along the way. Damage dealt from each attack is dependant on the roll of a dice, similar to D&D. After each wave of ghosties, the player can choose to roll a buff dice, a d12 that randomly picks a buff or debuff for the player or all of enemies.
How we built it
We built our project in Unity, using assets and animations from the Unity Store. Only the dice were created by us - we do not claim any other art, assets, or animations as our own. We also used GitHub for version control and to share our project with each other whenever necessary.
Challenges we ran into
A couple of group members had other plans on the Sunday so they had to leave early. This meant that we were on an extreme time-crunch! As well as this, our lack of an artist on the team meant that we had to find, download and figure out how to use free assets available on the Unity Store.
Another challenge was getting the character and the terrain to interact correctly. We had created the player on a plane and stupidly created the terrain in a different scene, so when merging we had to recreate the player. However, we didn't realise the the terrain was way too big for the character, causing movement problems when scaling the player up, and looking slightly ridiculous when at the right size. We fixed this by trying to resize the terrain, but figuring this out and then fixing it took about 3 hours, during which a couple members of our team had nothing to do.
However, our biggest challenge was creating the fighting mechanics as there weren't any tutorials that we could find about spellcasting specifically. In the end, we had the brilliant idea of using a tutorial for a bullet and trying to make that work.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We completed this game in 3D, despite that being significantly harder and more work. Also, we managed to create our own dice asset in Blender for the combat system. We are also really proud of how pretty the environment turned out to be: we feel like we really encapsulated the enchanted and slightly spooky vibe that we were going for. The lighting really makes this project shine! No pun intended...
What we learned
We learned how to better avoid merge collisions when pushing to GitHub, and generally improved our skills in Unity - especially debugging. In addition, we learned how to stay calm under pressure when working as a team with a strict deadline, successfully avoiding any fallings out. We also learned how to do a lot of things individually, most notably lighting, switching scenes, and Blender.
What's next for Ghosts in the Woods
During the summer, we may add some additional features like more spells, more complicated fighting systems, and cutscenes. Currently, we don't have a dedicated artist on this project, so creating cutscenes for a backstory is quite difficult. If we had more time, it would be great to create all the assets and models ourselves in Blender.
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