🚨🚨🚨HAUNTER GATHERER DOES NOT SUPPORT WEB. PLEASE PLAY IT ON A MOBILE DEVICE🚨🚨🚨
Inspiration
Artistically, we are inspired by the works of Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton, among others. We are big fans of the Graveyard Book, and thought a world centered around raising the dead in a graveyard setting could make for interesting sim.
What it does
Haunter, Gatherer is a game where the player, represented by a skeleton known only as "The Caretaker", arrives at a cursed graveyard and is recruited by a friendly spirit to help restore it. The Caretaker gathers materials such as stone and wood from the premises which are used to craft graves that become the home to new Dead of various types, e.g. Zombies, Vampires, Mummies, and more.
Once new Dead arrive, they can be assigned to various "Haunts", which are asynchronous missions whereby villagers from the nearby town are tormented for two reasons: revenge and loot. Successful Haunts will yield all manner of goodies, such as materials packs, in-game currency, cosmetics for both the Caretaker and the Graveyard, and more. Meanwhile, the player will be free to resume gathering materials, shaping up the grounds, exploring a magical Crypt, and more.
As the player's resources increase, they're able to raise more powerful Dead , which require more Gifts but allow for the successful completion of more difficult Haunts. Also, special Haunts award Hats which help the player keep track of who's who.
How we built it
Through the power of friendship, mostly. Also, lots of Gen AI and advice from other creators.
Challenges we ran into
Initially, we had some issues understanding lighting as it pertains to animated entities.
In general, we planned a really ambitious project for the time allotted and have been working our tails off to pull it off.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We've made a super solid mobile game that we feel players could fall in love with.
What we learned
This is our first project as a team of 3. We are learning on-the-fly how to plan out work so that everyone has enough runway, while avoiding making too many assumptions about the future.
What's next for Haunter, Gatherer
Our roadmap includes the following:
Within a couple days of submission, we'll be adding more polish, e.g. indicators for how much Spirit each flower is worth, timers on the Haunts, etc. We'll also be releasing the rest of the initial set of Dead, including the Ghoul, Ghost, and Mummy, which will allow for an exponential incremental experience.
The first major update post-competition will include a new in-world currency, Fear, which will be awarded from all Haunts as well as passively from each Grave the player owns. We will also introduce a new vendor who sells cosmetics and rare items in exchange for Fear. Fear will be purchasable with Meta credits.
We will also be adding a new mode for salvaging built graves, so that the player can re-structure their graveyard as they see fit.
Our timeout based feature, the Magic Crypt, is meant to entice players to play longer sessions and/or to return for future sessions. It's made from a modular dungeon asset, which allows us to expand the active portion of the game in any manner we can imagine. We are planning on adding keys as rewards for Haunts which unlock new wings of the crypt, including mini-challenges for treasure chest collecting, ghost growing, etc.
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