#among the haunted

[aurelim]

Among the Haunted Release!!

Happy Halloween everyone! For the past few weeks, I have been working on a collaboration with @albywritesfiction (who is one of the best people I have ever worked with; they have helped me so much with proofreading, coding, and looking for images 🥺 thank you so much!!) to make a game for Halloween.

The game has been submitted to ECTOCOMP English version (Le Grand Guignol) and Cozy Halloween Jam, so go check it out!

And so, Aurie and Alby bring you...

Being a single parent is never easy, especially when you have two kids to raise. You also live in a haunted house, where the supernatural inhabit the same space as the place you are meant to call home. Both of these factors equal chaos, which leads you to the present.

It is Halloween. Live through the spooky day on 13 Hallows Lane and decide what you will do when the sun begins to set and trick-or-treat goers fill the sidewalks.

What will you do? Decorate your house? Play some pranks on poor trick-o-treaters with help from the ghosts within your walls? Attend to your children to make sure they do not tell anyone that your house is haunted? The choice is yours!

​​Warning: this game has mentions of blood, ghosts, spiders and clowns, as well as disturbing themes. Please proceed with caution.

🎃 FEATURES

Mainly a linear game with some route differences based on your choices. Are they good? Are they bad? Who knows.

Choose your first name, your children's names (a boy and girl), and what they call you! However, you are locked in a preset personality, so you cannot change how you react to situations.

Live through your first Halloween at your haunted house, which is full of kind monsters and creatures you never thought existed until you met them.

Encounter strange things in your neighborhood.

🍭 CREDITS

Thanks to @writing-prompt-s for the following prompt: "You live in a very haunted house, but it’s not that bad. The voices in the basement remind you of your laundry and tell you to check the boiler, the rat size talking spider keeps the pests away and is a pretty good therapist, and the victorian ghost children are great friends with your kids."

Special thanks as well to Ash, author of Inner Demons, for some UI inspiration from her Twine/Sugarcube 2 Template (especially for the button CSS!)

And of course, thank you so much to Alby for helping with editing, coding, and helping me with advice! AtH couldn't have asked for a better guardian spirit ;)

All images came from Unsplash and were found by Alby. Banner and game cover made on Canva.

Check out the game here: GAME!

[albywritesfiction]

Among the Haunted: Behind the Scenes

Hi everyone!

@aurelim and I had a great time making Among the Haunted these past few weeks, as evidenced by the following screenshots:

We also talked about other things aside from AtH 😄 Here's us talking about the map bot from Five Nights at Freddy's:

We also had the revelation of Aurie's true nature ...

... as well as the birth of my new nickname

It was, indeed, a downward spiral of ghost references

There were a lot more, but these were some of our favorite moments 😊

Hope you all had as much fun going through this behind-the-scenes post as we did making Among the Haunted, and Happy Halloween!

[twinegardening]

Among the Haunted, by aurelim

Celebrate Halloween as a single parent living in a haunted house.

Being a single parent is never easy, especially when you have two kids to raise. You also live in a haunted house, where the supernatural inhabit the same space as the place you are meant to call home. Both of these factors equal chaos, which leads you to the present. It is Halloween. Live through the spooky day on 13 Hallows Lane and decide what you will do when the sun begins to set and trick-or-treat goers fill the sidewalks. What will you do? Decorate your house? Play some pranks on poor trick-o-treaters with help from the ghosts within your walls? Attend to your children to make sure they do not tell anyone that your house is haunted? The choice is yours!

[manonamora-if-reviews]

Among the Haunted by aurelim and Alby

IFDB - Game

Summary: What will you do on the day of Halloween? Decorate your house? Play some pranks on poor trick-o-treaters with help from the ghosts within your walls? Attend to your children to make sure they do not tell anyone that your house is haunted? The choice is yours!

This was a collaboration project between two authors of different styles, where a cosy slice-of-life and horror mash up was attempted.

There are indeed some horror elements to this game, especially at the start and towards the end of the story, but I found them being muddled through the rest of the text, its gripping effect drowned in lengthy passages and passive interaction, diluting the tension and fast pace. By the end, the horror aspect resembled more a list of references weaved through the quirky slice-of-life concept.

Granted, mixing up genres, especially when they are so different, is pretty difficult. But I can't help but wonder how it would have looked like if the writing focused more on the slice-of-life or more on the horror rather than make both genre work on the same level. The concept of a single mom with two kids trying to survive Halloween is already a neat concept, adding the cookie haunted house they live in adds to the charm, but I fail to see how the murder clown would fit in there. On the other hand, if the horror aspect was taken further, the single mom having to deal with a haunted house on Halloween was already a solid plot!

I think more interactivity and player agency would have greatly helped the game in general. There are many instances in the game where you go through multiple lengthy passages, with only a click-to-continue link, pulling the reader through the story, rather than making it an active participant*. It is a bit of a shame, especially as the blurb sets expectations of choices with decorating the house, or going trick-or-treating, or pulling a prank... While you have some small choices, the bigger aspects happen without requiring the player. I would have loved to be able to** place particular decorations in specific places (which could affect the prank later on), or choosing a different costume to go trick-or-treating (rather than that one or nothing), or responding to passers-by/candy-givers during the trick-or-treat phase. The added agency for the player would have helped with the pace of the story (and potentially added to the horror aspect - oh, but what if I had chosen another path...) *even if the PC is supposed to have a set personality, many of the choices made for you could have been interactive. **most of those don't require more than an extra line or two of variation in the text.

One final gripe with the accessibility of the game itself: when the passage has an image for the background, the text is often very hard to read, even when a dark-ish overlay has been added. Either the dark overlay needs to be darker/less opaque, or the image should be less bright (a combination of both would be best).

One thing that I noticed however, was how the prose and style stayed consistent throughout the writing, even with the switch in tone and genre. This is pretty impressive considering the writers have quite different styles. This speaks volume about the synergy during the creating process.

[dykobra-kid]

"Hold the hand of the god-child”, they said, "as he falls from the sky"

Lyrics from That Unwanted Animal by The Amazing Devil

[macksartblock]

Hi welcome to snippets and doodles of what’s been plaguing me for well over a week

[moonshynecybin]

Marc Marquez and Valentino Rossi together at the 2019 British Grand Prix

[ourhouseishaunted]

trips and dozens of shitty sketches of trigun women fall out of my pockets

[schneiderenjoyer]

The game reaching its first year shouldn't make me tear up, man...

[toxic-glamour]

why is there something so inherently queer about being a Japanese horror game protagonist?

like, what are you scared of? coming out?

[therain-lover]

Do not blink. Do not think to hard. Do not wake up (wake up). You do not know what you are, (you have forgotten) you do not want to know. (Keep dreaming)

More design notes v

Very cagey about showing skin (he may or may not remember what his face looks like…), which could feasibly be described as porcelain or paper-like. His fingertips are permanently stained with redstone.

Bdubs swears the angel features are new… but as far as anyone can really remember, he’s always looked like that. 👀

[skyfullofpods]

There's a non-zero amount of ✨denial✨in response to certain podcast-based events this week, as I bring you my thoughts about the fiction podcasts I've been listening to in this week's audio fiction Sunday blog post!

[myrquez]

i know dovquez is supposed to be the nice comfort ship or whatever but its even better when.. it is not.

and here i go rambling because

i’ll never be over dovi being So possessive and going all like ducati is mine nobody is going to take it away from me and. never settling for anything LESS really. dear petty impossibly stubborn possessive dovi. And. marc being haunted as per usual but not in a desperate and nostalgic way more like. i’m gonna be the most annoying brat you’ll ever met in your life and its gonna be even worse than any on track criminal offense bc you’re not acting as you should and im not used to it and this is pissing me off bc i cannot really control it so i’ll make you go grey right at the temples just to see how long it will take for you to reveal yourself and fucking explode or something. hate me. bruise me. ruin me. anything. and dovi isn’t pleased with it because he must be tired of playing by someone else’s rules. and ruin him he does.. but in a different way.. bc its dovi and he got all of the aces up his sleeve. he just knows how to make marc crumble, taking him by surprise bc nothing is ever predictable. not merciless but undaunted i mean. relentless. he knows how to put marc back under him in some swift, unprompted moves.. keep him there on a leash eventually, tightening or releasing it just when its needed.. so that nobody can take marc away from him anymore…

[sparkly-caroline]

Best friends

... right?

[fishpastetheconfusing]

A house i designed for a family of paranormal investigators (which i also designed) in isometric perspective

I hid an amongus in the interior

[whitewaterpaper]

Den som väntar på något gott väntar aldrig för länge. @kulturdasset lär bli mäkta imponerad av några av månadens filmval. Det är klart. Värt att vänta på vad det också. 😜

65 (2023) [👍] Riktigt bra SF om en utomjording som hamnar på jorden under dinosauriernas regim.

Australiens (2014) [👎🆓] En budgetstinkare från Australien. Går på komisk knock men svingar vilt i luften.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) [👍🔁]

Grease Live! (2016) [👍🎭🔁]

Hairspray Live! (2016) [👍🎭🔁]

Hocus Pocus 2 (2023) [👍🔁]

Kapten Våghals / Captain Scarlett (1952) [🆓] Intressant, och mot alla odds, kombination av Robin Hood och Röda Nejlikan. Hollywood! Vi vill ha en remake franchise!

Lair, the (2022) [__] Neil Marshall, åter i samarbete med Charlotte Kirk, och precis som i The Reckoning inte dåligt men når heller inte riktigt ända fram.

Lost City, the (2022) [👍🔁]

Love of Three Queens / L'amante di Paride (1954) [👎🆓] Spretigt sömnpiller med Hedy Lamarr.

Mord i Venedig / A Haunting in Venice (2023) [👎] När jag tänker tillbaka till Kenneth Branagh föregående exkursion som Poirot (Döden på Nilen, 2020) kommer beskrivningen ”välpolerad yta och dyra färger” för mig. Men vad gör man inte för Michelle Yeoh liksom?

Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, the (1957) [🔁🆓] Vikingraffel signerat Roger Corman. Den här hade jag tydligen sett tidigare... Ett upptäckt som är ett omdöme i sig.

Ski Troop Attack (1960) [🆓] Skidåkarraffel signerat Roger Corman, han har verkligen fått till det i den här filmen. Om oinspirerat sidåkar-pang-pang är vad man längtar efter. Jag tror storyn tog en annan nedfart, för den minns jag inte mycket av.

Totally Killer (2023) [👍] Hallå, hej! Amazon får till en underhållande liten skräckkomedi som andas klassiska grepp och tillbaka till framtiden. Me like! Kommer antagligen ses igen.

Vidioten / UHF (1989) [__] Idag kanske mer ett underhållande tidsdokument om tiden innan YouTube gjorde videostjärnor av svenssons.

WarGames (1983) [👍🔁] Idag, i skuggan av AI kanske ännu mer aktuell än någonsin. Står fortfarande stadigt utan behov av remakes. Lekte med tanken att se uppföljaren, tills jag såg att den bara fanns på hyr-tjänsterna.

@kulturdasset lär börja drägla över husguden Neil Marshalls senaste, hen bör dock trycka på play där med något nedskruvade förväntningar. Resten tycker jag skall ge Totally Killer eller Kapten Våghals en chans. Den senare är kanske inte A-klassad underhållning, men väl värd en chans.

För den nyfikne med ett sug efter en utmaning såg jag the Reckoning i februari 2021.