Weekly Update - October 18th, 2019

Hey there, Ghost Hunters!

Welcome to the weekly update!

Let’s continue our discussion on the Ghost additions since the last alpha test.

Last week we covered the new Ghost class, the Wraith. That class is all about sabotaging Hunters and their gadgets.

This week, we’ve got a new Ghost class to preview!

This one is called the Spirit.

Watch and share Spiritformpreview GIFs on Gfycat

The Spirit can turn into their Ghostly wisp form at will. In this form, they can fly in any direction for a short amount of time.

Like the Phantom class, the Spirit is all about making a quick escape and avoiding damage. However, the Spirit can fly in any direction, including upward, giving more freedom of motion to the escaping Ghost.

Unlike the Phantom, the Spirit is very loud and bright. This makes it rather easy to track as a Hunter, and once the Spirit form duration has ended, the Ghost is rather vulnerable.

When the Ghost returns from the Spirit wisp form, they keep their object they were currently possessing. So if a player is using a heavy and slow object, such as the Knight or the Fridge, the Spirit ability can be used to relocate quickly without losing the object.

The Spirit can also be used to escape from a trap if caught. If you think traps are frustrating, this might be the class for you!

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Like all of the classes, Spirit becomes upgraded after the clock strikes Midnight.

The Spirit becomes the Enraged Spirit, which moves much faster and lasts much longer. In addition, when the Spirit form ends, there is no cooldown on your next attack. 

(Before Midnight, there is a short cooldown before any action can be taken.)

This can be quite useful against the Hunters that use the perk Sprint to endlessly run around the map to run down the clock. You can catch up to them with this form and immediately knock them out with the Ghost swipe!

That’s it for this week, Ghost hunters

How do you feel about the new Ghost class? Do you think it sounds OP or kind of lame? Let us know on social media!

And stay tuned for our next weekly update. There might be some surprises in store… 👻🎃

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Weekly Update - October 11th, 2019

Hey there, Ghost Hunters!

Thank you all for joining us for another haunting edition of our Weekly Update! We have been going over some changes to our Ghosts over the last few weeks, so why not continue the tradition?

Spooktober is here, and with it comes with plenty of inspiration. We’re coming up with new ways to spice up Ghost gameplay.

Our latest idea is a new Ghost class! Enter: The Wraith

The Wraith is all about finding ways to disable or hijack Hunter’s gadgets. You are the GHOST in the Machine!

Watching… Waiting… Ready to punch a Ghost Hunter in the face…

Watching… Waiting… Ready to punch a Ghost Hunter in the face…

New Ghost Class: Wraith

  • Wraiths can fry Hunter’s gadgets for a short amount of time. However, This requires maintaining a line of sight on the Hunter for the duration of the cast, which can be hard to pull off.

  • When casting their ability, Wraiths have visual and audio elements that reveal themselves to the enemy team. You have to work efficiently and quietly if you want to stay “alive”.

  • Wraiths can reprogram Hunter traps to turn on their masters; this will result in traps hurting the Hunters and not the Ghosts. (Traps felt very hard to counter during the last alpha test, so this is a way to get some revenge!)

  • Wraiths can also sabotage any possessable object. This object, when destroyed by a Hunter, will explode and fry the equipment of any nearby Hunters.

  • AFTER MIDNIGHT, this ability evolves into the Electromagnetic Blast! This is an area of effect blast that affects all Ghost Hunters/Gadgets within line of sight. It has a longer cast time.

In addition to our new Ghost ability, we also added passive perks to our Ghost team. These passive perks work the same as the Ghost Hunters and allow for more customization and tailoring for your style of play.

  • Untrackable - Ghost footprints decay faster (A counter for the Pathfinder gadget, for those of us who live on the go)

  • Heavyweight - Large objects take less damage (Suits of armor, fridges, grandfather clocks, etc.)

  • Shatterproof - Small objects no longer shatter after falling. (Potted plants, tea kettles, busts, etc.)

  • Focused Spirit - Special abilities have a shorter cooldown. (So you can Cloak or Poltergeist or Doppelganger more often!)

Our goal is to create ways to specialize and pick a build that will complement your specific playstyle. We’re also looking at ways to create some symmetry with the Hunters in some ways. Hunters have many, many different types of loadouts to choose from - different combinations of weapons, gadgets, and perks. Ghosts felt a bit lacking in that respect.

How do you feel about these new ideas? Let us know!

Stay tuned in the coming weeks - we may have some scary news on the way! 👻

That’s it for this week, Ghost Hunters!

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Weekly Update - October 4th, 2019

Hey there, Ghost Hunters!

Hey there, Ghost Hunters! Thanks for joining us for another installment of our Weekly Updates.
This week, we are going to dive more in-depth to some of the changes we have mentioned prior — and discuss some new ones!

One of the biggest new features developed is the transition from UE4’s built-in voice chat to Discord voice services. This service will ensure higher quality voice chat, as well as make handling voice chat operations much smoother! (You can click here to read our more in-depth update regarding Discord Voice)

We have also added Discord Rich Presence to our game client, as some of our Members from our Discord may have noticed already.

Rich Presence is a feature that detects what game is currently playing (in this case: Midnight Ghost Hunt). It will show the current map, what team they are on, and how much time is remaining until Midnight.

We’ve also set up the framework to have game invites and joins right through Discord! Although not configured yet, we’re expecting it to be relatively easy to implement. 

Now you can see if your friend is ghosting you to play MGH!

Now you can see if your friend is ghosting you to play MGH!

As we mentioned last week, we’ve been making some tweaks to the balance of power. The biggest one is our Ghost ability overhaul.

Ghost abilities are being split into two phases, a pre-Midnight and post-Midnight power. This is to make the pre-Midnight phase more about hiding, playing tricks, and misdirecting Hunters. post-Midnight is all about knocking out Hunters in the most spectacular ways.

Post-Midnight Class Ability Changes

  • Doppelganger - Directly possess a Hunter, instead of making a copy. Players can use whatever weapon they had equipped to damage other Hunters. The possessed Hunter can only watch in horror as they are controlled directly by a menacing Ghost. Any damage taken from a fellow Hunter will force the Ghost back out.

  • Phantom - Activating the Cloak after Midnight will enter players into Phantom Form for a short while. All projectiles or melee weapons will pass through the player, meaning no direct damage can be taken. Splash damage from cannon explosions and grenades can still deal damage, however.

  • Poltergeist - Pull an object to the player using their telekinetic powers. The object will float to the player's right, and the camera will become over-the-shoulder. Press the ability button again, and the object will go flying forward crushing anything in its path. If the object comes into contact with Hunters, Generators or Traps it will deal damage.

We have also given our Ghosts passive perks just like the Hunters have already. These are still being actively tested and improved so we will go over them another time.

We’re also working on some new Ghost classes and Hunter gadgets, but they’re not quite ready to be talked about yet.

That’s it for this week, Ghost Hunters!

Thanks for reading!

Do you think the ability upgrades make Ghosts too OP?
Or do you believe the Ghost Hunters will come out on top yet again?

Be sure to let us know, and as always, make sure to check back next week!

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Weekly Update - September 27th, 2019

Hey Ghost Hunters!👻

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Welcome to our latest weekly update!

This week we’re going to talk about some Ghost tweaks we are experimenting with.

As you may know if you have played the recent alpha test, Midnight Ghost Hunt has two phases: Pre-Midnight and Post-Midnight.

Pre-Midnight, Ghosts are fairly weak - they’re trying to survive until Midnight when the tables turn. When the clock strikes Midnight, the Ghosts unlock their true power and become terrifying killing machines. That’s the idea, at least.

We’re looking at ways to set the pacing a bit more clearly for Ghosts.

Are players supposed to be aggressive before Midnight? Or are they just supposed to hide? Somewhere in between, perhaps? Players sometimes felt a little confused about how they should be playing.

We’ve decided to try to make a bit more clear that before Midnight is all about staying alive, running out the clock, and playing tricks on Hunters. Diversion, deception, all that fun stuff. When Midnight arrives, all that goes out the window and it becomes a bit of a brawl.

We felt that most Ghost class abilities felt a bit useless after Midnight, especially Poltergeist. Why would you use any of these abilities when you could just punch them?

To that end, we're looking at upgrading Ghost abilities when the clock tolls.

Foolish Hunter… My time to strike approaches.

Foolish Hunter… My time to strike approaches.

They will be in the same theme of the base Ghost class, but with extra offensive capabilities. 

We're no longer using the abilities to escape or cause confusion or hide better. We're using them to take out Hunters in spectacular fashion. Subtlety is out the window at this point.

We currently have three classes: Doppelganger, Phantom, Poltergeist. I think we’ve come up with some cool ways we can keep the themes for each class but pack a bit more of a punch.

Our upgraded Doppelganger ability allows you to directly possess a Hunter, instead of making a copy. You take over that Hunter’s body, and they can only watch helplessly as you use their own weapons to attack other Hunters. The possessed Hunters start to glow bright red and look a little bit terrifying.

You can also simply move the Hunter into a better position to be smacked in the head with a lamp hurled by your teammates.

It turns out to be pretty fun and fits in our game nicely!

We’ll dig into the other upgraded abilities, along with other new goodies in development in the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more info!

That's it for this week, Ghost Hunters. 

Be sure to check back next week where we may showcase some of these new abilities coming to the Ghosts. How do you feel about the idea? Any cool ideas for OP Ghost abilities? Let us know!

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Weekly Update - September 20th, 2019

Hey there, Ghost Hunters!

Welcome to this another edition of our Weekly Update! This week we’re hunting data, not Ghosts. But we’ll get to that soon!

We’ve got some data from our recent alpha test that would be fun to delve into and analyze.
Let’s begin, shall we?

Moments after this photo was taken, this hunter had a box thrown at him. He died.

Moments after this photo was taken, this hunter had a box thrown at him. He died.

First up is the match outcomes. Out of all the matches played that weekend, which team won more often?

Are you surprised with the results? Let us know!

Are you surprised with the results? Let us know!

Turns out we are fairly close on our win rates, with Hunters coming out on top by a small amount.

For the first day or so, Hunters were actually winning closer to 64% of the time. A few quick balance patches later, and we settled a bit closer to 50/50.

We’ve got some balance work still ahead, but always good to see we aren’t so far off.

The win rates also vary by map, as you might expect.

Mansion tended to be Hunter-favored, as it is the smallest map. Less places for Ghosts to hide.
Asylum seemed fairly balanced.
Warehouse tended to be Ghost-favored, as it is the biggest map and there are several spots to hide.

Some great information here that will greatly aid the team on their continued development and balancing of the game.

2 Very Nice Charts

It seems that Hunters tended to prefer the ranged weapon, the Spectral Cannon. There might be a little bit of skew here since it was in the default loadout - but it seemed to be the favorite. The Ghostsmasher’s limited range was indeed a fairly large drawback.

Unsurprisingly, the Radar was one of the most equipped gadgets throughout the weekend at a whopping 43.9% utilization. We’re making some tweaks behind the scenes on the radar, stay tuned for more on that!
Many of the other gadgets are seeing various tweaks to try to get them in line with each other.

Although the Shield was not used much, I did witness several matches where the Shield came in rather useful. We are looking at some options to change it up, stay tuned for that!

1 Very Excellent Pie Chart

Here is a breakdown of the selection of Ghost classes. A decent split, with Poltergeist being the favorite. Poltergeist at times felt very powerful, especially in a room with many objects to throw around, such as the Mansion dining room.

We’re looking into ways to balance these classes even further, as well as potentially introduce more classes. Stay tuned on that!

Here is a breakdown of maps played.

CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAART

A decent split! Mansion takes the cake. It’s our flagship haunted house, so that’s not super surprising. It’s got the strongest overall design and work put into it.

The other two were not far behind, and we are looking at ways to improve their overall layout, visual design, and so on. And of course, we’ve got plenty of more map ideas cooking!

What map was your favorite? Let us know!

That’s it for now! We’ve still got heaps of more data to analyze. Maybe we’ll go into more specific data in the future.

That’s it for this week, ghost hunters.

We hope you enjoyed the breakdown! Were the numbers what you expected, or did you think the results were going to lean in another direction? Let us know by reaching out to us via our socials below!

Thanks so much for reading!

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Weekly Update - September 13th, 2019

Hey there, Ghost Hunters!

Welcome to our latest weekly update!

We miss playing with everyone!
It was such a blast to play during the recent alpha test and at the PAX West booth. We can’t wait for the next test!

I know it’s frustrating that we don’t have the game up all the time so you can get your Ghost Hunting fix.

WHYYYYYYYYYYYY DOES THE ALPHA HAVE TO BE CLOSED?! I WANT TO PLAY!

WHYYYYYYYYYYYY DOES THE ALPHA HAVE TO BE CLOSED?! I WANT TO PLAY!

There’s a few reasons why we only do short tests.

The main reason is that we are still in an alpha state and we have limited content available. Only a couple maps, a few weapons, and so on. On release, we will have much, much more.

It makes more sense to have short intense bursts of testing as we really start to nail our core gameplay loop, and then focus on content afterwards. When that happens, longer tests are definitely in the cards. There will be simply more things to test.

On top of that, maintaining the alpha servers and functionality is rather time intensive. We’d rather have the team be working on making the game better instead of maintaining an alpha test longer term.

However, there will be longer tests in the future once we have enough content to test. Stay tuned for that!

Ok, cool, makes sense! what has the team been working on?

We’re glad you asked!

A bunch of stuff, really. There’s even somewhat big tweaks in the works - we’ll get to that when we are ready to show it off!

One thing that’ll be fun to talk about is our new voice chat system.

If you remember during our recent alpha test, our voice system didn’t work super well. We were using Unreal’s built in voice solution in conjunction with Steam Voice. There’s a number of issues we encountered, including jittery audio or just not even working.

And, of course, there was no team chat. No support for that in the engine, unless you want to mute the other team on a loop. So there was just a lot of confused yelling and screaming.

It’s just not a super configurable system without deep diving into the engine code, so we started looking for an alternative service.

Luckily, Discord offers high quality voice chat through their SDK. Birdm’n and Kite have been implementing this SDK over the last week or so. Thanks, Discord!

Lobbies are automatically set up on join, and we’ve got separate channels for Ghosts and Ghost Hunters. We’re also looking at the possibility of an optional global chat, as it was rather fun to yell at the opposite team at choice moments.

The audio quality is really, really good. And you can keep having Discord voice going out of the game too. don’t override anything. It’s configurable as push to talk or voice activity.

Only requirement is that you have Discord installed and logged in. Seems fair enough!

So that’s just one little preview of what’s to come in the next test. Stay tuned next week for some more!

Thanks for sticking around! We’ll see you in the next test!

That’s it for this week, Ghost Hunters

Thanks so much for checking out our Weekly Update! Let us know your thoughts and feelings via our social media! Check below for the links!

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Weekly Update - September 6th, 2019

Hey there, Ghost Hunters!

Welcome to our latest Weekly Update! This last weekend, we were at PAX West thanks to our awesome friends over at Discord! Thanks so much for inviting us out and hosting our game.

We really ‘haunted’ the floor with our presence.

Didn’t get a chance to attend PAX West, or maybe you did and just wanna revisit your time with us once again? Don’t worry, we’ve got some pictures to share with everyone.

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That’s it for this week, Ghost Hunters.

Make sure to check back next week, where we will have some updates on what we are working on and maybe even a few questions for the community…

Weekly Update - August 30th, 2019

Hey there, Ghost Hunters!

This week, we concluded a VERY successful Alpha Test #3! Thank you all so much to every single one of you who supported us, showed interest, and helped us find and destroy the bugs hidden deep within our Mansion’s walls…

We were blown away by the amount of attention our post on Reddit managed to gather. If you were in our Discord, you probably managed to see a lot of the chaos! Here’s a little peak at some stats from this weekend!

Our server isn’t such a ghost town when you see these stats…

Our server isn’t such a ghost town when you see these stats…

We had a WHOPPING 50k total messages sent from the date of our Alpha announcement, all the way up until we closed this last Monday. This is our biggest burst of activity ever, even when you compare Alpha #1 and #2!

Some of you may have noticed this guy hanging out in our Discord Server as well…

Have a question? Hit us up

Have a question? Hit us up

This is our ModMail bot! When you message this Bot, you have a direct line to our entire Moderation team! We’d like to give a shoutout to some of our team members who kept up with the mass amount of messages, and influx of Alpha Tester role requests.

We had a whopping 881 tickets sent and answered by our team. Here’s a breakdown of tickets answered by our team!

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Some of our Mods were busy with traveling and other IRL responsibilities and sadly didn’t get to participate in our Alpha weekend, but if you see any of our Mods talking in chat, be sure to give them a round of applause for all their work! We couldn’t have done it without you guys.