I have been haunted by the ghost of a game idea for four years. In Big Magic, one of my favorite books, author Elizabeth Gilbert describes creative ideas as ghosts that inhabit us temporarily. We can choose to act and bring those ghosts to life as movies, games, or Skibidi Toilets. Or we can ignore the ghost and it will flutter away, until it finds another person who will bring the idea to life.
This project idea is a repeat haunter. It has come back to me again and again over the last few years. I made a technical prototype, then ignored it. I wrote a script, then ignored it. I submitted for a grant, didn’t get it, and forgot to look up if there are other grants. In fact, this idea was going to be the first Adventure Snack project, until I got seduced by the prospect of a sexy X-Men visual novel and this idea was ignored once again. Well, no longer. I am busting out the runes and doing some hardcore conjuring to bring this thing to life.
I want to make a hologram you can have a conversation with. The game would utilize a classic Pepper’s Ghost illusion (most famously seen in the Haunted Mansion), where a moving image is reflected onto plexiglass in a transparent vessel. The plexiglass reflects the screen of a tiny computer monitor, which plays a voice controlled full motion video game. In the game, the protagonist (who is filmed against a black background, which gets nullified by the Pepper’s Ghost effect) asks the player questions. The player answers with their voice into a hidden microphone, triggering video clips. If it works, the effect would be like talking to a ghost in a jar or a Star Wars hologram.
If this concept sounds familiar, then you are an avid reader of the newsletter and I applaud your memory! 👏 👏 👏 I wrote about this idea as part of the theme park design class I took last year. In the class, I designed a ghost adoption van that sold holographic ghost toys. The toy I imagined would work exactly how I described above. As I said, this idea keeps coming back to me. And here’s the kicker…
I already built half of it.
Unlike most of my ideas, which end as some form of Google Doc, this one has a working software demo. I built it out of the possibility of collaborating with Shing Yin Khor, an artist and game designer whose work I deeply admire. I met Shing in San Francisco at the Alternative Press Expo in 20…11? (Jesus.) APE was a long-running indie comic show for indie cartoonists. Amanda and I were tabling for The Devastator, our now defunct comedy magazine. Shing was there to sell a collection of their photo puppet webcomic Marlowe the Monster that was visually unlike anything out there at the time. My wife Amanda and I hired them to create illustrations for The Devastator. We’ve been friends and occasional collaborators ever since. I’m very grateful Shing invited me to contribute a silly little piece about COVID anxiety to their solo RPG The Bird Oracle, which made me a certified Ennie-nominated game writer last year.
In 2021, Shing and I got brunch at a restaurant and community grocery store called With Love. We were talking about how much fun it would be to collaborate on a project together. I was getting my feet wet with game design and had a lifelong fascination with FMV. Shing was always interested in building things, from sculptures to puppets. I think I had just seen a video about how easy it is to create a working Pepper’s Ghost illusion with just a mobile phone and it all sort of clicked. A voice activated hologram. I would create the game, Shing would create the enclosure. They loved the idea! And so, I was off.
At the time, I knew far less about Unity programming than I do now. So I began by writing a tiny interactive script with minimal branching. Amanda helped me film it against a black background in our apartment. I played a rhyming ghost dressed in a white inside-out sweatshirt. (Helped a bit by blurring FX.) When I had my six video clips edited and ready, I followed a YouTube tutorial on how to create a choice-based FMV game using a visual novel engine called Fungus. It worked! Then I hired a Fiverr contractor to take my project and set it up so choices could be made with a voice control plug-in I found on the asset store. It worked! I plugged in my videos, programmed the branching, and yeah, it all worked! Somehow!
However, it was all very clunky. The program would only run on a Mac. You had to have Google Chrome, something called Net Core, and something else called Mono installed. It also required using Terminal, a text-based command line operating system program which gives your user friendly Mac a terrifyingly DOS vibe. But the demo worked, damn it. When I said “yes” to the hologram ghost, the game played the “yes” video. It took a chain of emails, but I managed to get it working on Shing’s computer, too. They were super shocked and impressed! Their first reaction was to buy a bunch of plexiglass. They wanted to create a first pass Pepper’s Ghost illusion.
But it never happened. We both got busy with paid client work. They also ran a series of very successful Kickstarters, which takes a lot of time and effort. They never made the physical enclosure and I never moved the game past the tech demo phase. The hologram ghost became a ghost of what could have been. But it never died. I kept thinking about it, tinkering with the concept in different ways in my head, then dropping it for several months at a time. Well, no more. I want to see the ghost in real life. I want to have a conversation with a hologram. It’s time for this project to cross over to the other side.
🎲 Your Turn: Do you have a project idea that you just can’t shake? A cool idea that haunts you like a ghost? If you email me about it, or write a comment about it by hitting the orange button below, you’re taking a step to seeing it fully materialize in the real world.
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