Haunter X Hunter

• Asymmetrical hide-and-seek game with audience participation in a period horror setting

• Three-week CMU ETC student project

• Team of four graduate students

• Selected for showing in the 2020 Virtual ETC Fall Festival MMO and livestream

• Dedicated pavilion in the Festival MMO themed to the game

For Haunter X Hunter’s showing in the 2020 ETC Fall Festival, our team created a virtual pavilion for our players to interact with our team in the MMO world.

I created a mockup of the guest flow through the virtual environment to help the artists create assets for each interactable object, and the programmers to lay it out in Unity.

I also planned the schedule and distributed responsibilities for our team to run Haunter X Hunter matches throughout the day. Using two user personas, representing a parent of an ETC student and a recent ETC grad, I was able to plan for the many guest questions and appropriately direct them through the MMO world.

Longtime ETC collaborator Anthony Daniels needed technical help while visiting our virtual room. Thanks to the thought put into how to direct different types of guests, I was able to provide it.

Skills:

• Creative software: Photoshop, Illustrator

• Other software: Google Suite, Zoom, Slack

• Other skills: Guest experience management, UX design, writing, presenting, collaboration

The setting of an abandoned apartment in 1980s Kowloon Walled City called for a claustrophobic, period-accurate, horror soundscape. To that end, I sourced and edited sound effects, and recorded foley and voice acting lines for our spirit and Taoist priest characters.

I also composed a short music loop used in the trailer as well as diagetically playing from the apartment’s tape recorder.

Skills used:

• Creative software: Reaper, Audacity, Premiere

• Other software: Perforce, Slack, Zoom, Google Suite

• Other skills: Pitching, presenting, organizing, music composition, audio recording, voice acting, voice directing, version control

Since streaming audience participation was crucial to this project, our team decided to build in a hint system where the audience could give clues to the Taoist priest player. I prototyped several systems of hinting, such as typing hints letter-by-letter, and playtested them.

Ultimately, we gave our audience a pre-determined list of hint words to choose from. I created and administered a word association survey to find the balance between hints too obvious and too obscure.

The final iteration, where audience members would give hints verbally or in chat to the game moderator, allowed real-time pace adjustment in response to the players, and created an exciting, game show atmosphere for those watching the stream.

Skills:

• Software: Google Suite, Figma, Adobe XD, Zoom

• Other skills: survey design, UI/UX design, written and verbal communication, teamwork

Haunter X Hunter was an asymmetrical hide-and-seek game with audience participation. Set in an abandoned, claustrophobic apartment in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City in 1988, our game pits a daoshi against the ghost haunting the apartment. His goal is to find the ghost to cleanse the apartment. The ghost’s goal is to remain unfound, despite leaving traces of her haunting every time she possesses the furniture.

To help the Taoist priest, the livestream audience is cast as the guardian spirits of the apartment. They can use his yellow papers to deliver hints to the ghost’s location.

But the ghost will not give up so easily. She can trick the daoshi by interacting with furniture without possessing it.

This game’s asymmetrical competition and design around audience participation made it a highlight of the 2020 ETC Virtual Fall Festival and its livestream. Dozens of students, family members, alumni, and industry professionals stopped by to play, including longtime ETC collaborator, the Star Wars franchise’s Anthony Daniels.