A new early prototype game for the HTC Vive is aiming to bring your time-shifting, lightsaber wielding dreams to life with Project Ghost, a new game, early in production, which mashes together so many individually cool ideas, some of them have to work!
Project Ghost is a “passion project” for the developer Gaspar Ferreiro, also the founder of Project Ghost Studios. Ostensibly an action title, and still at a very early stage in development, Project Ghost brings together so many great ideas with such enthusiasm, its easy to look beyond some of the work-in-progress aesthetics at a game that could be so much fun (see the embedded video at the top of this article to take a look yourself).
The draw for this title probably won’t be in the nuances found in its storytelling or character building, it’s in some of the ideas for creating compelling action set pieces.
The combat is built around your core weaponry, a pair of double-ended lightsabers (sorry ‘Ghost Blades’) which, somewhat expectedly, slice and dice enemy targets effectively and satisfyingly. However, bring those sabers together, and they become a laser-powered bow, unleashing archery-style projectiles at distant enemies. This looks to work really well, and is a great example of motion controls bringing multiple, accessible and naturalistic modalities to player input. And, above all that, it just looks plain cool.
On top of the core combat mechanics, Project Ghost also endows you with the capabilities to shape time and integrates that with the game’s locomotion system. Project Ghost allows you to select your chosen direction and position in the game world by pointing at and selecting pre-positioned globes, with you warping to that location on doing so. The twist here is that you can also slow time down before switching locations, giving rise to some interesting and potentially epic Matrix-fused-with-The-Flash moments.
Right now, it’s all fairly prototypical (the project is only 4 months old), with the first flush of proper animation via motion capture just added in this latest demonstration and yes things look a little shonky right now as a result, but the ideas are there and you can hear the enthusiasm in Gaspar’s voice as he presents his team’s work.
Whether there are one or two many ideas here (the inclusion of puzzle elements seems a little at odds with the general tone) is open to question, but the ideas are certainly there an I for one can’t wait to see where the team go with it.
