Project Apparition

About this game

Project Apparition is a 4 player cooperative paranormal investigation game currently in development. The aim of the game is to take on missions to investigate and remove ghosts from haunted buildings. From befriending and helping Ghosts pass to the afterlife, to fending for your lives at the whims of a hostile Ghost that uses the haunt against you, Project Apparition will have something for everyone and will provide a true paranormal experience.

This game will use a central private server to host client games, instead of the usual method of host and client pattern. This means we can really push the bar on what we can deliver and achieve. This is a progressive game, with the aim to continue adding content to the game after the full release. We want to match the same level of emergence as the other top multiplayer games that fall outside the scope of a full blow MMO.

• Various types inspired by old folktales from around the world. With our trait system they each have their own individual behaviors & personalities with just a sprinkling of randomity to keep players on their toes!
  
• They will be able to hear and see you and will respond accordingly. What you do matters! Our ghosts will form an opinion based on how you behave and what you do within our disposition system.
  
• Generated with random appearances, some may give clues to how they died, some may morph before your very eyes, some may hide their true forms. Along with varying manifestations, we will deliver a truly unique and rewarding experience.
  
• Not all of our ghosts are evil or hostile, some may need help moving on, only wishing to share what happened to them, it will be up to our players to figure out what is keeping them in the world of the living.
  
• Player possession and hallucination system. Some entities will have the ability to affect what you see and hear, sometimes making it difficult to trust your senses.
  
• There will be a total of 40 Ghosts, which we will release over time.

• Our maps (Haunts) will be realistic and fully interactable by both the ghost and the player to allow for a fully immersive experience.
  
• Haunts may hold their own secrets for investigators to discover, our ghosts will require various steps to remove, and the haunt can play a big part of this.
  
• Some entities will be able to affect the walls, floors and furniture in strange and sometimes unsettling ways.
  
• For the harder difficulties players need to take into consideration many outlying factors. Things that affect the temperature of the room when taking readings need to be considered and even sometimes pulling out a screwdriver to repair a damaged breaker or socket.

• Representing oneself is very important to us. That is why we are adding full character customization to our game. Not only will players be able to collect a variety of different clothing items, they will also be able to change the shape of their character's figure as well in the form of slidable morphs.
  
• Players will be able to get new clothing items with in-game currency, as rewards or from our future vanity shop. All items within the future vanity shop will be obtainable in game as well, but players will have to work for them!
  
• Players will also have their own player ID card. You will be able to obtain special titles, as well as select an achievement to display on this.

Singleplayer

• This will be your home-base for your private solo investigations.
  
• A fully customizable apartment to make it feel like home. You will be able to change furniture, wallpapers, floor coverings, decorations and even the weather.
  
• Pets will be obtainable and will come with their own affection system.
  
• Plans to add additional purchasable locations.
  
• Lobbies will provide computer access, and a way to manage your equipment inventory, change your clothing and style options and display your achievements and collectables.
  
• Players can invite friends to visit their single-player lobbies.

Multiplayer

• We call our multiplayer lobbies HQ's. These locations will be larger to accommodate the needs of a team and will serve as the base for team investigations.
  
• While all multiplayer matches are run from the hosts HQ, those that form special in-game teams can work together to customise their HQ, with funds and experience becoming shared (along with other features and benefits).
  
• Fully customizable to fit the vibe of your ghost hunting squad!
  
• Plans to add additional purchasable locations.
  
• Purchasable pets, every good team needs a mascot!

• Players will be able to use a plethora of equipment and tools to aid them in their investigations. These are divided into three categories.
  Electronic devices - such as the trusty E.M.F reader, Cameras and dots projectors.
  Spiritual - Including the Ouija board, ritual kit and poppet.
  Consumable - Smudge sticks, Ofuda, Holy water etc.
  
• Players will need to discern the ghost type through its behavior, isolating its traits using the equipment, tools and knowledge given to you in your grimoire. You will be able to add information to your grimoire too as you learn more about the spirit world.
  
• While we plan on adding many equipment items they will not always be required, because our ghost behavior is dynamic, experienced players will eventually be able to pick up on and learn nuances and features of each ghost type through their behavior and abilities.

• Solo and team leaderboards.
  
• Set challenges
  
• Pseudo social media where you can share and like ghost photos captured during an investigation with your friends.
  
• Comprehensive and rewarding content creator program.
  
• Players will be able to track their progress, and be rewarded for their time playing with an in-game seasonal reward tracker, this will also contribute to their ranking on leaders boards (solo and team based play).
  
• Special holiday events. These will include their own rewards, custom items, style sets and even custom ghost types all tailored to the theme.

Latest news

• Announcements·17 Mar 2025Official

  Transmission 9.0

  Overview First and foremost we would like to acknowledge the frequency and substance of updates recently has not been that substantial, we are however still absolutely invested within this project and we have never stopped working on it, this is our passion and are wholly committed. Going forward we will try to keep our supporters and followers updated at a more consistent rate and level, although our dedication behind the scenes has never wavered one bit over the past couple of years! Over the past several months we have been working mainly on ghost logic, more haunt interactions, a new character creation process, models and equipment system. It’s been a bumpy road lately as we have faced a lot of hurdles in not only the logic itself but general compatibility issues with certain systems highlighted by our testers with an engine upgrade as well! A lot of work has gone into stability and networking as well, which isn’t so obvious on the surface, after all we need to ensure that this game is stable and works across the board as servers are to be provided by us the developers. Stability & Networking A stability vulnerability was pointed out to us relatively recently in the way we handle data, and our general program language culture, it took a while to figure out, but we ended up discerning that the reading of data from our stored format to game formats was not translating correctly because of different system languages as to what that game was expecting. This was easily fixed by defaulting the games language culture to a standard that the games data can recognize no matter where the system is in the world. We are also finalizing our network connection code to finally allow for players to be able to connect to each other and enter missions together. This may seem like something that should have been implemented earlier, and for all intents and purposes thus far we have still had players connecting to our servers regardless of the fact that they were playing single play...
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• Announcements·11 Jun 2024Official

  Transmission 8.0

  Overview It's been a long time since the last update. We have been developing the whole time however. We have worked on many different aspects of the game, this is a large project so most of the systems we code are designed in parallel. Since the last dev log we have worked on ghost logic and appearance, equipment, ritual items and magic circles. The computer, including a browser and extended mission setup screen. We have revised our content delivery system and revised how the server accesses our player database including a more intelligent local caching system so loading client side content that depends on information from the server is much faster. We have also worked on our economy and progression system as well, and have designed a UI notification system to support it. The Ghostly Grimoire has been re-added as well, with full functionality for ghost type and trait selection, however no informational pages have been added yet. Let’s get more into these things in detail. Ghost, Logic & Looks We consider the ghosts to be the ultimate selling point of Project Apparition. Thus they have also become one of the largest aspects of development, in both logic and appearance. We are on our 3rd iteration of our ghost character model, we now plan on using the Daz3D Genesis 9 character base, instead of Genesis 8, this is also what we will be moving our player character models over to. There are a few reasons we decided on this advancement, they are receptive to a larger variety of stock animations, and animations in general, they have better UV skinning points, so texturing and changing textures at runtime looks much better as well. Their overall look and feel are much nicer too. Alongside working on their model appearance we have also been working on particle systems and physics based cloth simulation to bring our ghosts to life even more. Although we have a long way to go with visuals we are very happy with the direction we are going. Animations are still lacking though, bu...
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• Announcements·14 Dec 2023Official

  Transmission 7.0

  With testing off to a good start this month we have refocused our efforts into fixing issues that have arisen, adding a new haunt and refining the user interface. Initial testing of the client server pattern has gone well, mainly the issues that have been reported are superficial but there have been some serious ones that have arisen too. Pre-Alpha Testing Our Patreon testers overall have tested our server client logic vigorously and the separation of logic between player instances on the server is working as intended and has presented no issues so far, that has been great news, and great relief. However there have been a few things that have disconnected players, the ones that we know about have been fixed, and are awaiting to be pushed to the live tests soon. A notable issue that has arisen though is the render textures we use for the character creation photo viewer and the camera viewer have caused continuous DirectX errors on specific gfx cards causing severe FPS spikes. We are currently trying to track down a resolution to this, as it is known to happen with this version of Unity. The rest of the issues presented so far are superficial, and we have and will be fixing those on a lower priority, system and network issues get priority. Our ghost system is still very early in development but has been providing some interesting moments already for our testers. Ghost generation in its current state is working, and providing ghosts of different ages and with different appearances, this needs expanding though and the ghost does interact with objects around the haunt successfully. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44219748/0adac049b3d27f1e0bd60b94dd7abd85169a4da5.png Pre-Alpha Testing Our Patreon testers overall have tested our server client logic vigorously and the separation of logic between player instances on the server is working as intended and has presented no issues so far, that has been great news, and great relief. However there have been a few things that have disconnected ...
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• Announcements·3 Nov 2023Official

  Transmission 6.0

  Well it's been a while, too long. But we are excited to share a whole bunch of thing’s. The most important thing is that we have started pre-alpha testing, this is to make sure our underlying network framework does what we want it to do and does it well. It's extremely important that we get that right, as it is imperative to the future of this game. We are in the next phase of development, and we love it. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44219748/8d85f81bdf16077611443dcc66361c27491a8bdd.png This dev-log is all about Ghosts! We have added them, and they are semi-functional. We want to stress that our ghosts are ready for us to start adding their actions and how they affect the Haunt and to a limited extent the player. We have also finalized our Steam integration in terms of pushing builds to our testers, so we are very excited to be at this stage as now we can start adding so much more visual and tangible content to show off. Our ghosts are thinking, dynamic beings who have autonomy. To give you an idea of the current state of our ghosts, while we have not implemented much in the way of player reaction and larger haunt events, that is a whole beast in itself, we have implemented their action cycle, and have started developing the events and interactions that they perform around the haunt. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44219748/cf6f541e3e0b45382c5a88c6005b234c861917ab.png Currently our ghosts can nudge or throw objects, turn lights on and off, enable certain electronic devices and even affect them in destructive ways! They can also move and bang on doors and emit audio. Our ghosts work with an action system, where actions are chosen by the ghost on a priority and chance basis and they require energy, although currently we have no ghost types in play we have the system implemented to support them when we do. Eventually ghost types will override the base actions in the game with different priorities and chances whilst also defining a bunch of other distinctions, to enable intrinsic differences ...
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• Announcements·10 Aug 2023Official

  Transmission 5.0

  This month is a late dev-log. We have been working tirelessly on PA character creation, we aimed to have something production ready so we don’t have to revisit the core framework before early access release. We have achieved that, and currently the character creation tool is available for our top-tier Patrons for testing and feedback. Character Creation We aim to deliver a feature rich and expansive character creation experience, in our hope to stand alongside AAA titles within this area. Character creation is very involved, with lots of moving parts and things to consider, including pitfalls. Last month we covered quite a lot of the character creation, we were still heavily in development back then, and we are at a stage now where we can put it down and move on. But we did want to tell you more about it. We didn’t talk much about the clothing last month, but now we have finished the framework that supports it. Players at the moment can equip different clothing items for the under top, over top, legs and feet, but we will be opening that up to allow for eyewear, headwear and handwear. Our clothing forms with the character's body, so it will always fit. Players can also customize the colors of the clothing, and in the future, even choose between patterns and iconography for their clothes as well. We have built with all these things in mind, so adding new patterns/colors/logos is extremely easy, even adding new clothes doesn’t take too much time. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44219748/fe3d5dc3a2bfcb8c3e4c39d66759558f416cc7e2.png We have finished developing our skin shader, it's come a long way since last month. It now has built in makeup functionality, players will be able, as both male and female, to add eye shadow, liner, blush and lipstick. There are a dozens of different styles and players can change the colour, opacity and even shininess too. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44219748/8f96ef66fde69674ab7de5bb607964a1c715985f.png Lastly, at the end of the character creation process, player...
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