I can see from the last devlog that I've been working on this thing for six years. I started the Ghost Game after fiddling with a voice controlled prototype of Asteroids where volume controlled thrust and pitch controlled direction. Extremely difficult.

My child was two years old and I guess there was a lull in stuff to do at work (or maybe my brain was too fried to deal "real" work) and so I furiously knocked out a prototype in Javascript over the course of a few weeks. I can't begin to describe how exhausted I was back then. My kid was not a good sleeper and I was barely functional.

I revived The Ghost Game in the run up to each Halloween since then, more or less. I ported it to Godot after determining that I couldn't write another game in Scheme and then ported it from Godot 3.4 to Godot 4 this year. 

The Ghost Game seems to have an immediate comic appeal which belies the challenges of the game from a design perspective. If I wanted to make a little one-off toy, the absurdity of the voice controls and a floating character would be fine, but for some reason (Wario 4) I wanted to make a real platformer, and so much of this dev cycle has been spent refining and refining again the gameplay systems until the Ghost itself feels fun to play while still providing enough structure to allow game design.

I'll upload a series of demos as we approach Halloween.