A puzzle game where your objective is to scare every tenant that is meddling in your house. Use the powers at your disposition to haunt and scare them. Be a Poltergeist!

We are on Steam greenlight as well! Click on the image to go there!

Welcome to the Poltergeist: Pixelated Horror Indiegogo Campaign. This campaign's objective is to give us the resources needed to be able to help us complete and polish our videogame project "Poltergeist: Pixelated Horror".

With your support, we will be able to have a very polished and refined product for everyone to enjoy. It will greatly help us to complete our vision we have for this project.

Have you ever wondered what it feels to be a ghostly being?

You have always lived happily in your manor. A manor that you managed to obtain with a lot of hard work and many personal sacrifices. Naturally you don't want anyone else to take care of it, not even in death!

But now, after your demise, many tenants have taken over it, and this is intolerable to you. Luckily, your love for your manor has granted you powers that will help you get rid of those pesky individuals.

Watch them run and scream, scaring them using your intelligence, wit, and with the use of powers like possessions, spectres, altering objects and more.

Have fun and play with the occult... and become a Poltergeist!

Poltergeist is a puzzle game for PC/Mac/Linux in which you are a ghost named Henry B. Knight. In which you will scare the tennants currently living in your house, so you can have some peace at last in the afterlife.

As a game, it will feature:

• A total of 60+ levels. These levels will occur in different time periods of the history of the manor.
  
  
• A variety of powers for you to control in each level: Lifting objects, possessing objects, invoking spectres and more.
  
  
• Enemies, like priests and ghost hunters that will getting in your path of getting rid of everyone inside your manor. This will also include special "boss" characters in each time period.

Good question! Allow us to explain.

Poltergeist, as a puzzle game, will be divided in levels. In each level you will have a limited number of powers for you to use. You must use these powers with intelligence and precision, so you can haunt all the tenants the are in the level.

But be careful, if you use all of your powers in a level, and not all of the tenants were haunted, you will lose. You must be careful to choose your power and where/when to use them!

Usually powers will work in a specific "room". The execution of a power in a room will not afect characters who are outside of that room. This is important, because there are some powers that can affect various rooms with just one use.

There will be also enemies. Priests, Ghost Hunters and other "Boss" characters are tougher thant normal ones, and they can and will block certain powers. If you use a power near one of these special characters, they will block it and it won't scare anyone.

The objective of Poltergeist is not of "seriousness". It is a very light hearted take on the ghost concept by becoming the ghost itself.

It is designed to be fun, to feel more mischievous than actually evil. Pretty much like "mustache twirling evil" type. More of a playful little child that smirks every time he/she makes a prank on his neighbor.

It is also not a game of mad skill and twitching. You will carefuly execute everyone of your actions carefully to finish each level. Think of "Lemmings", but without the extra pressure that game has (n_n).

1. Alert: Call the nearest character to an area. Animals and special characters will always take heed before other characters.
   
   
2. Alter Object: Alters the selected object. Removes one scare point to everyone who is in the same room.
   
   
3. Launch Object: Launches the selected object to another room. Removes one scare point on start and end rooms.
   
   
4. Possess an Object: Possesses an object for a short time. Will cause two scare points.
   
   
5. Possess a Human (new for the current version fo the game): Will possess a human! The human will scare a lot and will also travel to a specified room, scaring everyone in its path! When the power vanishes, the ex-possessed character will run away in panic.
   
   
6. Invoke Spectre: Creates a spectre in an specific area. Removes two scare points.
   
   
7. Invoke an illusion (new for the current version fo the game): Creates an illusion that scares a character and forces her to move to the selected area.
   
   
8. Create a Portal: A portal. Very powerful, and we know you want it!
   

Normal characters: The normal characters just wander around the manor, waiting to be scared. They can talk and get distracted, but otherwise they are completely vulnerable to your powers!

Special characters (priest, ghost hunter): These characters are tough! They exist to make your haunting schemes more difficult, they are serious in their jobs and will block some of your powers whenever they can!

"Boss" characters (new for the current version fo the game): In every era of your manor's history, there will be one level with an special character. They are tougher than special characters and can also block powers. Beware, they can be tricky!

"Epoch" characters (new for the current version fo the game): Many more characters will exist in the house, according to the current historic era they ara living in!.

Poltergeist began as a simple idea and concept that started in November 2011. The idea was conceived by Diana Esperanza Pacheco (artist) and Italo F. Capasso B. (programmer).

But it was only with the advent of a contest created by Square Enix, called the "Latin American Game development contest 2012", in which we really started to make this game a reality. We entered in the contest by creating a small prototype of our game. At that time we were just hoping we could get if only a mention of honor or even better, end up as a finalist.

We had the very good fortune of getting the first prize of the contest! We got a super cool trophy and all (^0^).

You can see the results of the contest here:

http://close.latam.square-enix.com

Now, as of May 1st of 2013, the rights of our given were given back by Square Enix. This means the we now have the opportunity to really finish the game! We immediately started on making the full game, with more levels, better graphics and more gameplay mechanics.

At this moment, we still have the complete functional prototype. The consist of a grand total of 20 levels, and contains the basic implementation of the majority of powers, and the base mechanics, including enemies.

At this moment we are working on:

• Reworking all of the sprites and creating new ones for the game. These new sprites and models include the objects of the other periods of history of the manor and the look of the tenants in different times.
  
  
• Overhauling the look and feel of the game with things like dynamic lighting and an improved user interface.
  
  
• We are implementing new powers, which are Possesing Humans and Invoking Illusions. These will bring more variety to the game and have more ways to solve individual levels.
  
  
• Also contributing to that variety. New mechanics as "distractions" and special "boss" characters will make the game richer and deeper in its core mechanics.
  
  
• Although not super special, we are adding very simple image sequence cutscenes, to give some sense of a simple story to the game.
  
  
• We only have 20-25 levels. Welp, time to make more!
  To make the game more interestings, more levels are the key to be able to fully exploit all of the mechanics we have in store for it.
  

Our work in Poltergeist has been during the Square Enix contest deadline, and after we got the rights back in May 1st 2013. And though the money we won from the contest has been of great use to us (basically living from it in the past 8 months), we still need more support to be able to finish this project faster.

We can, technically speaking, complete the project on our own (and we will!). But that would take more time for us, since we do not have the resources for us to be able to work on it full time without worry. It would also not be the superpolished game as we want it to be (for example, not having special stuff like commentary mode, more characters and sprites, more levels and whatnot).

So any contribution we recieve will be greatly appreciated and will do wonders for us (n_n).

We would use the money for:

• Paying an extra artist for a short time to help Diana with the new sprites and models of the game.
  
  
• Paying for original music and audio.
  
  
• Finance the rest of our work for the game in the future (you know, living and eating and stuff), with the ease of not having to worry on part-time jobs.
  
  
• Formalizing Glitchy Pixel and creating an actual company (its needed of course, but also: This will be useful for talks of possibly porting the game on other platforms, and have it on multiple distribution platforms. But that is the super ideal case. No promises on that).
  
  
• Pay the Indiegogo fess and local taxes.
  

We are going to use the "Fixed Funding" option of Indiegogo. This means that all of the money you contribute will only be charged if the target is reached and when the campaign ends.

Please note the we are going to finish this game no matter what. The campaign will help us is to just get it in a better state, with lots of polish and detail than we could ever do without funding.

If we do not reach the target, well, it kinda sucks. Of course things will be a lot trickier, and the game will probably have a reduced scope than we have now, but it won't die (we can't let it die, really).

We'd still work on the game (and keep you guys posted about it). But it definetly would take longer to finish it.