Last winter term, I have attended a local school of arts for my minor in new media art, which resulted in one paper, one indie RPG, and now, one indie video game, Ghul. The development of the latter had taken pretty much exactly nine months (a truly difficult birth), from early November 2016 through late July 2017, with a total of six people (mostly graduate and undergraduate students from IT and arts) working on it at different times, including the incredibly talented composer Mathilde Hoffmann. My own role was that of the lead programmer, the AI designer, and, increasingly in the final months of development, the producer, and I've certainly learned a lot about game development from this experience. I may even have to do a post mortem on my blag later on...

Start of a new game Collecting the next item The monster attacks

Goal

The game's nameless protagonist finds himself trapped in a haunted house and must find five creepy objects to complete a demonic ritual that may or may not help him escape. All the while, he is stalked by a hideous and seemingly implacable monster that tries to thwart him at every turn.

Controls

Ghul is a 2D side-scrolling game where you can only move right or left using the arrow keys (or WASD). You can run faster by holding Shift, but doing so produces more noise that attracts the monster. You can go through side doors by simply walking into them, and through doors on the back walls by pressing Up arrow key (or W) in front of them. Lastly, you can collect certain items hidden throughout the house by walking next to them and pressing the Space bar. Pressing the Escape key opens and closes the main menu, pausing the game.

Hint: If an item zaps you with lightning when you try to pick it up, it's the wrong one! Look for clues in the house about which item you need to find at any given stage (it may change every now and then, depending on what happens in the game).

Download

You may download the installer from my Google Drive. Mathilde has also uploaded the game's OST for free on her YouTube channel, while Jakob (my fellow programmer) has made the first official Let's Play for it.