LudumData

Ghost Collector by Ausstein

[raw]
made by Ausstein for Ludum Dare 58 (JAM)

Screenshot 2025-10-07 013153.png

A twin-stick shooter with roguelike elements. Survive endless waves of ghosts, collect their ectoplasmic energy, and upgrade your gear to become the ultimate ghost hunter!

Screenshot 2025-10-07 012915.png

👻 Description 👻

In Ghost Collector, you're thrown into an arena with one goal: survive. Ghosts of all shapes and sizes will come for you. With your trusty flashlight and vacuum, you'll fight back, collecting ghosts to gain experience and unlock powerful upgrades.

👻 Features 👻

  • 🎃 Twin-stick shooter Controls: Easy to learn, hard to master.
  • 🎃 Upgrade system: With dozens of upgrades, no two runs are the same.
  • 👻 3 Types of ghosts: Each with unique behaviors to keep you on your toes.
  • 🎃 Powerups: Powerful, temporary abilities.
  • 🎃 Online Leaderboards: Compete with players from around the world to see who's the best ghost collector!

👻 Controls 👻

Keyboard & Mouse

  • WASD: Move
  • Mouse: Aim
  • Left Mouse Button: Vacuum
  • Shift: Dash (after unlocking)
  • Right Mouse Button: Blast (after unlocking)

Controller (Recommended)

  • Left Stick: Move
  • Right Stick: Aim
  • Right Trigger: Vacuum!
  • Left Trigger: Dash (after unlocking)
  • West Button (X/Square): Blast (after unlocking)

Made With

  • Engine: Unity
  • UI: UI Toolkit
  • Juice: MoreMountains Feel

Credits

  • Game by: Ausstein!

Changelog

Day1 Bugfix - LD Legal

  • Fixed Ghost sometimes incorrectly not being collected (and then killing you)
  • Fixed Vaccuum sound not being played accurately
  • Removed one Broken Powerup (x2 Points (Points are no longer counted so this did nothing)) and One Broken Upgrade (Adrenaline Rush)
  • Fixed PowerupSpawner not being reset correctly at new game

👻 Please Leave your Highscore in the Comments. How many Ghosts did you collect? 👻

Link https://ausstein.itch.io/ghost-collector
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/ghost-collector-1

Ratings

Overall 655th 3.109⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Fun 531th 3.13⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 559th 2.957⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Theme 502th 3.5⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Mood 421th 3.5⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Given 19🗳️ 30🗨️

Feedback

Ira Baciu
Oct 07th · 18:27 UTC
I liked it! But sometimes it's too dark
Discomorphine
Oct 07th · 20:06 UTC
The enviroment could be lighter, but the game is very cool!
ChuChuGeralt
Oct 07th · 22:27 UTC
This is a really nice game!

I really liked the moodiness of the game, as well as the SFX and the color choice in the menu.

While playing, I sometimes found it hard to see the effective vacuuming area clearly. Also, the decoy could be tricky, as I had to get very close to it to suck up the ghosts, which then rushed me immediately after the decoy vanished.

But I absolutely love games where you can choose your upgrades and try to find better or different strategic approaches.

Thanks for the game!
Trusty
Oct 13th · 20:36 UTC
Nice lighting effect, really helped with the mood. Wish there was some kind of health system so the game just wouldn't end in a split second mistake. Had fun with this, thanks!
graebor
Oct 13th · 20:52 UTC
Neat idea! would have been nice to have a bit more instruction/feedback in the game itself to be able to intuit what you're supposed to do. At first I didn't realize you had to approach the ghosts while sucking (the fact they were putting their hands over their eyes made me think I was doing something wrong - despite it being a cool animation detail). Once I quit the game and read how it was supposed to work I went back and things made more sense.
bjornstenlund
Oct 14th · 12:40 UTC
Cool game! It felt like it was scoped quite well! I understood what I was supposed to do and good feedback on my actions (SFX and VFX ). Nice touch with the scoreboard.

It was quite hard to avoid enemies when you started to get surrounded, not sure why though. It might be that the acceleration is little bit strong or maybe to speed isn't normalized when going diagonal? Or I'm just bad :stuck_out_tongue: but it felt like hard to maneuver when I needed to quickly change direction. And maybe one life was a little too punishing, I would have loved 3 hearts and a hp pickup.

Otherwise it felt quite complete! Good job!
🎤 Ausstein
Oct 16th · 09:30 UTC
@bjornstenlund
Thank you for the detailed Feedback!

Speed is normalized on the diagonals, but I did not implement acceleration. Instead you immediately move full speed in the direction you point. Which is effectively infinite acceleration. So yeah infinite might be a little too strong :D
Mibi88
Oct 20th · 16:28 UTC
Nice game, with really nice graphics. However I found it really hard as the ghosts kill one instantly, and I found it frustrating to be loosing the upgrades after loosing.

Overall it's a nice game!
Mackelvin
Oct 20th · 18:30 UTC
Nice game, nice idea !
The mouse control is a bit to sensitive
Great game !
Zliebowitz
Oct 20th · 20:54 UTC
The game feels good although the darkness is enough of an issue for me that I'm not able to really get past the beginning (bad eyesight, but I understand that this is a genre that accommodating that can be an issue, especially in a jam).

The game feels well put together and like you did a fairly decent amount of polishing on it. Regrettable that I couldn't get further in to the game.
Kapricorn Media
Oct 20th · 21:05 UTC
Great game, I had fun playing! Took me a while to understand how the vacuum worked (I was just trying to run over the powerups). But everything made sense after a few rounds. Great mood as well, though I'd turn up the brightness a bit and add something else to compensate to the spooky vibe without making it too hard to see what's going on.
Kash
Oct 20th · 21:59 UTC
The concept is really interesting! I feel like the idea that you need to vacuum ghosts closer to you to get xp but also ghosts kill you by getting too close is super novel, and I would've liked for there to be a visual difference between your light scaring the ghosts and the vacuum sucking up the ghosts. Also it'd be nice for there to be a visual difference between ghosts that are gonna give you xp and ghosts that are going to kill you. Other than that, the game was really fun to play, it looks really polished, I like the upgrades and power-up implementation. The SFX are really satisfying when you pick up a ghost or get upgrades and I really enjoyed the music continuity. Overall really impressive game!
FireSlash
Oct 21st · 03:56 UTC
I had to read the instructions to discover I could vacuum ghosts, I just avoided them initially and was collecting upgrades. I'm on firefox, maybe I'm missing a particle effect or something?

The Flashlight mechanic is cool, and it was nice seeing some variety in the enemy types.

Nice work!
YibiRabbit007
Oct 21st · 04:25 UTC
I still can't catch those ghosts, I can only keep shining my flashlight on them to stop them from getting close to me, and then I ended up gathering a big group of them. It's a bit scary, haha.
Flying Butter Studio
Oct 21st · 08:20 UTC
Nice game, I like gameplay and the "Game Over" sound :smile:
Power up are a good idea and allow good progression.

Nicely done! But, who you gonna call ?! :ghost:
LittleGamer
Oct 21st · 14:18 UTC
Really nice ! It's a fun entry. The sounds were well done and the music nice.
My only complaint is that the vacuum could have used a visual feedback for the player. At first I didn't understand how to vacuum the ghosts because I was vacuuming from too far, but when approaching they seemed to kill me. It's however nice that there is a small space between the light and the player that doesn't affect the ghost, it creates some danger when vacuuming. Overall a nice entry !
Lisek Gagatek
Oct 22nd · 19:28 UTC
Unfortunately this game is very hard for me :( I don't think that making ghosts run away from you when you flash light on them (while aiming) and also making the vacuum radius so small AND giving player 1 hp works really well here (unless I don't understand something). Maybe if aiming was disconnected from flashlight? (idk how could it work tho). Overall I haven't gotten really far but I appreciate the game's mood and funky visuals and sfxs.
yness
Oct 24th · 20:28 UTC
A nice and relaxing game for me (since I’ve played a lot of similar ones). The controls feel pretty responsive overall. At first, I died quite a few times because I thought the flashlight worked like a spotlight, but it actually has an area of light. Great animations and a simple yet interesting implementation!