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2021: YEAR IN REVIEW

Happy Holidays, Ghosts and Hunters!

As we move toward the closing of the year and the dawning of another very exciting one, it's time for a look back at the long and fascinating road that has taken us here!

2021 was the biggest year for Midnight Ghost Hunt yet - the team grew in size massively, and we made huge strides toward delivering a fun and polished game.

The feedback from our Alphas and our very first Beta have helped us on the path to making MGH an exciting and wildly fun game, and your kind words of encouragement have kept our spirits high.

So, what all went down in the MGH world this year? Glad you asked! The answer is… lots! Let's take a peek.


JANUARY 

In January, the Midnight Ghost Hunt team expanded significantly when two amazing teams from Sweden became part of the MGH family. Partner studios She Was Such a Good Horse and Ernst & Borg Studio were brought on board to help make MGH the best game it can be.

She Was Such a Good Horse is a studio made up of veteran developers who came on board to support the project across all aspects of development, including the production of art assets, animations, code, and design decisions. Over the last year, we’ve moved forward in all these aspects immensely!

Ernst & Borg Studio has brought a combined experience in both traditional architecture and environment artistry to the environmental design of Midnight Ghost Hunt. Looking back to January 2021, it’s amazing to see how far the environments within MGH have evolved. The niche expertise of E&B Studio has truly brought the environments of MGH to life.

Both of the teams were super excited to be part of the MGH journey and got started by familiarizing themselves with the project, existing maps, weapons, gadgets, and abilities and taking a critical look at the game.
The teams then started to work on multiple different facets of Midnight Ghost Hunt simultaneously. Museum was worked on heavily, Ghost Ship saw its very first blockout during January, the fan-favorite weapon Reaper was created all the way from concept to its first pass animations, and the Hunter Bot AI went through some major improvements!

FEBRUARY

By February, things were in full swing and the teams in Sweden and the U.S. were working in synergy, right in time for the first Alpha test of the year! The February Alpha test took place between the 12th and the 15th and included a ton of new and improved content including: 

✨Map: Museum

✨Hunter Weapon: Reaper (Sniper Rifle)

✨Hunter Weapon: Sledgehammer

✨Ghost Ability: Corruption

✨Hunter Skin: Professor

✨Prop Animation Overhaul

During the end of January and early February, the team was heavily concentrated on prepping for the Alpha and working on implementing new prop animations, finalizing the Sledgehammer, and adding a ton of quality of life improvements. 

After the test was over, it was time to go over the feedback we received and balance, balance, balance. The feedback given by the community is truly invaluable to us, and we appreciate each and every one of you for taking the time to write feedback for us!

Though the Alpha test required a large amount of both prep work and post-alpha workshops, the team continued to work tirelessly behind the scenes all throughout the Alpha craziness! During February the team worked on new props, the concepts for the Vacuum and the Salt Shotgun (two of my personal favorites). One of the larger undertakings was the first-person animation rework, which included tons of stages from introducing new bones for the character rigs, a brand new camera setup, and procedural weapon animations.

MARCH 

During the spring and summer of 2021, the team was deep in development and were able to establish new concepts, features, maps, weapons, and more.

The animation overhaul continued successfully, and more and more weapons and gadgets were transferred from the old system to the new one during the month of March. The Hunter’s generator got a facelift, and became the workbench-like structure it is now.

The Team's AI genius Måns was able to take the Hunter bots to a new level, improving their movement and rotation, teaching them how to use the radar, and nudge and shoot props. The bots learned to choose different targets, investigate new props in the area if the Ghost they saw disappeared, and were prompted to move to a different area if the Radar reading was zero. There was still more work to do regarding the Hunter bots, but we were definitely moving in the right direction! 

In March, we also saw the first concept for the Hunter gadget Spectrophone and continued working on the Ghost Ship map.

APRIL

April was a very idea-rich month, and the team worked on both improvements on old weapons, gadgets, abilities, maps, and props but also a large volume of new ideas on all fronts. 

Spectral Cannon, Harpoon Bazooka, and Project X got new animations in both first and third person, the Generator redesign was finished, and Frostbite (which was code-named Nail Gun) came to life. Some of our favorite props were also designed in April. Hint: One of them can shoot you, the other eats you!

…give up? Well, that would of course be our iconic hero props Ship Cannon and Mimic Chest!

All of the maps were also reassessed and potential improvements were mapped out (pun intended), to make sure they were fun and fair to play in as both Ghosts and Hunters. April also saw the first blockout of Graveyard, the newest map in the roster. 

MAY


In May, the development continued with the first iteration and implementation of the Hunter perks “Healing Aura” and “Quick Reload” and bringing the Frostbite in-game. 

Lots of old favorites also got the rework treatment including the Radar, Grenades, Pathfinder, and Defibrillator. Work on the Ghost Ship and Graveyard maps continued, and the idea of underground catacombs for the Graveyard was born. We also came up with two new concepts for weapons, but we’ll hold onto that information for now. 👀

JUNE

In June the team dedicated quite a bit of time to level design. Graveyard’s room structure started to take shape and Asylum went through a few different layout changes. The first round of polish also took place in Mansion, Asylum, Factory, and Ghost Ship.

Hunter bots were also put through quite a bit of work through the summer and they were taught to use even more gadgets and switch to the Vacuum or the Defibrillator if necessary. Tons of smaller fixes were also implemented in June. 

Many of the mechanics related to Ghosts were worked on, most prominently being a total rework of the possess animation & VFX. The VFX for being broken out of a prop were also revamped with an entirely new animation for the smoke/shards. The team also added a wobble animation to highlight when a prop is possessed as a nice visual cue. Ghost consume also went through the first VFX iterations of the year.

Before the much-needed summer break, the team came up with the concept of the Flamethrower (thanks to the hotter than hot summer weather). Ragdolls were also heavily improved with a complete revamp of the physics, including Hunters getting back up after being revived.

JULY


In July most of the team was enjoying a much-needed and well-deserved summer break. ☀️

Towards the end of the month, the team slowly got back into the world of Midnight Ghost Hunt. Level Design continued on with collision fixes, the blockout of a map that remains under the “TOP SECRET'' label, and tons of optimization work. 

Although the team tried to spend some time chilling and enjoying the summer, they still had time to work on Hunter bots, Miasma VFX, Ghost melee VFX, Death Grip, Spirit VFX, revive animations, and possess effects. I have no idea how they do it!

I (Tinny here! 👋) also had the honor of becoming part of the team MGH at the end of the month, and I’ve been so happy to be part of MGH’s story and community. You all rock!

AUGUST

Mid-August was time for our BIGGEST (and last!) alpha test ever! As we had a longer time between tests, we had a massive catalog of new content to share. Some of the new things we introduced during the August 2021 Alpha: 

✨Maps: Ghost Ship & School 

✨Weapons: Salt Shotgun & Frostbite

✨Gadgets: Spectrophone, Vacuum, C4

✨Ghost abilities: Death Grip, Apparition, Revamped Poltergeist, Telekinesis, and Trickster

✨Features: Experimental Party Support & Team Assignment, Visual Polish & Animation Overhaul, Experimental Controller Support 

Once again, we received very thoughtful feedback and critique that helped us continue on making MGH better than ever.

The team also continued with some behind-the-scenes work, such as future content like the Medic Box and the Riot Shield. Tons of map tweaking, bug hunting, and optimization also took place backstage. 

In August and September, we also tried out some new types of content on our blog. We took some deep dives into the data behind our August Alpha test and looked behind the scenes on how the team came up with the initial idea of a gadget or a weapon coming to life in-game.

Are these the types of things you like to read about? What other types of content would you like to see in the future? Let us know on Discord or Twitter

SEPTEMBER


Based on the feedback we received during the August alpha test, we started to make some changes. We realized that the Ghost Ship map was a bit too open and decided to add some things that would break the line of sight faster. We added a fence on the beach, modified the layout of the cave, and added some shelving in the ship to give Ghosts a few more options for hiding spots.

Hunter Bots went through a plethora of bug fixes, attack range tweaks, and improved attack/grenade/trap behavior.

We also started work on our new matchmaking system this month, but things really kicked off in October!

OCTOBER

October was, of course, the month of the Ghosts and a very exciting month for Midnight Ghost Hunt. We were preparing for our first ever closed Beta test. The whole team was buzzing with excitement and extremely thrilled to reach this milestone in the development journey. We didn’t think there was a better time to organize a Beta test than Halloween!

The Beta test introduced a whole host of new content, including exciting new features we’d been working on for quite some time, and were very happy to unveil for the community to check out. Here are some of them: 

✨Features: Matchmaking, progression, cosmetic overhaul, prop layout variations, new voice chat system

✨Map: Graveyard

✨Weapons: Flamethrower, Riot Shield

✨Gadget: Medic Kit

✨Hunter Perks: Overkill, Gadgeteer

In addition to the Beta test at the end of the month, the team and some partners worked super intensely to get the matchmaking feature to a testable level. It was a complicated process but we’re so happy that we were able to test it on Halloween with you all (even with a couple of hiccups)! We’ve kept on working on it, and believe it can only get better from here on out! 

Before the test, we also took a few sprints to be able to deliver cool new features like prop layout variations and progression unlocks.

The prop layout variations really helped change up gameplay with each match and we were pretty pleased with the result.

Progression certainly received a lot of feedback and has been internally discussed and worked on much since October. Stay tuned for more information on that.

Our brand new cinematic teaser trailer for MGH was published in announcement for this beta - if you haven’t seen it yet - check it out here! 

How did you like the new Graveyard hero prop, Gargoyle? We must say it’s become one of the team favorites since the last test, and we can’t wait to see what kinds of mischief you get up to when we play next time! 😉

NOVEMBER

In November, we took a few deep breaths after the conclusion of our first beta test.

Reviewing all the bug reports and feedback from the beta was our biggest priority, and creating a plan of attack on how best to action these points.

Many bugs were fixed, maps were polished, and feedback implemented. Unfortunately, we’re not ready to release detailed information quite yet, but you should definitely keep an eye on this space in the coming year!


DECEMBER


There’s so much new stuff that the team has been working on during the last couple of months, and we’re really itching to show you what’s to come. For now, I have to hold my tongue, though, and keep a few secrets a bit longer! We can’t wait to see you in the new year, we have a feeling it’s going to be a pretty good year for MGH.

On behalf of the entire MGH team, I want to thank you all for the support throughout this wild and eventful year! We truly could not have done it without your excitement and passion propelling us along, or your feedback guiding us! Merry Ghostmas and Smashing New Year, Ghosts and Hunters! We’ll see you in 2022!

-Tinny
Community Manager

DEV UPDATE: ALPHA LEARNINGS VOL. 2

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Hey Ghosts and Hunters,

We’re back with another helping of interesting stats from our latest alpha! This time, we’re diving deeper into more specifics on win rate and match outcomes. If you didn’t get a chance to check out the latest alpha, be sure to follow along on Discord and Twitter for an opportunity to get in on our next testing rounds!

HUNTERS

Let’s look a little deeper at the Hunter win conditions, and how often they occurred. There are 3 ways Hunters can win a match: destroying all Ghosts before Midnight, destroying all Ghosts after Midnight, and escaping after Midnight has run its course.

Hunter win breakdown.png

Hunter Win Conditions

As you might expect, most Hunter victories occurred before Midnight. This is when the Ghosts are weak and try to hide. During our latest alpha test, 74.8% of all Hunter victories were this type. 

After Midnight strikes, things get a little bit trickier for the Hunters - the Ghost’s onslaught can be brutal. The data points to 23% of all Hunter victories occurring via destroying all Ghosts AFTER midnight, which is a little bit higher than anticipated. It should be a pretty rare occurrence to successfully pull that off, with great teamwork and coordination. As we mentioned in our last blog, C4s/traps/grenade camping strategies ended up being a bit too powerful overall, as well as the instant generator heal every 5 seconds. We think in the next test we’ll find a better balance there.


Lastly, Hunters could also win by just surviving the Midnight duration. This was the rarest victory during this test - coming in at 2.2% of all Hunter victories. Even with various Coldblooded and Grappling Hook strategies, it became more consistent to just fight the Ghosts after Midnight than running away. We’ll be looking into this as we continue to balance and tweak the game to find a good medium.


GHOSTS 

Ghosts have two win condition types: taking out all Hunters before Midnight, or after Midnight.  As you might expect, destroying the Hunters after Midnight is much more common, as that is their attack phase. About 84% of all Ghost victories turned out that way during the last test.

Ghost Win Breakdown.png

Ghost Win Conditions

Aggressive Ghost play pre-Midnight is possible but can be tricky to pull off. This occurred in about 16% of Ghost victories. It can be punished quite quickly by coordinated Hunter play, and recovered from with timely defibrillators. However, if Ghosts can catch a Hunter out alone by themselves, or the Ghosts wombo combo their abilities together, it makes for a pretty fun and exciting strategy. Lead Developer Kite’s tip: Comboing Death Grip + Poltergeist + Corruption + Miasma coordinated in one room makes for a bit of a meat grinder!


MAPSSACRE

Throughout the alpha weekend, we saw a pretty balanced play rate of each map, which was encouraging to see. Ghost Ship was our most played map at 17.4% of all matches played - which makes sense, it has a very strong theme and was featured in our alpha teaser clip.

Map Breakdown.png

Map Play Rates


The rest were fairly evenly split - even School, our other new map, that was mistakenly not included in the quick play rotation on the first day of the alpha.

It seems that we’ve got a fairly solid roster of maps so far - we will continue to incorporate feedback on each map as we continue, and try to make them all equally interesting and balanced going forward. I heard a little birdie mention to me that Factory might be getting another layout/polish pass, but you didn’t hear it from me.

Ghost Ship

According to the data, Ghost Ship was definitely a bit Hunter favored. Hunters took home the win 59.4% of the time on Ghost Ship. The community feedback was fairly clear on this front - too wide open, not enough smaller props, not enough clear good hiding spots. We’re working on this internally. 

Ghost Ship Match Outcome.png

Ghost Ship Match Outcome

We, of course, want maps to have different identities and strategies, but we want to ensure the balance is within reason, and we’ve got some ideas to get there. For starters, we’re thinking of breaking up the line of sight a bit more on the beach and tweaking the cave to be a better place to hide. Let us know what you think on Discord - what does Ghost Ship need in your opinion?

School

On the other side of the spectrum, the School map was certainly more Ghost favored. 56.4% of matches in the School resulted in Ghost victories. As the community feedback noted, we’ve got a lot of prop clutter in various areas, and some very tight choke points that favor Ghost escapes and abilities. 

School Match Outcome.png

School Match Outcome

We think this adds some cool unique flavor to the map, but we’re thinking of making some adjustments to prop counts and layouts to make it a little closer to that coveted 50/50 ratio. Let us know on Discord your thoughts on this map, of course!

PRECISION CHANGES

Overall, we want to start with relatively small modifications here to even things up a bit without doing anything too drastic that might radically alter the levels. 

We feel like we’re already relatively close, but as they say, the last 10% can take quite some time. We’ll get there, and stay tuned for more updates on that front!

MORE JUICY DATA COMING SOON!

That’s all the analysis we have for you this week! We’ll continue digging through the data and have another blog post for all you curious folks in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back soon.
Let us know if you enjoy this kind of dev blog or if you’d rather see other types of content. We think it’s interesting to dig into data like this and give context and start a discussion, but definitely let us know your thoughts. We appreciate it!

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!

Tinny 👻

Community Manager

DEV UPDATE: ALPHA LEARNINGS, VOL. 1

Greetings, Ghosts and Howdy, Hunters!

With MGH’s latest alpha weekend in the books, we’ve started digging into all sorts of statistics and other data to get a sense of how things went. We’ve also been sorting through all the great player feedback we received in places like our Discord and Twitter.

First off, we want to thank everyone for playing and sharing their thoughts. This has been incredibly helpful for the team to identify the game’s biggest priorities going forward. Thanks for helping us make MGH as good as it can be!

A quick aside - we heard the calls for a proper matchmaking system loud and clear during this test. It became very clear that experienced players were grouping up and making the new player experience frustrating. We are looking into potential solutions and will keep everyone posted.

This week, we thought it would be interesting to deep dive into some interesting stats and data from the most recent test. In the coming weeks we will continue to dig into more data, so keep an eye out for that!

GHOSTS VS. HUNTERS

Let’s start with the biggest stat: overall win-rate between our two teams, Ghosts and Hunters! Hunters definitely had the edge this time around, taking home the W in about 53% of matches all weekend long. We’ve already got a pretty good idea of why that is, and what we will look into changing to get closer to that elusive 50/50 split.

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Ghosts vs. Hunters

A common strategy we noticed was for Hunters to camp around the generator after Midnight, utilizing traps and C4 to annihilate the red Ghosts. This allowed the Hunters to utilize the generator for an instant heal, making it very frustrating for the Ghosts to confirm any kills during their period of revenge.

Ghosts essentially needed to one-shot Hunters quickly or they didn’t really stand a chance at breaking that healing cycle if the Hunters were coordinated at all. On the Saturday night patch, as a stop-gap measure we increased the generator cooldown from 5 seconds to 10 seconds. But we recognize this is not a solid long term fix, as a longer cooldown makes changing your loadout feel very clunky if a wrong selection was made.

As for a longer term fix, we are investigating a number of options. Our current thinking is to decouple healing from the generator change loadout functionality. More details to come on that front, but please let us know in our Discord or other channels your thoughts on this topic!

C4 and grenade spam was a fairly common strategy, as well. C4 felt very low-risk to just spam it at your feet and hope for the best. As of our Saturday night patch, we added self-damage to C4 in an attempt to add some risk and strategy to the use of the gadget. We also reduced the maximum amount of C4 to 3, down from 6 on the Friday patch (which was a little absurd). We will see if these changes are enough, or if we need additional tweaking.

Grenades seemed less of a problem since the large timer before it detonates, but we are looking at ways to prevent the endless spam of them near the Generator, as that feels a bit unfair of course.

We will keep trying things out internally and will keep everyone posted. As always, let us know your thoughts on our official channels!

YOUR WEAPON OF CHOICE WAS…

You’re probably all dying (haha, 👻) to find out which weapons were community favorites, right? Or perhaps you already know, because approximately 22% of all of you Hunters selected Salt Shotgun as your weapon of choice. The second favorite was the other new weapon, Frostbite, at 20%. We’re hyped to see you testing out the new weapons! Shotguns and SMGs are FPS favorites, so we’re not too surprised about these results seeing as they’re both basically a means to the same end: deal damage quickly (either via one big, strong boom, or a bunch of little ones).

Hunter-weapon-breakdown-20210827.png

Hunter Weapon Breakdown

We heard the common feedback that Salt Shotgun’s damage falloff is unclear and perhaps too harsh - doing either high damage or very little at all. We are digging into this and would like to find a nice balance going forward.

Frostbite was thought to be a bit overpowered on our Friday patch - a little too easy to freeze props. We made a slight tweak on the Friday night patch to both the damage and the freeze speed, and that seemed to make it feel more reasonable.

AND THE FAVORITE ABILITY GOES TO...

Ghost abilities are very dependent on your playstyle and we didn’t have as clear favorites as the Hunter weapons. The reworked Poltergeist ability was a slight favorite, with almost 15% of Ghosts using this ability. Corruptor and Phantom were closely behind Poltergeist nearing 13% each.

Ghost-ability-breakdown-20210827.png

Ghost Ability Breakdown

Poltergeist being redesigned as a floating haunted object trap seemed to resonate with many players, especially with its combo potential with the Corruptor ability. Flying exploding furniture can be very effective!

Overall, it’s nice to see that there is enough balance among our Ghost abilities to get people testing out a bit of everything. We will continue to monitor these and make some changes (such as the Death Grip + Ghostly Focus combo being a little bit absurd), but overall we are pleased at the state of things here.

That’s it for this week - thanks for reading! Next week we will continue digging into interesting stats and data points. Don’t miss it!

Once more, we humbly thank you for joining our latest alpha test and sending great feedback and bug reports. We truly appreciate it!

Until next week, Ghosts & Ghost Hunters!


Tinny

Community Manager