At Haunted Planet, we’re working on something new, but unlike Nintendo, we’re not going to keep it secret. For years, we’ve been making location-based augmented reality games of the mystery variety — adventure games set in the real world. Recently, however, we’ve been turning our game engine into a user-generated content platform. Due to launch later this year, the Haunted Planet platform lets people make their own games that use the augmented-reality features and locative game mechanics from our games to create their own mysteries and tell their own stories.

Haunted Planet is a smartphone gaming platform designed for mystery adventure games that are location-based and use augmented reality. Games running on our platform cast players as paranormal investigators who do what ghosthunters do: find ghosts and gather evidence for their existence in the form of photos and audio recordings. As opposed to other ghost-themed location-based games, we don’t have a territorial or chase mechanic. As a player, you do “hunt” the ghosts, but you don’t chase them around. Rather, you solve mysteries that often involve malicious paranormal entities.

In my last post, I discussed the location-based augmented-reality game Bram Stoker’s Vampires. Players of our games take on the roles of paranormal investigators, i.e., detectives who solve paranormal mysteries. During play, a player investigates one encounter at a time. Completing one encounter unlocks one or more in the chain. Our engine allows the encounters to be linked in a sophisticated fashion. A case typically takes 45-90 minutes to solve and should offer some degree of closure at the end. The resulting experiences can be non-linear and personalized, such that different players playing together will get different experiences, which also improves replay value.