Ghost Hospital
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
Ghost Hospital is a game about anxiety, depression, despair, mental rock bottoms, and, of course, ghosts. You play as Robin, a twelve-year-old girl who has an anxiety disorder and is very much alive in this hospital meant for beings that are not alive. Frankly, her anxiety was already bad enoughbeforeshe landed in a hospital full of dead people, the still-shambling shells of ancient ghosts who try to take her down for a sweet taste of life, and the hospital directors hellbent on keeping her contained, and more importantly, away from the reason she's REALLY there.
Thankfully, you have your new friends Jay and Sarcastic Ghost- Jay is a ghost about your age, and still a very new arrival to the hospital, and Sarcastic Ghost…well, he's an amorphous blob of a ghost, who talks a lot despite not having a mouth.
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Reccomendation from Rock Paper Shotgun
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Lead Game, art, and story director: Lev Lefton
Assistant Developers: Tredlocity, C / Ghoultreats
Assistant writer: Rosemary Arnold
Balancing and Combat Design: Sam H.
Assistant concept artist: Maggie K.
Music: Kendall Mcintosh, CMDonovann
Other music: TeknoAXE, Sim Gretina, Aaron Spencer
RPG Maker Resources: Yanfly, Victor, Freepik, Himeworks, Galv, Fallen Angel Olivia
Troubleshooting/QA: Sam Casuto, Ben Casuto, Retro.DLL, Sam H., Jay H.
Patrons: Jason H., Harmless Games, Kari Gallagher, Ariala2b, D'Aundre, Draayder
Special thanks: Rob Kvacek, zephror, Nitro Rad
| Status | In development |
| Platforms | Windows,macOS,Linux |
| Rating | Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars (144 total ratings) |
| Author | SpitBlaze |
| Genre | Role Playing,Adventure |
| Tags | 2D,8-Bit,anxiety,Ghosts,Mental Health,Pixel Art,RPG Maker,Spooky,Turn-based |
| Average session | A few hours |
| Languages | English |
| Inputs | Keyboard,Xbox controller,Gamepad (any) |
| Accessibility | Subtitles,Configurable controls |
| Links | Blog |
Download
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Development log
Comments
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just played the first part on twitch https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1500062526 it was a lot of fun. really hope to get a full version
Hi there, chances are you have the game saved somewhere your computer only has read permission- you'll want to put it in the documents folder, on your desktop, or somewhere else your computer should be able to have write permission. As this seems to be a problem with RPG Maker MV in general, I don't currently have a better solution than that, but I'm working on finding one. Sorry!
Intriguing story and well suited aesthetics so far. I'm especially impressed with how you've integrated the narrative struggles with anxiety into combat. My only minor complaint is the walk speed in the later portion of the demo. It just feels like sludge rather than cautious exploration. That being said I'm very much looking forward to the pediatric ward update
As someone who suffers from anxiety, I admit that I was afraid of how it would be represented in the game but oh boy just playing the demo I felt there would be no problem in that part, the final scene of the demo made my heart race, in a horror game it doesn't always have to be with Jump Scarys and other classic formulas, simply the protagonist's thoughts, especially talking directly to the player is enough to disturb. I personally loved the game thanks for this work of art dealing with such a serious topic for me for thousands of other people, good work. (And forgiveness for my English is not my first language so it is pretty shit)
Thank you! I'm glad my goal of portraying how anxiety feels instead of just turning mental illness into yet another bugaboo has been so effective, I know that not everyone experiences this the same way but the overwhelming response from other sufferers of anxiety has been very encouraging! Thank you so much for your input, and I hope you'll feel just as satisfied with the final project!
--FIX FOR LINUX USERS--
As some may have noticed, the linux download for the game is broken. Luckily, I have devised a method to port the game to linux manually.
STEP 1: Download the windows version (0.1.8.5 at the time of writing, non demo)
STEP 2: Download the nw.js SDK (https://nwjs.io/downloads/ at stable)
STEP 3: unpack the nw.js SDK zip
STEP 4: put the nw.js files inside the Ghost Hospital folder. If you did it right, it should ask if you want to merge the two locales folders. Say yes and overwrite any files when prompted.
STEP 5: the file at www/js/plugins/smooth.js has windows newlines and a // comment. This means that when a linux program tries reading it, it parses the whole thing as one line. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem for Javascript, but in this case, the // causes the entirity of the rest of the script to be commented out, resulting in catastrophic failure.
To fix this, remove the
//console.log("disabling smoothing for "+path);
line from the file.
STEP 6: The font file names are broken. The game looks for the fonts using the wrong filenames and fails to load as a result. To fix this, rename
8bitOperatorPlus-Regular.ttf to 8bitoperatorplus-regular.ttf
and
apple_kid.ttf to apple_kid.ttf.ttf
STEP 7: Run the game by executing the file named "nw" inside the game's directory. If you did everything right, the game should work without any further problems. Enjoy!
So i noticed some stuff as a linux user:
-The linux download for the 1.8.5 version is broken. The .zip file is smaller in comparison (131MB compared to 390) and it wont unzip on anything. I ran zipinfo on it, which reported that the end-of-central-directory signature seemed to be missing. This indicates that the file was probably only uploaded halfway through.
-The linux demo zip is also broken, but in a different way. I installed the font file like the readme told me to, but to no avail: I got a Failed to load GameFont error.
Luckily, i was able to find a remedy that could potentially eliminate the requirement to install the font file to begin with:
- Go into the game folder.
- Navigate to www/fonts
- Find the file named 8BitOperatorPlus-Regular.ttf
- Rename it to 8bitoperatorplus-regular.ttf (without the capital letters)
- Restart the game if it's open
I came up with this workaround as i was fiddling around with the game files trying to fix the problem and saw that the gamefont.css file in the www/fonts folder contained the line:
src: url("8bitoperatorplus-regular.ttf");
and that the font file's name didn't match the name in that string.
I don't know if the comments section is the right place for a bug report but i'll post it here regardless so others can see the workaround.
By the way, I don't seem to be able to get the non demo versions to work on anything. So far, I've tried Windows 10 and 7 on Virtualbox with Guest additions (256MB GPU memory + Direct3d + 3d acceleration enabled on host - probably not causing the issue though). I haven't tried playing it on a real, bare metal windows install since I don't have access to one at the moment. I can upload any log files you want me to, if you point me toward their location. This is not a post directed at the developer only, this is directed at anyone who has or may have insight on this matter. I really liked what I saw in the demo and am willing to go through the hassle of debugging it myself if it means I get to play it to its end.
EDIT: For those curious about the exact details of the crash: It either happens when I press Enter on New Game or after the initial "ugh" "nnngh" "....". The game window just closes afterwards. The worst part is, I don't think there is a way to run it from the terminal to get the output like you can with linux, so we don't even get to see which part of the code it crashes in or what kind of errors it spews out right before dying. I'll try booting it on a physical windows machine, see if that works.
Do you know any RPG Maker RV game I could test this with? Also, I've tested it on a physical windows 7 install and it worked flawlessly. I think Virtualbox and Wine are the problem here (for some reason). I'll try virtualbox without any acceleration, see if that helps. Also, whenever the app crashes with wine, the standard "report problems" window shows up but telling it to "show more details" causes many lines of
0074:fixme:dbghelp:elf_search_auxv can't find symbol in module
to show up and then the window closes and I get no feedback. So I don't even get to read the crash report.
Thank you for responding to my comment.
EDIT: I've tried to repackage the game with nw.js by removing everything except the www folder and the package.json file then unpacking the nw.js zip on the game. I've tried both the SDK and the normal release but both of them got stuck in the Now Loading screen. This happened on a bare metal linux mint install.
EDIT 2: I have tested another RPG Maker NW application (Verdant Village) and it seemed to be working well, although i *did* use their native linux version. I'll try downloading their windows version and try it with wine to see if the problem is Wine or just the game.
EDIT 3: I have made some interesting observations. First of all, running Verdant Village with wine did not work, meaning wine and RPGMaker RT *are* a problematic combination. However, when I used the repackaging technique (remove everything except the package file, add nw.js files in), their game worked flawlessly. I will now try just unpacking the nw.js SDK runtime inside the windows distribution of Ghost Hospital to see if the problem was me removing one too many files.
PS: Sorry for spamming the thread so hard, just needed to give you (and the community) every bit of information I could.
FINAL EDIT: I have found every problem inside the game that's preventing it from booting. I will post it on a separate thread so other users can see it. If you're curious: I debugged the program by opening the index.html in firefox. (I did have to set the privacy.file_unique_origin flag in about.config to false to stop the cross origin request warnings) I then looked at the errors and debugged from there.
