Huntsman: The Orphanage

Project Description

Huntsman: The Orphanage a 3D first-person walkthrough of an abandoned orphanage and its rambling grounds and hedge mazes, where your only weapon is your wits and your only equipment is your mobile phone - lucky you loaded it with a torch app! Find the missing orphans trapped in other threads of time and space, re-unite them with their most treasured possessions to help them find a way back, and avoid coming face to face with... the Huntsman! 

That's right folks, no guns. Also no blood, violence or corpses. This is an experiment in just how scary an immersive experience can be when you remove gore from the game. So who is it aimed at then? Anyone who enjoys the sensations of fear and  tension that good story-telling and immersion in the plot can bring. The project is enjoying interest from a very wide demographic - all ages, genders and nationalities; this may be the gaming alternative for the thinking person as well as the gamer who wants to explore alternatives to the cliche of shooting everything in sight.

Check it out on our official site or Steam Greenlight - Coming to Steam and Amazon in PC and Mac versions:
http://www.shadowshifters.com
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92956803?

Game Description:
AS DARKNESS CONCEALS, SO LIGHT REVEALS – AND YOU MAY NOT LIKE WHAT YOU SEE... 
The human fear of the dark is innate within us all; we may conquer it to a certain degree, but never fully suppress the chill of unease it harbours. For millennia our ancestors have gathered around the flickering light of the fire, seeking succour from its warmth and the wisdom of insight offered by the multitude of visions of wild game, predators, allies, enemies and creatures with no name at all writhing within the shapes cast by the dancing flames; light has always been a portal to other dimensions, beyond these earthly realms. 
But place your faith in the light at your own peril, for just as darkness conceals, so light reveals - and in the portal between those two worlds, lives... The Huntsman. 

The Huntsman thrives in the darkness, effortlessly weaving and unravelling space and time through all the centuries, seeking the lost and the lonely, the orphaned and the bereft. Some say he came to be in our particular thread of reality in the 14th century, attracted by the misery wrought by the Black Plague of Europe and clad in the black-leather guise of a Plague Doctor... come face to face with him in the here and now at your own risk – he hunts within the half-light, the world his unsuspecting prey blindly see as safe, only to secret his victims within the realm he most adores – the blackness. 

Grimhaven Orphanage, Illinois, USA... the place where you come face to face with your past, your fears, your future - and the legendary Huntsman! Here one fateful night, way back on June 17th 1898, a dozen children disappeared... seemingly without a trace. Yet, traces do remain. 

Back in the present day, here you are - visiting the crumbling overgrown edifice of that same orphanage, urged on by your curiosity and the rising swell of cries for hard evidence that The Huntsman may actually exist. Even as you explore the abandoned buildings and investigate the truth behind the tragedy, you risk becoming a victim of The Huntsman yourself - he still stalks the paths and hallways, and his embrace is inescapable. 

Clamber over the overgrown hedges one moonlit night, tentatively step inside through the broken front doors, flick on your phone’s torch app so you can see where you're going. Shine it around the aging brick walls... the orphanage has obviously been deserted for many years, yet, something in the air is changing – there is a stirring, you can feel it. 

Exploring the crumbling rooms, casting your light over the disused pots and pans in the scullery, looking out from the dirty windows over the back yards, the rambling old memorial hedge maze and its 'hanging tree', the old chapel. In the murky back corner of what must have been the music room rests an old German piano, dusty, crooked, neglected for so long. Listen - can you hear those distant yet clear notes of music - it's altogether complex, plaintive, haunting - an eerie expression of the grief and misery of a young orphan lost in time? 

Climb the rickety stairs to the rows of cots lining the low-ceiling dormitories, a pair of iron scissors dangling above each little bed to guard the infants from the changling-maker fairies... a child's toy rolls across the floor to your feet and as you go to pick it up, your phone crackles to life - an image is trying to form on the screen... someone is trying to communicate... there are cries for help through the white noise - is that a child's face... from another time, but perhaps, the very same place? 

Could there be a deeper set of motivations, personal discoveries, twists and turns to this journey through the dank, cramped brick-walled rooms of the abandoned Grimhaven Orphanage? Will your discoveries reveal more than you bargained for, as the layers of time and space are peeled back one by one? Are there unknown links between you and the faint sounds of those lost children’s voices, their half-seen faces straining and struggling to communicate to you through the electronically-sensitive medium of your own phone, and can you save them all from another 100 years of darkness and solitude? 

It seems that parallel to your search for the truth, you must also save the soul of your own ancestor, the missing orphan Charley - or you may cease to exist yourself. Twists in time and tears in the fabric of space provide glimpses of the terrifying events of that night, and as you piece together the stories behind the disappearances and the rumours of The Huntsman, you learn of shocking connections to the haunted young Charley. 

Follow the clues, do as Charley asks you, find him, bring him back, or cease to exist yourself! 

--- 

OFFICIAL SITE: 
www.shadowshifters.com 

FACEBOOK: 
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Shadowshifters/282964538470278 

TWITTER: 
https://twitter.com/shadow_shifters 

YOUTUBE: 
http://www.youtube.com/user/ShadowShiftersGames 

--- 

About Shadowshifters: 
We're a bootstrapped indie start-up in the rainforest mountains of the Australian Hinterland. Our mission is to explore alternative ways to give you the tingles you crave!

MEET THE TEAM (so far!) 
Core Team:
DENE WARING - Director/Producer 
PAMELA WARING - Story Advisor, Character Scripting 
MACKENZIE WARING - Story Advisor, 3D Props 
TOBIAS WARING - Story Advisor, Music 

3D, Programming & Art: 
EVAN HSU - Ex 'Silent Hill' 
OLIVER COOK - Ex 'L.A. Noire' 
DALE MACKIE - Creature Design - Ex 'I, Frankenstein' 
TOM BANWELL – Creature Mask Design – ‘Ichabod, the Plague Doctor’ 
GRAEME CALLANDER – Concept Artist – Ex ‘Sanctum’, ‘Red Dwarf’, ‘House of Wax’, ‘Ghost Ship’ 
JON TILLER - Unity Dev 
WALTER PULLEN - Maze Designer Extraordinaire! 
SEB CORSON – Creepy-Toys-R-Us! 
HENRIK ASKANIUS - Architecture 
ANTHONY ADDATI - Props 

Actors: 
TOBIAS – ‘Charley’ 
CHLOE - 'Rose' 
CODY DINGFIELD - Voice 'Narrator' 
HATTERGAL - Voice 'Dorothy' 
PURITYSIN - Voice 'Hattie' 

PROJECT MENTORS 
MORGAN JAFFIT – ‘Heroes Call’, http://defiantdev.com/ 
ANTONY REED - GDAA 

---

What the media are saying about Huntsman: The Orphanage:

KOTAKU.COM: "Ooo... creepy! ...Rose, who begs you to help her find her ribbon... My guess? She's gonna eat your face. Don't find her that ribbon."   PENNY ARCADE: "...how a circus shooting “mistake” led to a horror game without violence"   VENTUREBEAT: "Life experience of gun violence motivates indie to developblood-free horror-survival game..."   IGM: "...a whole new take on the horror genre. In an attempt to move the gameplay away from the long standing tradition of being violent and full of gore, into something altogether different and even more creepy..."   DAJAY: "...may become something along the lines of Resident Evil 4 for the new generation of gamers, and truly innovate what is becoming a dying genre..."    JAYISGAMES: "The new design looks fan-freakin'-tastic, and to see the developers rally to the creative challenge instead of rolling over is really inspiring"    GAMERSYNDROME.COM: "...has a lot more substance than anything else I’ve seen... the plot about saving a young boy’s spirit is rather brilliant... branching out into the domain of true story telling."    UNREALITYMAG.COM: "It’s hard not to be impressed..."    COSYGAMING: "...features a much greater emphasis on plot and back story than any of the games I’ve mentioned... I think this could be a dark horse..."    CASUALGAMEPLAY: "...looks like it's going to be a deliciously spooky adventure. Keep your eyes peeled, and the lights on."    RIPTEN: "...a true horror tale..."

What the Greenlight voters are saying: 
"The more I see of this game’s production, the more I sincerely feel that this will redefine horror/suspense games. You're certainly setting the bar incredibly high."    "Scarier than Amnesia..."    "This could very well be the next zombie horror survival game - it could be as or even bigger than Dayz was..."    "... it's bloody freaky"    “Creepily awesome.”

Funding Purpose

CODING:
This indie game has a real back-story, over a dozen complex characters - each with their own life story to tell - and a range of free choice for the player with decisions to be made that affect the in-game experience! That all means many, many hours of coding by people smarter than me, and they need to eat (apparently it helps their concentration), and that in turn means we need to pay them a little something for their skills. We've already built a playable scene that has laid the coding foundations, and now you can help by funding the remaining tasks for the game's full release! 

ART:
We have a talented team of contributors who have game and movie credits ranging from Silent Hill and LA Noire to Sanctum and House of Wax - and one or two of them need to eat occasionally in order to produce their best work! This is our FIRST GAME, with no revenue stream from earlier releases to help fund this one - and that's where you can come in!

To help our artists and animators maintain their basic body functions while they breathe life into our game's creepy, malevolent time-and-space-warping antagonist character The Huntsman, we need YOU to chip in for pretzels while they model, rig and animate his 7-foot-tall four-legged ungodly self! 

ACTORS:
Our baker's dozen of in-game characters are actually... REAL PEOPLE! That's right, to make this game we are filming actors and integrating them into the 3D world you explore and interact with - plus, each character is voiced by a (wait for it...) voice actor! Now while that approach is different, and while it allows things to happen that we just couldn't afford to do in 3D, and it's not as expensive as modelling and animating 3D characters... it still requires some funding to make it all happen!