Gosutoraito

Gosutoraito, or "Ghost Light," is a light reflection puzzle game where a fallen samurai must navigate the trials of a mysterious shrine to finally put his soul to rest. Enter the shrine and dive deeper into the depths of a stony purgatory by guiding a beam of light from floor to floor with mirrors and prisms. What awaits the deceased samurai at the very bottom of the game? Find out by playing!

Mechanics Overview

Solve all puzzles to get to the final floor and send the samurai off to the afterlife. Guide the light downwards from one floor to the next to unlock the door to the next level.

 Mirrors

• Break mirrors with a broken sword (right click) to collect mirror shards
• Pick up and place mirror shards with left click

Pedestals

• Pedestals can accept a mirror shard or a prism on them (left click)
• Edit the rotation of an object on a pedestal with E. Press E again to confirm your edits or Q to cancel them.
• Pedestals that are created from ghosts are light enough to be moved by a broken sword (hold right click)

Ghosts

• Adult ghosts create movable pedestals when killed with a beam of light
• Children ghosts create prisms instead
• The broken sword (hold right click) can be used to reflect light at the ghosts

Prisms

• Prisms split the light when placed on a pedestal (left click)
• Switch between placing mirrors and prisms with the mouse scroll wheel

Switches

• Crystal switches remove walls when activated
• Hit a crystal switch with a beam of light to activate it

Assets

One of the most rewarding parts of this project was creating so many 3D assets ourselves from scratch. This was one of the first major projects for each of the developers, and through the creation of all our own models, we were able to learn not only about the technical side of game development, but also the game art side as well. We did use some pre-made assets to accelerate the development of the game; we used the Magic Mirror asset for (some) large mirrors, and the Aura 2 asset for volumetric lighting. 

Process Log

This game was created as a final project for the class ATLAS 4140 - Game Development at CU Boulder, and so the game comes along with a process log which can be found on our GitHub repository for this project.