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Updates: City Map | Ghost Hunters | Ironman | Music | Livestream Show | Day and night | Funding complete | Cities & Graphics | T-shirts | Live Ghost Hunting | 10 additional items

Let's be honest - a ghost in your house can be a real pest. For centuries we have accepted hauntings as unexplained phenomena which we can do little to stop. Side affects of living in a haunted home can include sleepless nights, headaches, smog everywhere and in some cases even physical damage in the house.

Enough is enough, with your help we intend to put an end to these paranormal pests. Build, manage and develop your own team of talented ghost hunters.

With the income from your team's work you can equip them with some amazing gadgets, but manage your budget with care not everything is as useful as it may appear. Hunt your customer's ghosts down - property damage should be kept to a minimum. Take on the ghosts, follow the map, take in the lovely sites and stunning landmarks.

Be the hero of the day and save the city!

Summary

The project in a nutshell before we cover the details.

With GhostControl Inc. you'll get:

• True, challenging turn-based strategy gameplay.
• Get the FULL game in a box or as a download, depending on your pledge.
• No DRM. No "always-on" necessity.

What's In The Game?

• Loads of ghost hunting with various equipment
• Team management and strategic investment decisions
• AI driven competing teams
• A London city map with famous landmarks
• Tons of humour in text messages and game action

What is our schedule?

With tons of game assets already completed and four people full time and three people part time on the case we believe to have a beta version available exclusively for our backers in July and the game finished by end of August 2013. We target September 2013 as a really conservative shipping goal to allow for final polish and serious testing.

The game starts by building a team. Select the right guys, hand them a ghost-gun, a few traps and a sensor and purchase a car. Now all you need to do is wait for the first call and off you go. Riding through the city, it depends on you and the competing teams cars to be first at the scene of the spook.

Having arrived, you enter the building and use your sensors (or eyes) to search for the haunting ghost. Split your team up or go as a team, it's up to you. In best X-Com manner, your up to five team-members seek and entrap the troublemaker. But take care: Using nuclear powered ghost-guns in a residential building can cause lots of damage. Try to do as little harm as possible to the rooms or you'll end up paying a bill instead of earning cash.

As the game progresses more and more equipment will become available and you will encounter more challenging troublemakers. If your business ends up in bankruptcy try again and sort out your strategy!

We've worked hard to ensure the game is full of surprises, we'll make you jump, we'll make you laugh, hopefully the ghosts wont make you cry. There's plenty of content to keep you on your toes and entertain you along the way to your first million!

As with any business you'll start with some pretty basic equipment, reengineered vacuum cleaners, I mean ghost cleaners and similar. As you start to capture ghosts you'll build up pile of cash to enable you to upgrade and buy more equipment.

But be aware not all the gadgets are as useful as they look, a used-underwear trap probably wont be suitable for all types of ghost! If you purchase a 3G-Comm receiver remember to check that your traps meet the IEEE-SensoTrap standard or they wont be able to benefit from the power of the 3G-Comm receiver. As you get more and more equipment we have cool devices like Riff Raff Inc.'s 'Shrink-em Further' to help you squeeze even more ghosts and ghouls into your traps. If this all makes sense great, otherwise ignore us and enjoy learning about these great tools yourself, by backing our project.

We'll send you occasional messages with either funny stories or useful information for your strategy. They will be delivered to your ingame-smartphone (or your real smartphone: see stretch goals). We are putting a lot of energy into writing up hundreds of unique news messages - literally. The news is about spooky sightings, interesting narrations, equipment-news as well as, from time to time, completely useless nonsense. They are picked randomly and if you are lucky you will get really useful tips. Because of that large pool of messages you shouldn't see the same message twice even if you play several times.

In addition we've written some phone dialogue that mix in with the emergency calls. You may have to make some serious decisions from these conversations, but hopefully some will just make you laugh.

Product recall for all Ghost-O-Mat 3175

"Pagan Industries have just announced that the lately released ghost trap of the Ghost-O-Mat 3175 series is having issues with the power supply. There have been reports of burning power supplies due to an overload. The company says that all devices shipped between yesterday and the day before that come with a power supply of the type XB756 are in danger of malfunctioning and should be returned for repair. A known side effect is the loss of power which sets free all trapped ghosts immediately and unintentionally."

Using our custom-made genetic algorithm, GhostControl Inc. will deliver you with almost unlimited numbers of unique rooms to clean, giving you a new experience every time you play. Using thousands of individually created game-sprites, we have created a bazillion of beautiful and logical combinations of rooms and inventory, automatically regenerated each time you enter a new building.

First of all we are trying to do this campaign in sort of a presale style. So we will make sure all backers will receive the game which is great value for the money. Content is key for each game, right? So the more money we get, the more content we can afford. We want to add more objects in graphics and more original music and sound to make this game a perfect experience. Please help us do so. As you can imagine what we are asking for in this campaign covers only a fraction of the cost. So we have put a lot of our own money on the project already and we are asking additional support here.

We have built a prototype and we are confident that we are headed in the right direction. We aim to finish in August but we set the delivery to September in our pledges to set expectations. If we are early you will get the game as soon as we are done.

GhostControl Inc. is the first game created in collaboration of two German teams: Application Systems Heidelberg Software GmbH and Bumblebee.

Application Systems is originally a software developer. Founded in 1985 the company has seen the ups and downs in the business. Originally they developed and published for the Atari ST Computer series and after the death of the Atari platform the company focused primarily on Mac software development, localization and distribution. But some of the companies history includes hardware products too - like the famous "Force Feedback Underwear" or the iPhone2Mac products, see video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEAuGHS6rGY

Bumblebee, founded in 2012, is a team of freelancing professionals from the games business - and every one of them a games-loving nerd since the very beginning. They create games out of passion and for the fun of it. In 2013 they got a lot of attention with their original roleplaying game Days of Dawn.

Great music makes a cool game even better. Having the awesome guys from Sound of Games create GhostControl Inc,'s music will make an awesome game incredible. Responsible for the music of games like Days of Dawn, Pearl's Peril and Lords & Knights they have impressed us more than once with their outstanding skills. We aim to use some of the money raised in this campaign to buy additional tracks of original music from them.

ACHIEVED: £9,000! Stretch goal - TALKING HUNTERS - Reaching this, we'll be having your hunters exclaim their thoughts every now and then (recorded by voice actors in english). Examples may be: "Ectoplams is dripping from me ears!", "Guys we are being busted!", "Is that all you learned in the past 200 years?"

ACHIEVED: £10,000! Stretch goal - Ten more equipment items! This may be traps, sensors or actual weapons. We'll need to see in the design process what's best to keep the balance. This includes all graphics, extra sound effects and the in game wiring, balancing and testing. The game is quite complex, so we can't just add stuff.

ACHIEVED: £11,000! Stretch goal - Ironman-mode as discussed in the comments section This will unlock the Ironman-mode. Without that, you'll be having three savegame-slots plus an autosave-function that is saving every now and then into an autosave-slot. The ironman-mode would reduce the overall savegame-slots to one which will also be overwritten with the autosave. This one goes out to the tough guys out there.

£12,000! Stretch goal - CHOPPER & GHOSTS - With this goal reached, we will be adding a helicopter to the game and three additional ghosts, offering additional strategical options, gameplay and fun.

£15,000! Stretch goal - Additional City! We will add one more city with landmarks, new missions, new city specific events and ghosts.

£20,000! Stretch goal - The APPPP! Yes, that's right an App for the game, not the game as an App! We will add an app for iOS that communicates with the game. This is really cool because you can get a sensor message from a trap used in the game appear on your iPhone and alert you to take some appropriate action.

£22 Million! Stretch goal - The Party! If we reach this goal we'll fly the first 100 backers over for a really good party.

Here are additional optional rewards. We did some research and believe that whilst the majority of Kickstarter Backers in the video games category prefer digital there are still people who like physical rewards. Therefore we decided to offer those separately.

By increasing your pledge by a specific sum you can get add-ons to build your very own bundle. So far the following Add-Ons have been introduced:

• Second electronic game for a friend - If you want to add a second non-physical game for a friend to your pledge then please add £7 to your pledge.
• Physical Edition box - Includes a second license in addition to the one you already have. Please add £20 to your pledge (worldwide shipping included)
• Printed special edition poster, signed by the Artist - please add £30 to your pledge (worldwide shipping included)
• Ghostly Pixel Art T-Shirt (we'll ask for your preferred size) - please add £40 to your pledge (worldwide shipping included)
• The London Poster: This physical edition of the pixeled City of London comes in a 23.3x33.1" / 59,4x84,1 cm sized, beautiful, high-quality print and hand-signed by Tassilo, the artist responsible for placing those 768.432 pixels. Will be sent out approximately in August 2013. Please add £25 to your pledge (worldwide shipping included)

T-shirt selection

The Ghost Hunter T-shirt - one of a kind!

All T-shirts are GOTS-certified organic-cotton fair-trade T-Shirts (size S-XXL). And we have done these before, so we can guarantee they are not the cheap type that lose all color after two times in the washing machine.

After the campaign we'll send out a survey asking you for sizes and shipping details.

What can I do to help?

• Let us know what you think: If you don't want to support the project let us know your concerns.
• Contribute your ideas: We will consider everything in our forums as content for the game. We have a concept and a general idea what the game should be like. Anything that is inline with that concept and will not cause a major delay will be seriously considered. So you can help shape the game and that is highly appreciated.
• Spread the word: Twitter us, put us on Facebook, let your friend know and recommend us where you can. Any help welcome.

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