Deck of Haunts News

Hey ho! Philippe here, VFX artist (among other roles in our small team) for Deck of Haunts.
For those of you not in the know, when I write VFX, I refer to Visual Effects. ✨

I've been pumping out explosions, sparks and magic for some years now, but never in this dark grungy and almost isometric style. (You can find more about the art style here)

Real time visual effects are not only the cherry on top of everything else, but are also used to better convey gameplay elements towards the player. By combining elements from texturing, modeling, tech-art and animation, you can conjure up all sorts of interesting illusions to breathe life into the game world.

The most important part doing VFX for Deck of Haunts, is that you have to put the emphasis on the player being the house. I had to keep this in mind with every particle effect I made, since it is really easy to fall into the trap of just making everything look "magical", rather than grounded in the house.

To give you an example, this is the effect we had at the very early stages of the project, for "Shifting Hallways" AKA teleporting a human to a random room:



As you can see it has more something of a wizards finger snap & teleport, than the actual house doing something to the human.

Here is a rework of the effect. Some planks coming out of the ground and pushing the human into another room:



Of course it all needs to go fast to not put a drag on gameplay.

In our recently released "Release Date Trailer" you can see some of the effects that I loved making, for instance the dissolving of a card when it gets banished or the lightning storm towards the end of the video:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Being a VFX artist, a lot of times that also means optimizing the game.

Here you can see the before and after of a specific ground material. The less red, the better the performance. Profit!



There are a ton more of effects I'd like to share with you, but... You'll have to play the game to find out what they all are, not spoiling any more ;).

If you've made it until here, well done!
Thank you for reading and I hope to see all your cool house builds on socials or on this hub, once the game is out 🖖

PS: Make sure to tell your friends to wishlist Deck of Haunts, it helps a ton! 🔔

Hey!

Some friends of ours released their game, BLOOD BAR TYCOON, this February 2025! And guess what: it’s a super cool, darkly humorous tycoon game where you abduct humans to feed vampires! If you're into the DECK OF HAUNTS vibe, there's a good chance you'll love this too!

They're an indie team, just like us, so be kind and show them some support. The game is currently on sale! Go check it out!

Have a great day!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2776780/Blood_Bar_Tycoon/

We are excited to announce that Deck of Haunts will launch on May 7, 2025!

Deck of Haunts is a sinister deckbuilding roguelike where players take on the role of a malevolent haunted house. In this eerie title, players build their mansion, lure unsuspecting humans into it, and terrify them into madness, or kill them, using a variety of haunting cards.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]A House of Horrors Await[/h3]

After refining its mechanics through demos and player feedback, Deck of Haunts is ready to unleash its frights for the full release, which includes a host of new horrors, including an expansive arsenal of haunt cards, a variety of mansion rooms to build with, human traits to exploit, and formidable new bosses.

[h2]Features in the Full Version[/h2]

A Slew of Cards to Haunt With: A vast array of haunts at your disposal, from damage-dealing scares to tension-building tricks and cunning traps.

Expansive Room Types to Build Your Mansion With: Design a nightmare maze with basic rooms like kitchens and bell towers, plus special chambers like the Phobia Room, Mechanical Room, and Sacrifice Room, each affecting gameplay in different ways.

The Witch: Roaming the mansion, she inflicts terror on humans once she is summoned from the bell tower.

Bosses Enter the Building: The Stonemasons return, but they won’t be alone. Three additional fearsome human adversaries will challenge your haunted rule.

Human Traits and Items: Pesky humans bring more variety than ever, with traits like Pathfinder, Bleeder, and Frail, alongside new items like Pistols, Compasses, and Holy Books that alter their behavior in your mansion.

Meta-Progression for Multiple Runs: Unlock new haunt cards, rooms, and human traits as you grow in power.

Endless Mode: Unlockable after certain conditions are met, this mode lets you test your haunting prowess in an infinite nightmare.

Reactions & Naming Visitors: Listen to their terrified quips as they navigate your cursed domain, and rename them for an extra bit of fun!

40 Steam Achievements: Prove yourself as the ultimate haunted house master with a variety of challenges.

Prepare to haunt your victims with sinister strategies while growing your deck of cards and the mansion itself, ensuring every run is a different nightmare for those who dare to enter.

Hello there! I am Willem, a 3D Artist for Deck of Haunts, but alongside that, with our limited capacity, I have had the opportunity to delve deeper and work on something that has interested me for a while, Sound Design.
It was a challenge but also a fun experience to learn while working on the Sound Effects in Deck of Haunts, so let's take a deeper dive into the process of making these creepy and twisted sounds you will hear in our Haunted Mansion.

The process

Starting off with no experience, I relied heavily on library sound effects. I slowly started building a library from free sfx (Sound Effects) I gathered online which I usually mixed together with some instrument plugins in Reaper and added sound effects on top of, such as equalizers, delays, reverbs, and so on.

However, relying only on library sfx has its limitations. As the experience grew, so did my confidence in recording my own sounds.
I started using props such as deck cards to create the sfx for the hover, selecting, and playing of the cards in game. I even started using my own voice. At the beginning it was a real challenge to not cringe when I started doing this, but using your own voice gives you more freedom.
I used it to add some grunting noises to the human when they die, take damage, or when you turn them completely insane.

However, my favorite recordings are the whispers of the house when playing your cards to torture or scare the humans inside. These whispers need to feel mysterious, spooky and scary. To achieve this, I recorded myself whispering some sentences in Latin or some gibberish. Usually I would record the same sentence a few times with different tone, speed, and loudness and throw these together in Reaper. There I overlap them, reverse some, and to make them all sound a bit more spooky, I add some pitch variation, some reverb, and delays on them. It's a fun process when you get the hang of it.

Preventing chaos

Working on the sound effects from a top down perspective, with an overview of the entire playing field, was quite the challenge. We have the awesome music tracks created by Aleks, the atmospheric background loops both indoors and outdoors, you have all the different rooms, the humans, and on top of that, you're playing cards, these also cast effects and VFX and so on... There is a lot going on, and that requires some balancing to prevent chaos.

The main mechanics that helped me to create this hierarchy of sounds are the zoom and hover mechanic. The zoom is used to distinguish most of the ambient sounds inside of the house from the ambient sounds outside of the house. There are however too many rooms inside the house to play all of them at once, so for this we used the hover mechanic. Each special room has their own unique ambient loop in order to strengthen their identity that can be heard when you hover over these rooms

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Back to work!

Now it’s time for me to return to the microphone and get creative with some newspapers and magazines, making some sounds for a fun new feature we’re introducing. This will add to the story surrounding the arrival of several bosses in the game.
I hope you will enjoy my whispers in your ears while playing Deck of Haunts! I for sure look forward to see the game out there for you all to play.
If you want to stay in the loop with the most recent updates, or talk to me or one of the fellow developers, come join our discord server:
https://discord.gg/s4Qu6pg7D7

Thank you for reading and until next time!

Fixed Bugs

• Fixed language setting dropdown displaying English instead of current language.
  
• Fixed tutorial toggle resetting when resetting the save file.
  

Changes

• Nerfed pathfinders.
  
• Chinese and Dutch Localization update.