Spirit Hunter 1998 is a first-person 3D dungeon crawler created in a group project for a final assignment in my third year at UC Santa Cruz. The level design and programming were completed by my teammate, while I handled character design, story, and UI assets. The player is sent into a dark dungeon to eradicate the ghosts haunting its halls, with nothing to attack the ghouls with other than their own hands. Aiming with the crosshair in the center, the player has to slap the ghosts to death until all are gone. I created all of the 2d assets in Procreate, which were all compressed on a small canvas to pixellate the artwork. To make these flat assets work in a 3D environment, we billboarded them so the sprites are always facing the player’s camera. For the hand-weapon, I took pictures of my own hand and rotoscoped them to create an idle animation and an attack animation. I then edited them with dithering and pixellation to create a bizarre look inspired by the visual style of the game Hylics. While Spirit Hunter was initially a school project, we became attached to the concept and are currently furthering its development to release it as a demo on itch.io. We chose to make a dungeon crawler game with a combination of creepy and silly aesthetics. The combination of themes and personal preferences of the creators was daunting at first because we were worried that the strange combination of 2D /3D, as well as the different visual/thematic ideas, but it ended up creating a really unique visual style, and the shaders used on top to add a VHS-esque filter made everything look consistent.