A Creepy Platform game like nothing you've ever seen!*

Detail through simplicity - Will look great in motion on the iphone's hi-res screen!

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Gameplay Influences

Cave Story by Pixel & Nicalis - 2004 - (PC, Mac, Wii) - Screenshot from: Indiegames.com

- Easily one of the most inspiring indie projects I've played. Freeware and dripping with its own cute style. Currently being commercially ported to both the Wii and PSP.

Has an incredibly large, loyal fanbase. Proves there's a market for retro gameplay if combined with a nice style, atmosphere and playability. Cave story doesn't really do anything new, but it's pretty much perfect, giving as much as you put into it back. It's casual friendly with tonnes of save points but also  a lot of depth and replayability.

Turrican 2 by Factor 5 - 1991 - (Amiga, Sega Megadrive, Super NES) - Screenshot from: Hall Of Light

- Run 'n' Gun exploration gameplay at its best. You could charge through the game blasting away and get a lot of satisfaction, but there was a deeper exploration element too. To do well on later levels it helped to learn the earlier one's secrets, as you'd run out of lives otherwise!

Action games like this worked at the time but modern sensibilities would consider it FAR too unforgiving. No save points!

Obviously Spooky Swamp will be full of save points to make it playable to everyone.

There have been at least 3 mobile phone (.jar) Turrican games, none of them being all that great.

Look & Feel - Looks a bit like...

The Nightmare Before Christmas Warner / Time Burton et al.	Blade Warrior Imageworks - Amiga - 1991 interesting looking game, shame it had terribly gameplay.
Trap Door - Terry Brain & Charlie Mills I loved this series as a child, it probably had an effect on my later work. :)	Invader Zim - Jhonen Vasquez/Nickleodeon The series got cancelled unfortunately. Him and Roman Dirge are the two most well known "spooky" comic creators.. Biig audience.

Also looks a bit like...
Creeping Me Out - Me - 2004 to present - Creepingmeout.com

Characters and Promotional Ideas
The player character in Spooky Swamp is intended to be quite ambiguous. The  audio-visual style of the game itself provides most of the game's identity rather than a mascot character. Saying that - you are Francis Kershaw, a teenager who gets into all sorts of trouble with undead things, aliens, talking jellies and girls.

A hidden agenda: The strong visual style of Spooky Swamp is a hook.. The game shares characters and themes from Creeping Me Out. By putting a short free game up on the Apple App Store I can also get people to look at more of my work. If I had on site advertising I could probably make some money that way!

Technical Considerations

Control Schemes
The iPhone is a strange beast in the field of portable gaming devices. With no physical buttons you're left to either use the accelerometers or multi-touch controls. For Spooky Swamp I'd use a pair of virtual controls in the corners, though it could conceivably work with gestures too.

The screen would flip if you put it the other way up too, (normal functionality for the phone)

Market Considerations
Recent articles show the Apple App Store is a very intelligent way to market indie games. Not only is the annual membership (necessary to submit titles for Apple's approval) miniscule at $99, people who've filled niches have made tidy sums with their games. Apple pass 70% of the game's price (set by the submitter) back to the developer. No server costs, instant advertising, and a community of people looking for interesting new ideas to discuss. Touch Arcade is a good example of a news site focussing on interesting ipod/iphone game news.

"Trism has made $250,000 for its developer, Steve Demeter, in just two months. A simple game, it looks to be as addictive as Tetris*, and it hits the right spot for pricing: $5. [...]  Remember, Trism is the work of one man. If the game keeps selling at this rate for a year, he will have made $1.5 million. Not bad for a lone coder." - Wired Magazine

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"The game, called Chopper, is available for download on Apple’s App Store, which launched in July. Chopper had 20,000 downloads, at US$7.99 (NZ$11.21), in the first month, says Frampton. At the moment, there are about 500 downloads a day, he says.

“I’m shell-shocked,” he says.

Third-party developers selling applications on the App Store get 70% of the sale price. That means Wellington-based Frampton is clearing nearly $4,000 a day. [...]

Frampton’s artistic background definitely comes in handy for developing games, he says. “Without my art skills it would have been difficult to build a game like Chopper,” he says. - COMPUTERWORLD

- Neither of the games mentioned above are ground breaking in any way, they just filled niches and made good use of the hardware. Especially Trism, with its ability to drop the blocks down according to gravity. Chopper doesn't really do anything clever like that. There is not a run n gun platform game on the iphone, (there are about a million driving games!) and there's nothing that looks like SSwamp on any system really, so even if it is destined to be a freebie, it's one that will hopefully get me some attention, looking good in my portfolio!

Resources

A shopping list of the tools I'll need for this game:
Myself - by choosing such a simplistic style I wouldn't need any other artists.
A Programmer.. Oh dear, I really don't fancy my chances programming in Objective C.
Prototyping: PGF by Sawblade Software (osX) (already owned)
Xcode (Free) ADC Membershop (Have it) iPhone Developer Status ($99)
Garage Band - for music I've been composing midi-like arrangments. (already owned)
Photoshop - All the graphics will be done in Photoshop (already owned.. Thankfully. Eek)

* Zombie Holiday Prologue - A retrospective.

Spooky Swamp could be considered a companion to my Mac game - Zombie Holiday: Prologue. It is an episodic, story based platform game which has more in common with Castlevania and Shadow Of The Beast than  the run and gun gameplay in Spooky Swamp. It's not very casual basically, requiring quite a lot of effort to play.

I've recently found out that the engine's creator will be paying me to include Zombie Holiday Prologue's working files with the engine itself. I'm absolutely stoked about this, it's reassuring to see other people valuing a project which had previously been a labour of love. I learned so much from ZH:Prologue that I'm looking forward to doing another game.

As an aside, Zombie Holiday's thread at the engine's forums has had 102397 page views.

The screenshots above show Zombie Holiday Prologue running on osX. ZH's graphics would be way too fiddly a graphic style for a handheld device. The Mac is an odd choice for a game of this sort too. On one hand there's a captive audience as they're deprived of a lot of good indie titles and very open to new stuff.. On the other hand making similar games for Windows offers a much bigger base of people to try it out. This is why I'm planning on making the next desktop ZH chapter for both Mac and PC.. Which will be difficult, as there's no version of the PGF engine for windows, so it'll be a complex porting process. The plus side is I'll be able to implement new features in the Windows version that aren't possible in PGF - A big problem with using such a high level script/drag and drop engine.. Namely, two player co-op.

Anyway, these screens are an important reference as Spooky Swamp will have some adapted ZH assets for the purposes of my prototype, and they have the same root style..

Prototyping a new graphical and map style

Below are test maps for the swamp, based on one of the ZHP maps but completely redone with the new considerations.. For example in ZHP much of the time your feet are below the "ground" because ive painted rocks and background things in the foregroound layer. This led to some confusion even with full colour, so monochrome things had to be much more straightforward. (you need to stant on top of the floor's upper pixels!)

This new style presents some new problems.  How do I signify something that can be walked through? How do i stop enemies from hiding inside bodies of blackness and killing you?


I decided to blanket the walk-throughable areas with holes. It might not be realistic but it looks nice. The grey is actually half opacity black, so any parallax layers i put behind will still be visible.







GAMEPLAY & Interface

So that Spooky Swamp isn't like everything else I'll discuss features I'm going to implement to make it fresh and innovative.

A Living Environment
One thing I thought would be exciting in a game like this is having the environment come to life around you. This wouldn't be possible in a normal sprite based game as it'd be way too obvious what was going to start animating. (like in cheap old cartoons!)

I could go crazy adding loads of similar but different creature's "start frames", making sure i have very similar background scenery sprites. It'll be a lot of fun. I can imagine the player panicking when a harmless section of level starts wriggling and bouncing at them!


Weapons
The primary weapon in spooky swamp is a scatter gun/shotgun type thing. It has infinite ammo and has an intentionally wide area of effect to counteract the slightly-difficult-to-judge-where-enemies-are graphics.

You'll be able to beef it up by collecting objects dropped by some of the enemies. This will just give a wider spread and more bullets per shot..

Similar to the "multiple" gun in Turrican. Or the Shotgun in The Chaos Engine (bitmap brothers 1993, Amiga)


I'm Dying!
To reduce on screen clutter I'd use a trick I've only ever seen in first person shooters.. Having the screen go red around the edges and gradually take over the view. It looks nice, is instantly understandable and is easier to keep track of than an energy bar in the corner of the screen.


High Scores
One handy thing about the iphone's wifi and constant network connection through the mobile network is the ability to send little snippets of data to a server. An arcade game with somewhat randomly placed enemies and twitchy gameplay is a perfect candidate for a database of online high-scores, offering a lot of extra replayability!

Title Screen
It would be nice to have the misty wispy layer scrolling past in the background of the title screen..

It's really nice not to have to worry about antialias. The high DPI of the iphone screen means crisp pixel graphics look great without.

Menu items have to be big enough to easily tap to select.


Piling Them In
There needs to be a lot of creatures in each of the small levels, and secret ways to cause more to spawn, allowing you to get bigger multipliers and high-scores. I'd like there to be very little time just sat around admiring the scenery, but still enough to set the scene and have atmosphere.

Music & Sound
I'd probably be lazy and use music I've previously composed for Zombie Holiday. Here are some online examples; Crypt Song / Boss Music / Graveyard / Underwater - it's not as if "real" developers don't recycle the same music, and there's only one of me. I did these in Garageband using a cute  little Edirol midi keyboard.

Progression
I'd implement a map screen that gradually grows, starting from a single swamp location in the middle. If I have time I'll draw a mockup. By clearing the levels more areas will appear, then you'll be able to choose which to go to next. They'll stay unlocked once they've been seen even once allowing you to jump right into a level if you found it fun or challenging.

Prototype & Demo - see more here.
For a very early prototype of platform motion and basic collision detection done in Processing: Click here. It took me ages even with advice and an example file to base it off.. So I decided I'd be better off using a) an engine that's designed with platform games in mind.. and b) Something I'm familiar with so I don't go crazy.

The result looks like this - the SSwamp prototyped in PGF. The animation is wonky, in the final version there would be parallax scrolling, and the creatures are way too floaty at the moment. (eg they aren't supposed to go flying away when you shoot them, oops) The ghosts are supposed to be killable too. Basically buggy as hell at the moment, but I'll carry on working on it once the brief is over, probably switching to MultiMedia Fusion and doing it for Windows as a practice project.


Hopefully I've shown how Spooky Swamp will be an exciting, viable game. I'd want to play it anyway! You can grab the prototype and source from its own section here.