Game a Week 2: Spookum

This week’s game is Spookum, a game in which you play a ghost who has to chase kids out of his haunted house before they’re murdered by an evil Teddy Bear.

Spookum started out as a top down Maze Chase game, the most famous of which is Pac-Man. I didn’t want to make a dot-eating game, so I brainstormed a few ideas of other things you might do in a top down maze - collect items, eliminate enemies, run out the clock. I settled on a game where you - a ghost - need to chase away all the kids before time runs out.

That’s not exactly the game I ended up with, and that’s largely a factor of Godot’s pathfinding. I spent a whole day trying to figure out its Navigation2D code - and if you only give yourself a week, a day is a lot of your development time. I wasn’t able to get my AI code to the point where it would make sharp turns and stop trying to clip through corners, so I went from a tightly packed graveyard maze concept to something more open - a haunted house.

Getting the basic mechanics down was quick after that - your ghost could float around, scare the kids, and they’d run out of the map. While experimenting with the player’s acceleration and friction I hit on numbers that gave the player a very drifty-floaty movement, so because I had moved away from a tight maze decided that the player should be able to float through walls, while the kids had to go around physical objects.

That was this game’s happy accident.

Adding the enemy - Mr. Longshanks - to the game was something I’d planned from the beginning as an “if I have time” enhancement, and I’m glad I had time. I don’t think the game would be as engaging if you were simply trying to scare away the maximum number of kids in the time allotted. Generally speaking I give myself a day to brainstorm ideas, two days to implement the core mechanics, two days to create the sprites, sound, and levels, and a day for polish, but this week was tight because of an unexpected family emergency and some narrative consulting work.

I really think Longshanks - a possessed teddy-bear that murders the kids if it catches them - drives the game, and made the object to scare off more kids than Longshanks can murder.

The art this time was relatively easy; as placeholders during development I re-used some spritesheets from the Platform game I did last week. The ghost I simply added a new ‘Boo’ animation, and the kids ended up as variants of the 8x8 player sprite. The walls and floor tiles I made from scratch, along with the sprites of the various objects in the mansion. I also created the music and sound effects using the online tools ChipTone and BeepBox.

As always I consider this project complete, but with sufficient interest I could come back and flesh it out a little more. There isn’t much I’d do to improve Spookum - I’d sharpen up the furniture sprites so they didn’t look so flat, add some more objects to fill out the house, and tweak Longshank’s AI and the game’s overall difficulty curve a bit. I think that even when everyone’s faster the idea that all it takes to win is to scare off more kids than you save is a little easy, so I think I’d cap the kids you can lose at 3 or 5. I might also implement a second evil spirit - The Lady - who has a different hunting and target-seeking pattern.

But for now, I’m happy with Spookum as it is, and looking forward to next week’s project. You can play Spookum in your browser, and if you like what I’m doing you can support the development of these games at http://www.patreon.com/mcoorlim