One Game A Month

Inspiration hit me for a new game idea. This one is beautifully small, simple and effective, and will only take about a week to make. This makes it a perfect candidate for @McFunkypants one game a month challenge! While I could use free art and free music, the game would definitely be better if an artist and musician worked with me on it. So I figured, what better way to get to know some new people than working on a short, interesting project? So I am currently looking for one artist and one musician to help me out - if we enjoy working together, then we could consider working together on future projects after this. Production on the game will not start until January, but I'm looking for team members now so I can get to know you before we start! Interested? Below I have some details about the game:

The game is a first person "horror" game. I put horror in quotes as it is more eerie than in your face scary, there are no enemies, and nothing jumps out at you, the scary part is more subtle than that. While the game is first person and 3D (and will be made in stage3D), no 3D modeling is required for this project, as it will be generated from maze-like walls and floors similar to older raycasting games (lands of lore, wolfenstein, etc). The art needed is for wall, ceiling and floor tile textures.

The premise of the game is that the player falls down a pit into a dungeon/basement, and they need to find an exit. The game focuses mainly on exploration, and has one interesting mechanic that I wont spoil publicly. This mechanic complements the exploration core nicely, and creates the eerieness of the game (along with the art and music, of course). There are also pits in the main game that drop the player to a lower level of the dungeon.

The art requirements are drawing 128x128 pixel wall (including doors), floor (including pits) and ceiling (including pits from above) tiles. You can certainly base them off of free textures and modify them or make them from scratch. The tiles will allow gif-style transparency, meaning you don't have an alpha channel, but you can have holes in the walls (or bars which you can see through the gaps). The art style will be up to you, but the general idea is that they get creepier as the player gets deeper into the dungeon. This is only a week project, but variations on the walls will be nice to break up the monotony, any artists should be confident that they could draw a few tiles with many modifications every day.

For the composer, the same general idea is true - we need the music to get creepier the deeper the player gets. This can be done with several songs, or one song with an overlay track that I can fade the volume in to increase the "eeriness." The music style will be up to you, as long as it fits the general theme "eerie." If you can do sound effects (doors opening, falling through pits), that's a bonus, if not, we can get sound effects free online or I could ask one of my Fancy Fish Games team-members.

The goal of this game is mainly for fun and the experience, as well as getting a chance to work together and implement a pretty cool idea (you still don't know the simple mechanic, you'll have to trust me on this!) If you're interested or have questions, reply with a comment or send me an email: davidmaletz at gmail.com!