"The Textbook Spirits" sample art and concept

 Sample art and snippets from an achingly naive design document for an unfinished Flash game, largely cooked up during college days (as if that weren't obvious from the setting). I had always wanted to make a Zelda clone with a horror angle, and at the time still felt that 16-bit style was essential to an indie game's success. It's a shame, as later experiments with particle effects would show me just how much simpler and more effective these enemies would be in a 3D environment. At one point, there was a full design document packed with extraneous information (characters, enemy types), which is what tells you it was written by an ambitious young designer and not the more well-rounded designer/programmer who sits at his desk today.

Gameplay Overview:

A retro 16 bit-style action/adventure game, with a playful horror-influenced atmosphere. The game is set on a storm-plagued college campus, where the player character must explore the open map and solve various supernatural mysteries connected to his classmates. Each “chapter” in the story represents a new hour in the game’s time, with the weather and lighting changing from a dark windy night to a raging storm by the story’s end. All enemies are spirits which manifest through the wind (i.e. as scraps of paper caught in a whirlwind, giving them a vaguely defined shape) with the size and number of the creatures increasing as the storm grows in power. Non-player characters are other students, who change location and dialogue in each new chapter, giving each character a unique story that is intertwined with the overarching plot.

Story Overview:

Joel is a late night college radio DJ, who decides one night to torture his few listeners by playing an abrasive side from Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music". When the signal cuts out soon afterwards, Joel climbs to the building’s roof to find a hyperactive young girl removing the station’s main antenna and using it to swat at scraps of paper caught in the wind. The girl is Darcy, the founder and sole member of the school’s Exorcism Club, who insists that the unusual frequencies in Joel’s broadcast have torn open a gateway to a spiritual dimension, and that the scraps of paper are actually manifestations of former students. Thinking her a drug-fueled lunatic, Joel follows her around campus trying to get the station’s antenna back, but gradually realizes that her fears are real, with the spirits growing in power as the night goes on. As the game progresses, so do the stories of the other students that Joel meets, and although they are oblivious to the supernatural happenings, their stories are intertwined with those of the wet papery apparitions.

Locations:
The story is set on a college campus, with cold modern architecture and large forested areas. There are 15 outdoor map sections, most of which have adjoining interior levels. There is also a series of underground tunnels which connect the various buildings, which become more accessible as the game progresses.