Wahoo, and a good day to you! Today I’m here to announce that our long-awaited game Flipping Death is coming out on PS4 on August 7. Yes, that’s next week!
I really want to tell you about our game, but man, there’s so much to say! The world-flipping, the ghosts, the ragdoll animations, the mindreading, the writing by Ryan North, the possessing of humans, the ghost cards, the crazy missions, the amazing voice actors… as you can see, I’m not the kind of developer who knows how or when to stop.
This game comes with extra everything, so it’s been hard to keep this post short and quick. But hey, I got fun GIFs to lighten things up!
Have you played our previous game Stick It to The Man? Game development is hard and tedious, but making that game was just pure fun. I like having fun, so we wanted to keep that part rolling. At the same time, making games is a journey and taking the same trip twice can be boring. So how could we add a really fun twist to our next game while sticking to the same track?
Stick It to The Man is a game where the world is built out of cardboard because it’s just a really fun art style. At the end of development, we wanted to put in some Easter eggs and someone suggested we should draw something on the back of the cardboard. But then we would have to flip the camera around to see that.
That’s when we realized – that would be an amazing game! And that’s how the idea of Flipping Death came to life. A game with two different worlds, drawn on the opposite sides of the same piece of cardboard.
I’ve always loved ghost stories and if you look at my art you’ll see that I’m a big Tim Burton fan. Our next game just had to be a ghost story. A story about the living and the dead. Each world on each side of the paper.
See, in Flipping Death, you play as Penny Doewood. On her way home from her newly lost job she does what any human eventually does: she dies. She is sent to The Otherside, where the newly-dead wander around as ghosts. Here she meets Death, and because of a few weird misunderstandings, Penny ends up becoming Death’s temp.
Suddenly you’re in charge of helping all these lost ghosts with all their weird issues. Stuff like finding Lady Elderdough’s killer, painting Skipper Blackstone’s secret mistress (it’s a boat), putting out Vera’s not-so-eternally-burning hat, reviving a cross-eyed alpaca, stitching a zombie tennis-arm… every ghost has all sorts of issues that need fixing before leaving this world.
The big perk about being Death is that you can possess humans. Yes, jump right into them! When you do, the world flips around and you walk around with that human on the living side!
And that’s how you solve all these puzzles. We wanted this experience to feel really fun and weird, so we are actually using ragdoll physics to animate the characters. That gives them this really floppy and fun look. Honestly, it was a real pain to develop, but it is just a blast to goof around with these wibbly-wobbly characters.
On the ghost side, you control Penny and here the game becomes a bit like a platformer. Penny has this incredible scythe that you can throw around and teleport to. It’s a super neat platforming climbing and jumping tool (patent pending). You use it to explore the ghost side of Flatwood Peaks, the cute village where this whole game plays out. This place is populated with some very eccentric and fun characters that you get to know over time.
But what about Penny, what’s her story? When you start as Death’s temp everything is just fine and dandy, but one day during a regular ghost mission, you suddenly notice something very weird about your own death and… well, I don’t want to spoil it. But the game takes a whole new turn and Penny goes on a personal mission to save herself and discover a dark secret in Flatwood Peaks.
Besides solving the puzzles that push the story forward we also added extra Ghost Missions. It was just so much fun running around experimenting and playing with each possessed human. So each chapter of the game has a bunch of little extra missions you can play. Finishing these missions will award you with Ghost Cards, collectibles that tell the backstories of the characters in Flatwood Peaks.
Okay, okay, I’ll have to stop, but just one last mention of our voice actors who have done such an amazing job. Yes, this game is fully voiced, and boy do I mean fully! Over ten hours of voice recordings of the hilariously written script by Ryan North who’s previously worked on the Adventure Time comics, Dinosaur Comics, and Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. And of course, Stick It to The Man.
It’s been over three months since I left the development of Flipping Death, and I am already knee-deep into something else. But as I write this blog post and look back at the development of Flipping Death, I realize that this game is truly unique and took on a life of its own as we made it. It twisted and turned and became this really weird and unique gem that I am so proud of.
I truly hope you have as much fun as we had to develop this!
Hugs,
Klaus
