Spoo4k

In Spoo4k, (pronounced just like Spook), you're a lone adventurer in a spooky house which is inhabited by ghosts. All of your friends are also in the house, but they've been paralyzed by the ghosts and their life energy is slowly being sapped. Because you're an adventurer so full of vim and vigor, you're much more tempting to the specters than your poor friends. You must use this to your advantage.

Your job is to go near the other people to lure the ghosts off them, then bring those ghosts to an effigy to make it disappear. Careful, though, because if a spirit touches you, you will lose life force, just like the powerless victims. If you lose all your life force, then you collapse, and all hope is lost.

But you've got a secret weapon - your Magic Adventurer's Lantern. While the lantern is on, you've got extra visibility and the ghosts will run away instead of coming close to you. By going back and forth between the lantern, you can keep the ghosts following you but also at a safe distance. Disperse all the ghosts at the effigy to win (it's in the bottom right corner.) When you get rid of the last ghost, your score is equal to the number of victims who are left alive.

Your life is measured by the red bar, and your remaining lantern juice by the yellow bar. The green bar represents how many ghosts you've led away - when it fills up, you win. If your red bar drops to nothing then you lose.

Press [ARROW KEYS] to walk around. Press [SPACE] to turn on your flash light. Press [ESCAPE] to quit. Press [R] to restart.


Extra notes:

This game actually went through a very interesting evolution. I wasn't at all sure what I wanted to do for the 4k competition, and finally decided (since I've been playing around with it so often lately anyway) that a velocity/attraction game would be pretty cool. I was thinking some sort of puzzler/action game where a missile gets shot at you and you need to arrange black holes intelligently so that the missiles get flung back at the rocket launcher. So I started coding that, and ended up with a pretty cool little gravity engine that could fling missiles around in a nifty fashion. Then I experimented with repelling fields as well, which were straightforward and would probably be good for the gameplay. Because at that time I was having one gravity well follow the mouse around, I realized that the missiles actually seemed to behave sort of like some sort of critter when I repelled them. So I decided maybe a game where you need to get a bunch of mice out of a maze would be cool, and your mouse would represent either cheese or a cat. But then I realized that I still had the possibility to have more than one "black hole" in the level at one time, so after noticing that the "mice" would sort of attract to the other ones until the stronger black hole got closer, it reminded of ghosts or something floating around a person. And the rest is history, of course.