Whale of Noise is a side-scrolling world-building game of sorts. The world starts off gray, static, and empty. The player controls whales, one at a time, and builds naturally occurring environments on the back of the whales to later implant into the grounds. Sounds will be attached to elements of the world so as the world grows a songs starts to form.
VectorGrey will be making it in Java but, in case of unforeseen problems I’ll be making it in Game Maker as well. We’ll be both doing the design while VectorGrey will be handling the music and sound.
Really looking forward to getting this realized. Also, I’m way more of a sound kind of guy. If anyone wants to be our artist, that would be pretty sweet. Otherwise, we’ll make your eyes bleed with programmer art.
The basic gameplay is set in stone at this point. Its pretty complex but, modular at the same time. So here we go.
There’s a resource, whale-bucks, which allows you to buy different types of plants. At the start the player only has a couple of plants and moss. moss is one the only plants that doesn’t generate more whale-bucks. Moss is also the only plant that can make soil, which plants need. Eventually there will be better moss to allow better plants,etc. When you buy a plant, its seed falls from the sky. The player then uses the wind mechanic to find a suitable location to plant it.
As the players use more plants others start to unlock. This includes plants not native to that biome. There will be a biodiversity rating that grades your whale on how biodiverse it is(plants from a multitude of biomes all near each other).
Here’s a demo of what we have so far. WASD to move the camera and left click and hold and then move the mouse left or right to guide the wind. Very iPhone reminiscent. Ignore the text in the corner. There is a bug with the static bubbles aligning and infinite scrolling.
And last but not least, our friend Mariah is going to do all the artwork. Its all hand drawn with some heavy editing. We’re going for a slightly rough and noisy feel to all the artwork.
I’d also like to add that growing plants not native to your current biome will be more difficult to do, but will boost your biodiversity up greatly if you succeed.
