The Black Forest has been a project I wanted to do for a long time. However, the idea of what exactly it should be went through a number of iterations. The very first idea was to have a ghost character in a game world that was slowly destroyed by the great void like in Michael Ende’s Neverending Story. The void would expand and act like a spatial time limit. You could only stay inside the void for a couple of seconds before you die. I developed a simple prototype, but playing it was not very enjoyable since I did not put enough time into the level design.

Instead, I got side-tracked by working on my own 2D game engine called Pelikan. It was supposed to be super-flexible, easy-to-use, have a beautiful clean syntax, help you focussing on actual game design work and make prototyping so much faster. Well – I was wasting my time on building an engine for rapid prototyping, instead of actually prototype. I finally ditched Pelikan when Flixel came out, since it was doing everything I wanted my game engine to do, but in a better way.

If you really want to make your own game engine or any other framework it is worth looking at what actually worked. Adam Saltsman distilled his Flixel library from a variety of Flash games that he had worked on. David Heinemeier Hansson extracted the famous Ruby on Rails web framework out of the Basecamp source code, not the other way around. The good thing about this is that you don’t need to anticipate how you’ll use your code – instead you only implement what you really need right now and take out the useful parts later.

For the second idea I took a 180 degree turn. I would make The Black Forest a series of little game episodes, each one developed and released in a weekly circle. It soon become apparent that I was not able to develop one episode within a week. I simply had too many other obligations. We kept the idea of releasing an episode once a week, but developed them in advance and on the side, so we still had time for other projects.

With the episodic format we tried to combine some of the aspects of prototyping and episodic games. The prototyping allowed us to try out new game ideas in a quick way. The episodic structure should tie everything together into one narration of the hero’s journey – the main character experiencing different adventures in unfamiliar environments. I feel that there is a certain atmosphere in the series that comes out of this connection between the episodes. This was important to me since I wanted The Black Forest to be more personal than the other games we did before. I also wanted to explain as little as possible to the player and break through some established and learned game conventions. Figuring out what to do would be the player’s main challenge and motivation to play the game.

Finding Friends
In the first episode the player needs to figure out that the signal-red colored ghosts are not enemies, but potential friends that help him or her to find the exit. Every ghost the player touches illuminates the dark maze for a certain amount of time. The “latest friend” will follow the player, making it easier to draw the path.

Unlearn
A lot of games reward the progress of the player by constantly giving him or her new power-ups. How would it feel if you actually take something away from the player and question common game design conventions? People seemed to like this episode the most, but it suffered a bit from problems with the collision detection.

Harmony
What I like about this episode the most is that it does not reward any skills you might have attained in other computer games. This one is only about hearing. It’s the most difficult and frustrating of all episodes though and the audio-visual feedback to the player could be improved quite a bit.

Companion
The goal of the last episode is to meet the other ghost. If you touch the other ghost, a different music is triggered and stars begin to appear in the background. If the distance between you and the other ghost becomes bigger, the music slowly fades out and the stars disappear again. The level is generated procedurally, so the path is different every time you play. So are the chances of meeting the other ghost. You can not go backward, as you can’t go backward in time in real life. The idea came from tinkering about the likelihood of meeting your significant other – being at the same place at the same time.

As with previous game projects I worked together with Martin Straka, who made the soundtrack for the game and also came up with a lot of gameplay ideas. The Black Forest is our first game where the audio is probably as important for the player feedback as what you see on screen. Without the music “Finding Friends” and “Companion” would hardly offer any reward, and the puzzles in “Harmony” are completely based on sound. This was also the first time I worked together with Marek Plichta, who did the beautiful graphics and level design for “Unlearn” which added a lot to the atmosphere as well.

The Black Forest got a number of favorable reviews and mentions in blogs like Jay is Games, Game Set Watch, Play This Thing! CreativeApplications.Net and IndieGames.com.