Soooo this morning Nick and I were looking at Jeff Minter's tweets after an evening he'd spent playing terrible old video games and summing them up in snarky tweets. And I suggested that it would be highly entertaining to have a game jam using these tweets as design material.
And then Nick scrolled down Jeff's timeline and said, well, why limit it to just his retrogame tweets? Because “Live on Periscope: Inserting Digestive biscuits into sheep” sounds pretty good too.
We started brainstorming this. So obviously you have to be in a submarine, because you're using a periscope, right? (We'll willfully ignore the fact that “Periscope” is the name of a video streaming app.) And if you're in a submarine under a pasture, it must actually be a subterrene, right? Obviously it is piloted by a mole. So you are of course a mole staring into a big clunky periscope, shooting biscuits at sheep to feed them.
And you can run out of biscuits, so you have to dispatch a mole to go stand in the queue at a British supermarket and buy a packet of biscuits to feed the sheep. This is shown in jerky 8 bit animation on a secondary monitor stuffed into your subterrene's cockpit.
And there are other controls, strewn awkwardly across the screen. You interface with this absurdly complicated control panel by using the left and right thumb sticks to move your huge mole claws around and press buttons. Want to move the subterrene? There's a lever on the side to throw it into forwards or reverse. Want to turn it? There's a big wheel to turn.
Your goal? Feed the sheep. But not too much. If you over feed them they get so full they explode. Which is a thing you need to do in later levels when wolves show up; if a wolf eats a sheep who's about to explode then they explode too. Eventually the sheep wander into their barn for the night and the days points are ticked off, with various absurd bonuses.
As the game goes on you start getting more controls, to the point where you have to start scrolling the screen to turn around in your tiny little cramped cockpit. Manage your crew of inept moles to keep the ship running! Send minions out to buy lawnmowers to break down for parts to repair the sub! And whatever other stupid low-res problems a crew of moles feeding sheep might have.
Also because autocomplete just turned “Mad Moles” into “Mad Moleskines”, they are now comedy Russian “MOLESKIS”.
I'll start on the prototype and the Kickstarter pitch immediately.