My name is Frederick and I founded Ghostie Games in 2021 when I decided to seriously pursue solo game development. My background is in studio arts and creative writing. Game development has allowed me to implement my art in such cool and interactive ways. It has been the perfect balance of challenge and reward. There's no greater feeling than watching someone playing your game and laughing their butt off!
Clown Camp is my fifth game release, and my most ambitious by far. Players take the role of a young camper exploring a mysterious summer camp full of deranged clowns. They will attempt to survive the horrors lurking around every corner of the campground and uncover the gruesome secret behind Clown Camp. If they're lucky they will escape alive!
The game is heavily inspired by survival-horror games of the late 90's, early 2000's era, such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Aesthetic choices like the crunchy low-poly graphics, give it a cozy, yet unsettling, vibe. Other aspects such as a small inventory space, puzzles, NG+, tight environments, and (optional) limited saves add extra challenge. I wanted to pay respects to the heyday of survival-horror, which surprisingly rarely featured clowns, despite how universally feared they are. There's also a hefty amount of hidden collectables and files to find that expand the game's lore.
I love using Custom Resources as much as possible. It is such a convenient way to store mass amounts of data. If you set them up correctly, especially when combined with Custom Classes, it can make scaling your game (and editing later on) 100x easier. I use them to store different collectibles, enemy stats, dialogue scenes, you name it! It's hard to imagine going back to developing games without it. Those early games I made were a mess!
The trickiest thing for me was integrating Steam features. Luckily, there is an excellent project called GodotSteam by Gramps that can be installed as an add-on. The GodotSteam community has been very helpful and supportive, and there are several guides to get you started setting up things like Steam Achievements.
Godot has been my game engine of choice since 2021. I love the lightweight feel of the editor and open source classification. The development community is relatively small but supportive and passionate. I have not yet encountered any serious reasons that would push me to another engine.
I think whatever you do, when working on a large project, you need to be consistent. Learning how to utilize Custom Classes is great for this, because you can have dozens (or hundreds!) of similar objects and their scripts inherit from one super script. If you set it up with exported variables or loading a resource, you may not even need a proprietary script at all.
This makes it super simple to just go into the one super script to make changes across the board, and not have to keep track of whether you changed it for every similar object. If you can get away with fewer proprietary scripts, you'll have an easier time keeping things consistent, and have less places you need to check for bugs!
Make sure you're ready to go commercial at all! There are so many additional responsibilities that come with that. Beyond marketing, there's community management, technical support, and navigating a storefront's pipeline (i.e., Steamworks).
This can add a lot of unexpected pressure and can quickly lead to burnout. So really, don't rush yourself. Take your time. Make a ton of prototypes. Learn the engine and your tools, whether it's Blender or Aseprite or Krita, inside-out.
Learn to love the craft! It can be difficult to go back once you've gone commercial, and suddenly you won't have the time you once had.
Greatly appreciate you reaching out! I am very pleased with the launch reception of Clown Camp, and am super excited to see where my clowning-around takes me next.
Frederick ❤️
