After several months in development, the Friendly Phantoms interactive game for touch screen kiosk and the web is at last finished!
Created for Ordsall Hall in Salford, a haunted Tudor manor house over 800 years old, the game pits you against the ghosts of four historical characters, each from a different period. Based on the characters of Lady Margaret, Sir John Radclyffe and children Thomas and Emily, the ghosts are brilliantly illustrated by Chris Jevons and post-produced by ay-pe. In order to discover their stories, you must catch each ghost as many times as you can throughout the Great Hall and the Star Chamber rooms, before the clock runs out of time.
Over several months I spent a number of weeks programming and animating, mindful that the game needed to work on a touch screen kiosk with bells and whistles aplenty, but could then be easily adapted and optimised for use on the web. It required quite a bit of research and testing to get the right balance of visual quality, while still being able to play smooth and fast and also be web-friendly. Developed in Adobe Flash using ActionScript 3.0, the touch screen kiosk version was published as an AIR desktop application and the subsequent web version was delivered as a Flash interactive.
You can play the Friendly Phantoms kiosk version right now, converted for the web in all it’s glory! It’s a 26MB download, so if you haven’t got a super fast internet connection then please be patient, it will be worth the wait. You’ll need the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player.
Don’t forget to turn your speakers on… …and enjoy!
Concept and post production – ay-pe
Illustration – Chris Jevons
Audio – Ben McAvoy, Wave Media Productions
