BRING THEM BACK - From The Dead // pixel jam 2025

A MESSAGE TO YOU!

I love the steam riverboats, I had to include one in the title art, hearing the beautiful steam organ gently on the air as the boat enters the bay. What a lovely view! So lovely that I wanted to give you the option to hit the right mouse button and fade out all the titles, so you can sit on the hill and admire that view, take a moment to reflect, and enjoy it. 

The gameplay scope was simple, customers come in, ask you to revive their beloved pets and other things, you match the ingredients and fight off voodoo ghosts!  in the future i'd love to add more ghosts that interfere with your ingredients by snatching them off the shelf, or mess with your gold! 
As always with these things it's a case of balancing all the gameplay over time.  For now, i'm super happy to hand this over to you dear player. I hope you enjoy having a click, make some customers happy.

If nothing else, I hope this brought a smile, and perhaps left a memory of the little voodoo shop (from the dead) in that little bay town. 

THOUGHTS & PROCESS

This is my submission to the Pixel Jam for 2025. I had a great time working on this and crafting this small Voodoo world. Its not a complex game, I wanted a balance of casual clicker and atmosphere. 
I'm hoping that people just enjoy being in the environment of the shop, and soaking up its vibes. its calm, quirky, and I tried my hardest to get a fantasy styled new Orleans/Caribbean mix.

Influences

My influences are very much from the Monkey Island days of 90's pixel art back drops, I felt that was important to get some good ones in there to really pull you into the world as much as possible.  Within 10 days, being a solo developer I had to keep my scope super tight. 
There are some downsides and things I can expand on post jam, things like adding a bigger variety of customers that enter the shop.
I wanted each customer to feel unique and have something interesting about them, adding more character to the world, like you'd want to know more about them... naturally that meant I only had time to make 3 for this jam submission.  I hope you find them charming enough, and can see what direction I was going for.

Audio

Sound was obviously a massively important factor to get that atmosphere right. I used some recordings of my own, and made some new sounds from combining and mixing a few recordings from freesound.org (list below of the raw sounds) but I've heavily edited most of them beyond recognition in some ways. 

I was lucky in a way, that I found a recording of Calliope (on freesound), which is an organ on the Natchez steam powered river boat. You can see footage of it in action here.

PIXEL ART

So this was a lot of work, three full screen backdrops, 5 characters, 8 unique ingredients, each with hand crafted animations. I wanted to focus on this the most!  It takes time and effort to make them look good, and I didn't have a lot of time to work with, this is absolutely me flexing what I can do in a short amount of time. Sure, there are a lot of things i'd fix and drill down on a lot more if this wasn't in a jam situation, but i'm pleasantly surprised this didn't kill me haha.

for the title art I started with a grey sketch to get the layout right and block in my landscape, then refined and refined until I got it to where it is now. Then it was a case of bringing that final art into Pyxel edit (my animation software) and then animating small aspects of different parts of the image to bring a bit of life to it. The title art alone took 1 entire day of my development time. But it was worth it to me, I love how it turned out and i'm super proud of it.  

 

Audio Credits

noted earlier, some of these I modified or used small portions, but I've included the links to the full sounds. 

Slam door shut by jorickhoofd -- https://freesound.org/s/178063/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Northern California Crickets by ellie.vanderlip -- https://freesound.org/s/704381/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

horn_liptrill_D4_E4.wav by TaranP -- https://freesound.org/s/361391/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Magic - Chimes by Vrymaa -- https://freesound.org/s/753334/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

FrogsAndCrickets_ExcerptB_JMA_24Bit_48k.wav by greysound -- https://freesound.org/s/32655/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

Calliope.wav by moebiusbean -- https://freesound.org/s/141623/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

1pm church-bell inside recorded 190413_1356.wav by klankbeeld -- https://freesound.org/s/571607/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

New Orleans Street Life.wav by shelbyshark -- https://freesound.org/s/501241/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

coins_into_box.wav by 5thWall -- https://freesound.org/s/190945/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

Singing Ghosts I by NicknameLarry -- https://freesound.org/s/487628/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

dorm door opening.wav by pagancow -- https://freesound.org/s/15419/ -- License: Creative Commons 0