Various sightings of the green headed man to the right have been reported back to our Typhon HQ of his possible whereabouts’ but we are unable to track him down.  His name is Sid, an infamous project manager at a large software publisher and is notoriously evil.

Just look at what is left of our team after working under his oppression!!

“George, we told you to go home to your wife and kids. Hitting your deadlines on time was really not as important as you thought. Now look at you”

”Sergio, it’s just an algorithm, it can’t be that difficult to workout, get a hold of yourself lad”

”Richard, don’t take it so badly. I’m sure he didn’t really mean to scrutinize your project management skills. You are really good at what you do, I promise!!

Anyway, now we’ve got that spectacle out the way, let’s get on with it.

So here’s our first scrap book post, we’ll take you back to 2005, we had been working hard on a series of multiplayer games that were to be launched with a network operator in Spain. 

We won’t go into how agonising it was to work on these games, with such slow data traffic and constant connection drop outs but it did inspire us to work on something a little more interesting in any spare time we had. 

And so Psychoville was born.

It also died very quickly but we created some great material before the kibosh was dropped on it.

It was going to be a side scrolling arcade (Castlevania type) game loosely based on the story of a semi-abandoned desert mining town where everybody had pretty much gone schizoid and wreaking havoc, a bit run of the norm. There was supposedly an evil force emanating from deep in the mines where your paranormal detective would eventually get to “The evil force” and destroy it. 

The plot was not exactly original or fit for an Academy Award but it was an arcade game which would have eventually got played on a screen size of no more than 176x220 pixels. Well as one may hear all too often, it’s all about the gameplay.

Here are some of the characters:

Detective Marlow, our heroic detective who I might add by shear coincidence had an uncanny resemblance to one of our programmers at that time.

Concept marketing art

An idea for the title screen. Marlowe is about to get dragged down a dark alley by one of the towns people. “Marlowe, you’re looking the wrong way!!” 

An another idea for the title screen. A ghoulish being lurks around the corner. Maybe it’s Sid, he’s come back to haunt the team.

We did much more work on Psychoville, even got to a demo stage but for the lack of time and dedicated people working on it, it never became anything more than just a collection of crazy characters enslaved on our backup drive waiting to break free. 

The demo still needed lots of work so we put in on the shelf in the hope that maybe one day it would resurface as a finished game or appear many years later in our company scrapbook, and so here it is.