PSBlog Feed: Introducing Poltergeist: A Pixelated Horror on PS Vita

[Commander Fury]

Hello to everyone who plays games! We must first introduce ourselves. We are Glitchy Pixel, a small development group from Colombia, South America. We really love to make games! Glitchy Pixel is composed of 50% Diana Pacheco (artist, designer) and 50% Italo Capasso (programmer).

We are writing to to tell you about our game Poltergeist: A Pixelated Horror, and also to write about the challenge of developing games in Latin America.

Poltergeist is a puzzle game. Your objective is to scare the tenants that live in a haunted manor with the help of certain powers at your disposal. That’s right! You can now call it payback time for all those other games where you were the scared one!

But be careful, it will not be easy. In each level, you’ll have a limited amount of powers and objects to use to scare the tenants. Possessions, spectres, and portals are just a sample of the powers you can use. You must be clever and not waste away your powers, or you will lose.

Poltergeist is more of a calm puzzle game, than an endless, action type of game. But we hope you can feel like geniuses each time you manage to solve a level. In Poltergeist, you’ll witness the history of the manor across a variety of eras. You will scare people from the 30′s, the 80s, even in an office! The basic idea is to create nice environments of the different periods of time from the past century. You will take advantage of the objects of each era, and you will face different bosses, each one representative of their time period.

We’ve been working on Poltergeist since November of 2011. It started from a very small prototype that barely worked. From that moment we’ve worked at every opportunity we can so we can build a great game that everyone can enjoy.

From a Latin American point of view, the idea of creating video games seemed to be an impossible one a few years ago. But now, the world is increasingly interconnected, and with the rise in technology, and increased digital distribution systems, it has become a reality. Now there are opportunities that we from Latin America are able to take.

Poltergeist had its first great breakthrough when it won the Square Enix Latin American Game Contest 2012 with a 20 level prototype. The current game has about 60 levels. At that point, we discovered that not only does Poltergeist have great potential as a game, but also that in Latin America, there is a lot of talent and passion, willing to work in the video game industry.

We plan to bring Poltergeist: A Pixelated Horror to PS Vita this October. This was a long process that took lots of dedication, effort, and many long nights. Developers in Latin America are just beginning a big journey order to become big player in the video game development world. For the moment, we think that we’ve had a good start so far.

We hope you’ll enjoy Poltergeist when it launches.

-Italo Capasso & Diana Pacheco

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