Illustrator and game designer Steven McCarthy doesn’t want to use licensed music in his "non-shooting shooter" Ghost Police. He wants Shovel Knight composer Jake “virt” Kaufman to create original music for it. But he needs money.
That’s why he’s launched a Kickstarter. It’s to fund a Ghost Police soundtrack using the N163 sound chip, which McCarthy explains is “a rare sound expansion chip that Namco used in early NES games” and “which is different from the one used in Shovel Knight in its own amazing ways.”
Kaufman has used the chip to score the music in the trailer above so you can get an idea of what he’ll be creating should the Kickstarter be a success. If you want to know what the game will play like then you can download this playable demo (note that it has placeholder music).
Worth noting is that Ghost Police is nearly finished and will be released regardless of the crowdfunding success. The Kickstarter is for $16,000 – $10k of which will go towards the soundtrack, while the rest goes towards Kickstarter fees, campaign management, and producing additional art assets per the physical rewards.
If the Kickstarter base funding goal is reached then stretch goals for new game modes, ports to new platforms, an expanded soundtrack, and a potential remix album by Jake and his friends at Scarlet Moon Artists will be pursued.
Ghost Police has you transporting two ships at a time through its levels. You use a brush to create and erase pixel art backgrounds to open and close parts of the real world and the ghost world for the two police officers (one human, the other a ghost) – one can’t move into the world of the other.
