Students create adventure video game 


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“SPOOKULELE,” a USC Advanced Games Project where players play notes to fight ghosts, comes from a team of passionate game designers led by Sheehan Ahmed and Weston Bell-Geddes. (Photo courtesy of Spookulele Games)

Sitting in their Game Design Workshop class in 2019, Sheehan Ahmed and Weston Bell-Geddes were inspired to adapt their team’s board game, “SPOOKULELE,” into a fully developed video game. Last spring, the two successfully pitched this project to USC’s Advanced Games Program — the capstone program for USC games students — and are now in the process of completing a shortened version of the game. Ahmed, a junior majoring in interactive entertainment, serves as the creative director, with Bell-Geddes, a junior majoring in interactive entertainment serving as the game’s executive producer.

Starting out as a freshman year board game project built around a green ukulele, Ahmed and Bell-Geddes have since been inspired to rework the game into a haunted, action-adventure, single-player game to pitch for the Advanced Games program.

“[Game Design Workshop’s first assignment] is a very famous project for our major. It’s the first project you do as a Game Design major, and it’s just so funny, because now this is what we’re also ending our [college] lives with,” Bell-Geddes said.

Since pitching, the team has spent the last year crafting a fully playable 15-minute demo game. The process started with pre-production last summer, when Ahmed and Bell-Geddes found their team and planned out the plot and details of the game.

Over this period, Ahmed and Bell-Geddes recruited a large, diverse team of collaborators to work on their project. Eventually, they amassed a team of 49 people, which Bell-Geddes said brought along a good variety of input. 

“There’s volunteers that are mostly from USC but also from other universities such as Cal State Fullerton,” he said. “It’s very interdisciplinary … We have artists, designers, etc, and they all come from different majors around the University.”

Erica Wang, a junior majoring in interactive entertainment who serves as character art director, said working alongside Ahmed and Bell-Geddes has been exciting. Wang felt as though her contributions, as well as those of her teammates, were valued, and that Ahmed and Bell-Geddes created a dynamic work experience. 

“I think both [Bell-Geddes] and [Ahmed] are extremely skilled and passionate at what they do,” Wang said. “The team itself is really amazing too. There’s so much talent going around, and I think ‘SPOOKULELE’ in particular, it’s just a very tight-knit, close team.” 

The team created an action-adventure game set in haunted New Orleans, where a young girl named Haru and a reaper, Spooky, must fight off ghosts to save the world from an endless night. Players use either a sword or a magical ukulele, from which they can cast spells. Their goal is to progress through the city fighting various ghosts who become increasingly harder to defeat, before a final showdown with Diesel Knevil, an evil biker with a pumpkin head.

“There’s a point where the game really reveals its identity to you,” Ahmed said. “I was a little bit afraid at the beginning of the process that that moment would never come, and we would kind of just be making shots in the dark forever and we would never find out what SPOOKULELE was trying to be, but now knowing what it is feels really good.”

Designing this complex and unique game was no small feat, as the team entered the school year having to meet milestones, such as alpha, when all the features for the game had to be completed, and beta, when no new content may be added, set by a team of industry faculty, led by professors Danny Bilson, Tracy Fullerton and Jim Huntley. Gradually, the team also had to fully design and see out their game while making sure the gameplay was free of bugs and user-friendly, leading up to the fully playable demo, which will debut at the USC Games Expo May 12.

The USC Advanced Games Project will debut a playable demo at the upcoming USC games expo on May 12th. (Photo courtesy of Spookulele Games)

“Everything we’re doing now is just polishing, getting everything super, super good,” Bell-Geddes said. “Putting the trailer together, putting all the marketing material together, which is also eye-opening because we see how close the game is.”

Ahmed and Bell-Geddes have detailed plans to take “SPOOKULELE” even beyond the expo. Ahmed and Bell-Geddes also founded their own publishing company, Spookulele Games, where they have published some of their own games, as well as those of other students. After graduating, the duo hope to take this company further, and publish an expanded “SPOOKULELE” under their label.

“The dream is to walk into a Gamestop and see ‘SPOOKULELE’ lining the shelves,” Ahmed said. “Now that we have a demo that we know is like, ‘Oh, this is actually kind of fun,’ we want to take it and stretch it to a whole 10, 15-hour experience that people can buy and play.”

From the freshman year board game built out of a bright green ukulele to the fully playable demo, the two students are excited to see what the future holds for “SPOOKULELE.”

“I just think it’s so special that we started this game as freshmen in college and now it’s taken a whole different form and created a whole different life for us,” Bell-Geddes said. “I’m very excited to see where it goes and I’m extremely optimistic for the future of SPOOKULELE.”