When Kadie Kaolo

hears her dead, sci-fi dork of a father's voice on the airwaves, she knows cleaning out his old radio tower won't be the in-and-out job she planned for. 

Dead Air is a game exploring strange signals, satellite chasing, distanced communication, and the struggles of being a depressed ecologist in the midst of a PhD program in the pacific northwest.  

Featuring graphics made using a physical set and a stop motion character model, a fully original soundtrack, and full voicing in the  (completely free!) downloadable editions, Dead Air clocks in at just about 10k words , with four unique endings. The game will be available for both PC and Mac, and a lightweight Browser version (without voice lines). At the time of Spooktober Submission, only PC has been published.

The game was created in a single month as part of the 8th Annual Spooktober Jam ! Be sure to check out all the other wonderful games from the year!

Features

This game also has LOAD, SAVE, AUTO-PLAY, and FAST-FORWARD options, as well as further audio volume configuration (both MUSIC and VOICES) and text speed configuration settings.

There's no Back option, though scrolling up while in-game will bring up a BACKLOG of the most recent lines (also accessible via the menu!) and scrolling down will scrub FORWARD through the game.

Credits

Dead Air was developed by the FeatherBoy team & friends! Specifically, Benjamin Feinstein & Eli Hersh directed and wrote the story together, with Hersh as the Head Writer (and notebook doodler) and Feinstein serving as Project Head (along with programming, SFX, backgrounds, and assistance on music, sprites, and voice editing). Caleb Feinstein was Head Sprite Artist, Kiera Rhodes served as head of Voice Direction, and additional voice editing was provided by FeatherPops.

The game's cast features: Zoe D. Lee as Kadie Kaolo, Jackson Zappa as Signal 103.1 AM KRPT-IC / John AM Drive, Kiera Rhodes as Signal 832.0 AM KPBLC-RD / Diana Quartz, Allain Armean as Kuo Kaolo, and, in the AM Drive Studio, Marcus Roman as Uncle Vampire, Eli Hersh as Jon, and Benjamin Feinstein as Phone Tap Victim.

Music was composed and performed by Marcus Roman, Ellis Piper, and Benjamin Feinstein. The title theme, Supermassive Burnout, was composed by Marcus Roman, with lyrics by Benjamin Feinstein and performance by Marcus Roman. Renditions of the Amis folk song Fangcalay A Dadaya within the game were sung by Zoe D. Lee and Allain Armean.

Additional Creative Commons sound effects were sourced from Pixabay. No AI or AI assets were used in the creation of this game.

Content Warnings

This game deals with grief and depression, and features the mild swearing one might expect from a grungy grad student in the early '90s (which is to say, a nice smattering of f-bombs).

Dead Air was made using TyranoBuilder.