Pencil Whipped is a... rather awkward piece of history in the development of First-Person Shooter video games.
Lonnie Flickinger (then the sole graphics developer of Chiselbrain Software), after a fever dream at some point in the late 1990s, doodled a bunch of pencil sketches on a single-line notepad, depicting an unnamed cartoon character exploring a dungeon-like maze. And since Chiselbrain is a relatively young company at the time, Flickinger decides to convert his drawings into video-game form, before submitting it for the 2000 Independent Game Festival.
The game is as weird as you'd expect a random series of doodles coming to life and battling each other would be like. Also kind of unique and awesome.
An expanded mode is available for up to 4 players at once.
Lonnie J. Flickinger Approves These Tropes:
- Adorable Evil Minions: The rodent enemies armed with tiny swords might be able to hurt you, but the way they squeak as you squah them just sounds so darn adorable.
- Ambushing Enemy: One of the enemies in the game, half a humanoid cartoon-creature popping out the ground from out of nowhere before slinking back in. All in two seconds.
- Circling Birdies: The Circling Stars variant shows up whenever you, or your onscreen enemies, takes damage.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The game's graphics is designed to look like pencil sketches coming to life. Even gunshots and explosions are pencil-drawn. However there are occasional splashes of red from enemies.
- Fake Difficulty: Because literally everything is rendered as pencil drawings at first glance, good luck telling what can hurt you, and what can't. For instance, a bonfire or a hiding enemy looks no different from the background, but can still hurt you - which you only find out after touching them.
- Featureless Protagonist: Your character doesn't even have a face! The most you see of him is two hands holding guns from a first-person POV.
- The Grim Reaper: An enemy type, sketched in pencil like everything else, though their hoods and cloaks are white while it's their faces which are completely rendered black.
- Limited Animation: How the game's graphics are portrayed, as static frames that hops about jerkily.
- Mascot Mook: The Dooby Dummy enemies are the mooks most widely associated with this game.
- No Plot? No Problem!: You're a sentient pencil drawing in a pencil-sketched dungeon, fighting other pencil-drawn enemies, because why not?
- Paper People: Everyone that appears, from the player character to mooks, are two-dimensional, befitting the game's verse being set on a notepad. When killed enemies simply lies flat on the floor, and the ones who doesn't hit the ground but leans against a wall when slain are visibly paper-like when seen from their sides.
- Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: Onscreen enemies tends to verbally narrate their attacks, while the player character - shooting at things with a badly-drawn gun - does the same with his firearms.Dooby Dummy: SMACK! SMACK!
- Stylistic Suck: The game's designs, where even for 2000 standards it looks behind it's time. Then again, it's meant to look like fever drawings coming to life.
- Technicolor Fire: Inverted - flames in-game are rendered as black-and-white pencil drawings, too. And yes, they can harm you like other obstacles, but you don't know until you touched it.
- Waddling Head: The Dooby Dummy, a waddling oval cartoon head on spindly legs, is a recurring enemy. It's also enough of a Breakout Character who later shows up in M.U.G.E.N.
