Chantey Developer Spotlight

AVAST! Yer’ onboard the ‘Jolly ModRetro’ an’ must prepare fer the long voyage ahead filled with adventure and raising your voices and song higher than the seven seas you seek to conquer! Chantey is a classic top-down adventure, mixing open-world exploration and rhythm game elements. You play as a young-man-turned-pirate, entangled in a fierce pirate vendetta between the descendants of the legendary ‘Nightingale Pirate’ on a quest to rule the seven seas beneath the vibrant echoes of rousing pirate metal anthems. Set in an alternate history where Golden Age pirate mythology and headbanging metal riffs collide, embark on an epic journey to re-assemble and revive the Nightingale Pirate's heavy metal legacy, navigate treacherous waters, overcome notorious enemies, and survive the horrors lurking beneath the ocean’s waves.

Watch the Chantey Trailer:

Recently, we announced our exciting partnership with Chantey to bring the game to the Chromatic. We met with solo developer and creator, K.C. Apostolakis of Gortyn Code, to share more about distilling an exciting pirate metal adventure into 8-bit.

Watch the Developer Spotlight Video:

ModRetro Blog: Right on! Thanks for meeting with us today. Introduce yourself to the people!

“Greetings from Greece! My name is K.C. Apostolakis. I’m the founder and sole employee at Gortyn Code, which is a micro-game development studio based on the island of Crete, and I’m the developer of Chantey, a new retro top-down adventure and rhythm game hybrid slated to release for the ModRetro Chromatic early next year.”

Chantey is not your typical handheld game, leaning heavily into the power/hair metal in the early 2000s, with what K.C describes as “heavy metal rhythm combat."

He continues, “You play as a young man turned pirate, and become entangled in a fierce pirate vendetta that’ll have you travel through several ports and towns throughout the Caribbean in order to re-assemble an epic pirate metal setlist, and use it to become the most notorious pirate in the West Indies.”

Why did you create this specific game? What were the inspirations behind it?

“Chantey is a collective homage to various things I love, such as retro Game Boy®️ games, heavy metal, and pirate mythology.”

“Gameplay-wise, it draws inspiration from early Game Boy adventure games, like Link’s Awakening, and even has a “collect ‘em all” type of objective, like Pokemon. Obviously, the game also blends music note-matching gameplay found in rhythm games, like Guitar Hero, and there are several little nods, graphical, gameplay, or story-wise, to other titles as well – see if you can spot them when you play the game for yourself!”

What do you do when not working on games? What is your primary job? How did you get into game development?

Being a game enthusiast all his life, K.C. shared that he has been crafting and self-publishing video games as a hobby for close to ten years now. 

“My professional background, when I’m not working on games, is in Research and Technological development, having worked in R&D for over 13 years. My research interests include video games, game-based learning, and extended reality applications, and my main focus is to understand, apply, and transform knowledge into innovative technological applications,” K.C says.  

While his background has significantly shaped who he is as a game developer, his belief in games runs deeper than what we see on a surface level. “I have come to appreciate and respect video games as more than just tools to entertain, but more so as vehicles for storytelling, learning, memory-making, and preservation.”

What game engine did you use, and how did you approach development using it?

“I’ve used the incredible GB Studio game creator by Chris Maltby. It’s an incredible and user-friendly IDE for Game Boy and Game Boy Color game development, allowing developers of all shapes and sizes to pick it up and start working on their own game.” 

“When it comes to Chantey’s development, I’ve come to familiarize myself with GBStudio’s code and scripting, trying to expand upon the capabilities of the tool itself to best fit the admittedly complex design of my game, and so far, it’s been a successful endeavor.”

Thank you for sharing, K.C. We appreciate your time. Before we go, is there anything else you’d like to add?

“Thank you! I’m excited to bring Chantey to your brand-new Chromatic or trusty old Game Boy. Whichever way you choose to play it, I hope you’re just as excited and eager to check it out for yourself.”