Granddad's Camera

Granddad’s Camera is a pixel-art wildlife photography game for iPhone and Android, set in real places in Britain. You play a young nature photographer with your granddad’s old film camera and an empty field journal, and every animal you meet keeps to its real season and hour. OakFox is designing and building the whole thing: the game, its art, music and sound, and the website. It’s in development, and launch news goes out from granddadscamera.co.uk.

The Problem

Wildlife games tend to go one of two ways: made-up creatures, or real animals dropped anywhere at any time of year. Neither teaches you anything you could use on a walk. Britain’s wildlife is at its most interesting in the details. Badgers leave the sett at dusk in spring, puffins are on Skomer from April to July, and a bittern is heard far more often than it’s seen. We wanted a game where knowing those details is how you get the shot.

The Brief

Make a game that rewards real fieldcraft: reading the signs, choosing the season and the hour, and keeping still. Everything in it had to be true and sourced. Good wildlife photography ethics had to be part of how it plays, not a note at the end. And it needed a website that would find its audience before launch, in search and in AI answers.

The Solution

Look and Feel

A handheld-console look: pixel art, a control deck under the screen, and turn-based encounters where every move raises or settles the animal’s alert, from CALM to BOLT. The art, music and sound were all made for the game. The website borrows the field journal: warm paper, faint ruled lines, and a pixel display face over a readable serif.

Colour Palette

• Paper (#F1E8D0) - the journal page. The background of the website and the game’s menus.
• Screen (#2B2320) - the handheld’s dark body, framing every screenshot.
• Moss (#3D7443) - buttons, links and the month-by-month charts.
• Gold (#F0C567) - the A and B buttons, and the highlights on the in-game panels.

Key Features

• 103 real British species - each on its real calendar and clock, across five places: a made-up market town, the New Forest, the Norfolk Broads, the Pembrokeshire coast and Skomer, and the Cairngorms.
• Granddad’s film camera - 24 shots a roll, and nothing to see until it’s developed in town. The digital cameras wait until you’ve earned ranger stamps.
• Fieldcraft over grinding - field signs tell you what’s about, the locals tell you how to see it, and the wind decides whether a deer smells you first.
• A wildlife garden - feeders, nest boxes, a pond, a nest box camera and a moth trap, each changing which species visit, the way they would in a real garden.
• The real calendar - the game knows today’s date, so real events like the deer rut and the seal pups turn up in it while they’re happening outside.
• Bird News, a monthly photo competition and a Hall of Fame - reasons to keep going back out.

True, and Sourced

Every species has a field journal page covering its size, diet, population, conservation status, the law that protects it, its field signs, a photo tip and the ethics. Each page is checked against UK sources such as the RSPB, the BTO, The Mammal Society and The Wildlife Trusts, and lists them. Rare animals really are rare. The game won’t let you creep up on a protected bird in the breeding season, and it tells you why.

A Website Built From the Game

granddadscamera.co.uk is generated from the game’s own data, so the two can’t drift apart. It has 127 pages: one for every species, place and month of the wildlife year, plus a moth guide and a press kit. The pages answer the questions people actually search, like when and where to see a puffin or what’s about in October, and they cite their sources, which is what search engines and AI assistants look for. It’s static, quick on a phone, and has no analytics. Launch-news sign-ups are double opt-in and protected from bots.

What We’re Building

• Game design and development for iPhone and Android
• Pixel art, music and sound
• Species research and fact-checking against UK sources
• Marketing website (granddadscamera.co.uk) with a page per species, place and month
• Launch-news email sign-up with double opt-in
• Search and AI-search groundwork: structured data, llms.txt, IndexNow and a press kit
• Hosting on OakFox’s own server

Visit Granddad’s Camera · Press kit · British wildlife calendar