Welcome to Morpeth Jetsan! Thanks for taking the time to check out our blog. This is the place where I’ll be posting regularly about updates here at Morpeth Jetsan, sneak peeks at upcoming titles, and posting about any upcoming events - giveaways, live streams, and festivals we’ll be involved with.
So, to start things off I decided I’d make a post explaining exactly how we got to this point - a registered company with our first official title - Fight Back The Night - scheduled for release this Summer.
Prior to becoming Morpeth Jetsan, it was just myself, with an interest in game development, but not sure where to start. I had made games before - mini-games in existing sandbox games, tabletop games, mobile games as part of courses, but hadn’t done any work I had seen as Proper game development (Which, looking back isn’t true - all those things are games I made!)
Then, in late 2021 a game jam was announced for the charity stream ‘Jingle Jam’ - running in early december. I had heard of game jams before, and decided it was finally time to get into one. The theme for the jam was ‘Opposites’, so I decided to make a side-scroll PvP shooter (with both players using the same keyboard - I didn’t want to waste the entire jam figuring out multiplayer), in which the screen is split down the middle, with the players stuck in their ‘half’. Where they shoot on one side, the bullet appeared on the other.
Behold, Parallel Warriors! The first (and as of right now, only) title I made using Unity. The game itself is very barebones - has wonky collisions and physics, but it does work as proof of concept I suppose. As far as I know it didn’t even end up being played by the hosts of the charity stream, but I was already hooked in the game jam process. I decided doing these was how I could start getting experience in the industry.
The very next month I entered another game jam - the Historically Accurate Game Jam 5, the theme being ‘Your country’s history’. As an Irish studio, I began to wonder what a farming game would be like - if it were set during the Great Famine. I got to work drawing pixel art versions of Irish farmers (complete with flat cap) - deciding how the various crops would work, and how to represent various aspects of life at the time.
Every day, you have to make sure you’ve grown enough potatoes to keep feeding your family - while simultaneously, you must be growing enough cash crops (Oats and Barley) to pay your rent each month - all the while dealing with an increasing number of the potato crop being unusable due to the blight, rent going up, and your landlord selling off parts of your farmland to the neighbors.
Overall I was much happier with how this project turned out than Parallel Warriors - and even considered expanding it into a full version, but ultimately decided against it (though never say never!). The game itself was the first game we made in Godot - which we’d start to using going forward (for the most part…)
Up until this point, all projects I’ve mentioned are still publicly available on the Morpeth Jetsan itch page - though these next few projects are currently hidden. But I’m going to talk about them anyway. For the next project, it was no longer a solo venture - a pair of us got to work on our submission for the Global Game Jam 2022.
With the theme being ‘duality’ we got slightly off the rails in how our game connected to that theme - in the end we had a life simulator in which you played as a blob man of some kind - going to your blob grandma, blob work, chilling with other blob people - all the while managing various stats - Hunger, Social, Energy, Money, and Happiness - which would be affected by what activities you set for each cycle.
Initial plans involved the game slowly incorporating a Pandemic that would greatly affect your ability to do certain activities, but in the end those were never incorporated. That’s about all I have to say about Blob Business: Now Live The Prime Slime of Your Life!
The following jam we participated in was the GDevelop Game Jam 1 - the first jam for a relatively recent game engine, that uses an event system to power its logic, rather than coding. Yeah. The theme was Build/Rebuild, so what we ended up with is a top-down zombie survival game, in which you play through a series of days and nights - during the day you set up your defences, during the night you defend yourself against waves of Undead. The next day you rebuild, and so on. The title for the game is ‘ALONE’
We were on the move quite a bit during this game jam, but thankfully due to the unique aspects of GDevelop we were able to work on the game on the go - and while the final result is an enjoyable experience, the graphics are a bit lacking due to them being placeholders that never had their final versions even started.
But now, we move on to the fifth and (as of me writing this) last game jam entry - FIGHT BACK THE NIGHT. Developed for the 1-bit Game Jam in the Godot engine - with a theme of Light & Dark. One of the requirements (not enforced) for the jam was the use of only two colours - we went with light grey and dark grey. However, to get around this and add some depth to the game (as well as make use of the theme) there was a heavy emphasis on lighting in the game - you, the player blast fire that lights up the room, you light beacons that illuminate the areas, all the while fighting hordes of monsters that emerge from the dark.
Overall, we had a blast working on that game jam, and found the core gameplay loop fun and exciting - so we decided that this game would be our first fully developed title. We set up the business, got the steam page set up, and now all we have to do is get it fully tested, finalized and published!
Thanks for taking the time to read this (Assuming anyone’s actually reading). Expect more posts like this in the future, as well as specific posts about our first title FIGHT BACK THE NIGHT, news about upcoming events we’ll be represented at, and more. Speaking of which, RENDR Festival 2024 starts tomorrow - and I look forward to meeting others in the industry there!
If you want to play some of the games mentioned above, check out our Itch page here! You can even try out a demo of the full version of FBTN! And make sure you wishlist it on steam!
Bye for now,
Jason
Komentáře