๐ Have a fun time
๐ Feel like a hero without leaving your computer chair
๐ Make some new friends (who are not actually real though)
๐ฅ Press buttons on your computer keypad
๐ฎ Listen to some music
Journey to the End of the Jelly World is a lil 8-bit RPG game born out of the imaginations of visual artist and musician Faith Eliott and producer/composer Susan Bear; both based in Glasgow, Scotland (the best city on planet earth)
Faith + Suse = SliceyBredd
Susan Bear
โI really wanted to just escape into a fun wee world with this project, in the first part of lockdown I spent a long time playing Animal Crossing then started dreaming that I was living inside Animal Crossing. I think when things are difficult or stressful in life I like to imagine being somewhere else, but like not somewhere on planet earth yโknow. Iโm not sure if this is healthyโฆ but it works! All the workshopping and imagining of the game world and characters and story and music with Faith I found really exciting, and hope it will give others the same feeling of joy and escapism while playing it that it did for me whilst helping making it. Writing music with a mad story/ characters / world in mind was loads of fun. Sometimes the music drove elements of the story; sometimes I responded to the visuals and the story with music so the making of it felt quite flexible."
Faith Eliott
โI had never made a game before, and to be honest the prospect felt quite daunting as I am most at home working in physical media: textiles, drawing, painting, etc. However, Suse is a whizz so I was reassured enough to start experimenting! When we discovered Bitsy, the program which we primarily used to make our game, I found it really easy and fun to play with. I also really enjoyed itโs colorful, blocky and approachable aesthetic! Whilst working with it, I started drawing surprising parallels between creating these little 8-bit worlds and working with fibre. For instance, with crochet or rug-making, you also tend to work into grid-like patterns in order to build images, so that was really interesting!
One of the best things about game-making is the potential to communicate a narrative in a spatial rather than linear way. Because itโs such an immersive format, you donโt feel so much of the pressure to maintain a measured plot-line. I think for Suse and I, it meant we could include lots of the more surreal or tangential things that came up in conversation when we were devising the story-line. As well as being a fun, weird story, the outcome of the game feels like it reflects the chats we had in between too about stuff like crypto-currency, immortality and mental health.โ