In 2017, my mind was blown by the video game Undertale, which was basically a solo project by Toby Fox. I was immediately inspired to try to make video games. I reached out to a few of my college roommates, each of whom was a video game enthusiast and had different critical skills that I sorely lacked—coding, art, game design, etc. I contributed with design and project management. I also wrote authentic chiptune soundtracks using a fascinating kind of software called "trackers."
We called ourselves Jazz Bat Studios, and for a couple of years, we set about trying to make video games on the side of our already very involved careers. We ended up making three different games, to different degrees of completion.
The first was Skeleton Crew, a full demo of a pixel art beat-em-up where you play as a rad little skeleton pirate protecting his ship from a bunch of doofy sharks who want to eat it. This was our first attempt and magnum opus and I have tremendous fondness for it.
The second game was a Rampage clone called Page Ram (get it?). In the game, you play as a rad 90's coded anthropomorphic ram who loves America and is trying to recover sensitive government documents—and if you destroy every building in this city to do it, so be it. This was a more ambitious project, and we only ever finished one level, not a full demo.
The third game was Pie Division, an app game based on the "I cut/you choose" mechanic for divvying up desserts and the like. This had a different vibe—it wasn't pixel art or chiptune, instead featuring an original gypsy jazz soundtrack. We finished v1 of the game, and it almost made it on the Play Store, but life and family and careers drew us in different directions before we got it to the finish line.
It has been several years since we have made games together, but we still have an active Jazz Bat group chat and I think we all low-key want to quit our jobs someday and do the video game studio thing for real. Here is our website, where you can check out our work and even download some (hopefully all soon!) of the games we made:
If you'd like to listen to my soundtracks from these games, they are hosted on soundcloud:
