Lou, can you tell us what Jumping Grounds is? or The Clumsy Star? PLS!!
" Let me go get some stuff and I'll explain gladly!!
First of all, we need to talk about "Clumsy Star". What is it?
"Clumsy Star" is a videogame that I and Syd have been working on since we were kids, more or less! Yes, even when we were away from each other, apparently we still kept working on it!
The protagonist is called Atmy, who is a star fallen on Earth on the night of the 10th of August, the "Night of Falling Stars".
As they fell (yes, they, Atmy doesn't have a gender like any other star), they met a beautiful girl they fell in love with. This girl seems to be in trouble so Atmy immediately helps her! But as they turn the girl has disappeared!
Your real adventure starts now: because you need to find the girl, fighting anyone who tries to catch or stop you so you can declare your love to her!
During the game, you'll make a few friends, like Elisa, the daughter of a scientist who's gonna try and understand why you fell on Earth. Then there's said scientist, Doctor Lawrence, who will also help you with your special abilities. Finally, you'll speak with various animals around the place. Yes, you can talk to animals. One of them is a kangaroo called Wally (the game was made when Wally was still missing, and this was Syd's way of remembering him).
Will you be able to find the beautiful girl and tell her your feelings?
This is basically what the first game was about. People LOVED it. It received a lot of praise, and high scores for the ending no one saw coming.
We were also able to secure funds to give our company, Jumping Grounds, a real, stable office and also hire some of the people who helped us get the game out!
Jumping Grounds is now our company of game development, and we're now busy working on Clumsy Star 2 and a fighting game that is giving us some problems...
As a bonus, I found some old drawings of what Atmy and Etmy (the second player available from the second Clumsy Star game) used to look like:
Yes, their heads used to be actual stars! We somehow got to play "Spike!" on the Vectrex and we loved the idea of stars going around on adventure.
In this incarnation they were star siblings who wanted to visit Earth, so they came down and went around to look at it.
That's it. That was the story. It was more of a comic at that point than a videogame idea, because it's the early 1980s, and the idea of videogames with a full story was madness!
During the years they went through a lot of style changes from Syd, and I tried to keep my mind busy by inventing stories that were more and more complicated for them, until they became good enough for a whole game to be built around it.
This is them right now (spoiler for the second game I guess?):
Even if they are technically genderless, we were pushed to make a playable character look more feminine for the little girls who wanted to play. Etmy is just Atmy with longer hair and a skirt, but it worked well enough.
Thanks for asking! See you with the second game! "