I first encountered Jack King-Spooner’s work when he sent me a copy of Sluggish Morss: Pattern Circus over the hospital wifi tardy at night. The game was a dazzling spot at the wrong time, which may seem odd given that Sluggish Morss often looks like an upset whale, but it’s such a feverishly inventive work. It blew the dust off my synapses.
The same goes for the upcoming Judero King-Spooner, which he’s collaborating on with Soul Searching creator Talha Kaya. You’ll play as a “pagan clairvoyant” armed with a large stick, scouring the mythical Scottish borderlands for evil creatures to bash. It looks cheerier and airier than Sluggish Morss, with a more pronounced focus on mechanics like combat, but it has the same pickled 3am energy. It also now has a release date—September 16—and a modern trailer below.
Like many of King-Spooner’s games, Judero uses hand-animated stop-motion animation. The pagan clairvoyant with the large stick is an actual action figure, photographed in various poses to create the animations – and if you think that sounds like a “primitive” way to create a video game character, next to Ye Fancy Inverse Kinematics or something, then all I can say is: boom, boom, get hit.
Judero has no time for your precious procgen walk cycles, he has some nasty clay monsters to beat up. Luckily, he can possess some of these stop-motion creatures and operate their abilities. The full game will also include various minigames, such as a side-scrolling shmup where you shoot hearts at giant crows (citation needed), complete with branching dialogue and “succinct, aphoristic NPCs.”
Here’s some info from the Steam page about the game’s visual direction.
Judero is made of handcrafted objects and custom figurines, animated in the tradition of stop-motion animation. For us, this art style evokes something nostalgic; partly comic, but maybe also a little scary. These real-life elements are then rendered in the 3D world to evoke a unique visual style. Using this style, we can introduce digital techniques such as real-time lighting, shaders, and post-production effects. The cut scenes will be done using established stop-motion techniques with higher fidelity to give them a more cinematic quality.
Here are a few more words about music:
The music in Judero pays homage to established British folk music, such as that documented by Francis James Child. Many of the songs are hundreds of years ancient and it has been an honour to research and learn them. We keep the instrumentation acoustic and mostly true to the originals (mostly), but with contemporary arrangements and harmonies.
“I like the fact that I don’t quite understand what’s going on with Judero after playing the demo, its mix of past and present, handmade and hand-painted, fantastical and down-to-earth, soft folk and unexpectedly intense boss fights,” wrote Alice0 (RPS in peace) in 2022. She also admitted to wanting to explore the folklore of the Scottish Borders, after spending time floating the region’s rivers, exploring its ruins, and cycling through “valleys illuminated by heather”. Are you reading this, Alice0? I can just imagine you wandering the frontier, thrashing stuttering gremlins with your walking stick.
Again, Judero comes out on September 16. It is still demo on steam. If you like programmer methods, you might also like Harold Halibut.
