David Firth is one of the most distinctive animators of the internet age. First finding success with Salad Fingers—a sparse, surreal cartoon about a green dude with a creepy voice and love of rusty spoons—Firth now has a thriving Youtube channel with all manner of comically unsettling content.
It turns out that he also dabbles in making games in his spare time, and in arecent chat right here at DualShockers, Firth revealed that he’s making a game based on one of his earlier cartoons, Jerry Jackson—a badly (yet brilliantly) drawn foul-mouthed teen who presents poorly worded scrappy videos.
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See below for a sample of the sketch (bizarrely published on the BBC YouTube channel):
Firth is making the Jerry Jackson game using Clickteam Fusion, an accessible gaming software that Five Nights at Freddy’s was notably created with. It’s a 2.5D beat-em-up. So far, the game “only has three or four levels, and you’re able to probably complete it in 10-15 minutes,” according to Firth, but he eventually wants the game to be “at least an hour” long.
Early footage of the game shows just the kind of ultra-violent, splattery shenanigans you’d expect from the titular miscreant: jumping on peoples’ heads at his school, running over customers in a fast food restaurant, and fighting a ‘Manky Bird’ boss with a big Souls-like health bar.
Destructiveness and interactivity are key aspects for the game. “Jerry Jackson is quite destructive, so in the school you can break everything, you can break the vending machine, you can knock the lights off, you can Smash all the plant pots, you can bounce on people’s heads, you can Talk to people or you can bop them on the head and they just kind of bleed and fall over. It’s just kind of crude and unnecessary, but in his world it seems necessary.”
Firth says that thanks to Jerry Jackson’s deliberately scrappy art style, it doesn’t take too long to put together the art assets. “You can draw it up pretty quickly. You don’t need to obsess over every little pixel you can just do fun little kind-of bad drawings which add to the comedy.”
When asked whether he wants to bring the Jerry Jackson game to Steam, Firth told us: “Yeah, I think so. I didn’t announce it because I don’t want people to be asking about it in 10 years saying ‘where is it?’ and it’s not there. I’m really enjoying making it and I’ve got so many ideas for it. I just don’t want it to be over in 10 minutes.”
As for the price? “A fiver or something,” according to Firth. That’s plenty of violence, foul language, and distinctly British dark comedy for the price.
