This guest post is written by J.D. Harlock.

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Released in August of 2023, “Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands” is a turn-based RPG developed by Five Houses in collaboration with British web cartoonist Dan Martin. It follows the titular band, a trio of misfit musicians led by their lead singer Faye, as they set out to stop a world-ending threat after they unknowingly sign up for a satanic version of a “battle of the bands”-style contest. Along the way, they have to contend with rival musicians, demons, literal and otherwise, as well as their own internal drama, all while trying to survive a competition where every musical performance is a fight to the death!

The premise is definitely out there, but that should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Mr. Martin’s work in the online comics scene. After all, he is the bizarre mind behind the cult classic strip “Deathbulge,” and he, alongside Five House’s Kyle Jenkins and Scott Walenty, spent a decade faithfully adapting it into an experience that is just as mad as its source material. Fortunately, unlike many of its story-driven peers in the indie gaming scene, “Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands” also delivers when it comes to the gameplay with a unique combat system that’s one of the more innovative ones that the subgenre has witnessed in quite some time. 

Although “Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands” was acclaimed by those few who played it upon release, it’s struggled for years to find an audience outside of its dedicated fan base. Hopefully, that’s all set to change soon with its recent console release on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. In the meantime, Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Walenty of Five Studios agreed to sit down with me for a chat to reflect on the long yet rewarding road to seeing this underappreciated gem to completion.

J. D. Harlock: So, how did you two first meet? 

Kyle Jenkins: The summer before first grade, my family moved from Ft. Worth, Texas to Detroit, Michigan. My dad was working for General Motors, who were moving him around all the time, so it was inevitable they’d send him to the Motor City. Right after we pulled up to the new house, my brother—who inspired the NPC with the stuck headphones—and I left the car and saw a bunch of kids our age playing in the backyard of the house from across the street. Of course, we ran over to play with them.

Scott Walenty: And I was one of those kids!

When did you start working together?

S. W.: In 2000, when we were around the age of thirteen, we both got “RPG Maker 2000” on our Windows 98 PCs and had a blast making short RPGs to troll one another. We would design the most annoying combat imaginable for them or have the player walk at the slowest speed possible through endless irritating mazes that triggered random encounters with each step. Somehow we always bore through the torture and managed to finish them, laughing the whole way through. Eventually, we became quite proficient with “RPG Maker 2000,” but I gravitated towards coding, developing a bunch of minigames by writing things the engine wasn’t designed for. 

K. J.: And I was more interested in world-building, level design, and creative writing!

S. W.: So we started making a “serious” project within “RPG Maker 2000” with a custom combat and menu system.

K. J.: This “serious” project didn’t last long, but that’s when it all started! 

S. W.: I met Dan Martin on an online community of creatives way back in the mid-2000s, way before “Deathbulge” was first published! So I had the pleasure of following it from the start, watching several of his strips go viral in real-time. I eventually introduced him to Kyle in 2014 when we started brainstorming “Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands” together. 

When was Five Houses founded?

S. W.: In 2006, we both noticed that we were both majoring in the perfect subjects in college. I, of course, majored in computer science.

K. J.: I, on the other hand, majored in multimedia design. 

S. W.: As we grew our skillsets, we decided to take on an even more ambitious project, a Nintendo DS homebrew action RPG called “Arcane Dawn,” starring a female lead coincidentally also called Faye. 

K. J.: Back then we were known as “Hexfire Software.” 

S. W.: Eventually we abandoned it to work on an iPhone game for iOS 1.0 back in 2008. Codenamed “Arte Factum,” it was a surreal dreamlike side scroller with an industrial vibe, but even that one proved a bit too ambitious to finish in a reasonable time. 

K. J.: So, “Potion Lore,” a puzzle game where you could toss potions onto any tile within your view, released on the Windows Phone 7 in 2012, became our first title. 

S. W.: Unfortunately, we picked a dead platform for it. Porting over to the iPhone and Android stores was difficult to pull off at that time, so we decided to focus on what became “Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands” instead. 

K. J.: We renamed our studio Five Houses in 2019 when we launched the Kickstarter for it. 

Why rename yourselves Five Houses?

K. J.: We wanted something a little cozier, so we started thinking of homes. Up until the game’s release, we were a core dev team of five. Five people. Five houses. It just made sense at the time, and it just sorta stuck!

Why an adaptation of “Deathbulge?”

S. W.: Well, Kyle and I loved the webcomic!

K. J.: Scott had introduced me to it, and I became a fan well before meeting Dan. It had a unique charm to it. I even went back and reread it from the very first panel way before we ever chatted about the possibility of making a game. Once we started discussing it, it was clear right away that we three had the right skills to pull it off. 

Why a turn-based RPG?

K. J.: A lot of “Deathbulge” strips ridicule the silly tropes that keep popping up in RPGs, and all three of us had a desire to create something to satisfy our RPG fix. 

How did you develop such a unique combat system? 

K. J.: We wanted a turn-based combat system with active gameplay in-between turns. This is why we came up with the core swapping mechanic where you have to strategically swap in and out.

Do you feel like you succeeded?

K. J.:  Ultimately, while we did achieve what we set out to do, it did come with some heavy caveats. The action economy could’ve been curated better because you still had to sit through enemy attacks with no dodge or parry system in place. 

Anything that didn’t pan out? 

K. J.: Originally, I wanted the action bar to consume effects more granularly as your marker slid across them, but we eventually landed on the final measure mechanic, which features persistent effects that could only be overwritten or consumed. 

You first met in 2014 for it, but it would be five years till you launched the crowdfunding campaign. What work was done during this period?

S. W.: From 2014-2016, it was just brainstorming with a prototype of the combat system. There were no measured effects yet, but there was swapping. We also had a literal bench for the non-active characters. We called them “benched,” and we still colloquially call them “benched characters.” It’s all over the codebase. Dan even drew a unique bench graphic for each combat area and a “bench sitting” graphic for each character and class. Unfortunately, as late as 2022, we realized the bench sadly had to get cut. RIP bench….

K. J.: RIP BENCH. Having them all with their instruments out made it feel more like a “band” fighting together. 

S. W.: In 2017 we started building it properly. We each had full-time jobs, so it was very much a side hustle. By 2019, we had our Kickstarter demo featuring Tonewood Forest. Only one area was fully finished, but the core combat system was locked in. 

Why crowdfund it?

S. W.: We decided to crowdfund because Dan had already had a successful Kickstarter for “Deathbulge: Prettier on the Outside.” 

You exceeded your initial goal of $30,000 with $59,202. In hindsight, was crowdfunding a good choice?

S. W.: It was, and we’re very grateful for every backer’s support! However, our timing for kicking it off wasn’t ideal. We threw a dart at the board and stuck to that. If we just waited a bit longer, the delivery time would’ve felt “shorter” by comparison. 

You met two of your stretch goals. What others were you planning?

K. J.: “Rhythmic performances” would’ve introduced a rhythm element into the performance system. It would’ve added “timed hits.”

It wasn’t released until August 8, 2023. Why did it take around four years?

S. W.: The scope of the game was a lot for three people to take on. We didn’t just clone an existing game. This was completely new territory, and it needed time to “breathe” and figure it all out. And, oh yeah, we still had to hold down jobs! 

K. J.: Yeah, I never left mine. 

S. W.: I had to tutor computer science to undergrads…. 

Did you learn anything from the experience?

S. W.: You need playtesters! Development drags without them since we had to test it ourselves. Eventually, we did recruit eight testers in 2023 just before release, but it would’ve helped a lot to have active testers as we were developing it, even if it was expensive.

Was there any content that had to be cut?

K. J.: Dan drew a world map for an entirely different story than what we ended up going with! Still, a lot was carried over in one way or another, so we did end up getting everything we wanted. For example, the land of Enudous would’ve featured traversing over naked giants whose naughty bits were cleverly covered by the environment. 

S. W.: We wanted that sweet, commercially viable TEEN rating. 

K. J.: Now, that area lives on in Claire and the Tonewood Forest. Another example was a dungeon that was essentially a permanent party, but Hellblivion captures that essence in the final release. However, the most beloved of what was cut was Canoe Guy. He was a normal NPC who’d join your party to let you use his canoe to cross a river. After that. He would just stick with you as one of your core party members. The kayakers in Hellblivion were added to honor his memory. RIP Canoe Guy….

S. W.: RIP CANOE GUY!

Of course, “Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands” was loved by those few who checked it out, but it struggled to reach a wider audience. What do you chalk that up to?

S. W.: Initially, we had marketing momentum. The Kickstarter catapulted us into view, and we got into PAX 10 for 2019. It was the first time it was ever boothed, and what a place to kick that off at! We were off to the races with our demo winning further accolades and being featured in prominent outlets, but then we started to make a lot of mistakes. First, we stopped shopping our demo around when COVID-19 happened to focus on dealing with all of that. Second, we stopped marketing it for around three years from 2020-2023, and we didn’t even post public updates on our progress, because we were afraid of “spoilers,” when you can’t really spoil a game no one has heard of before! Third, we handed out very few keys to any press before launch.

It was featured in a Humble Bundle in the last couple of months. How did that come about?

S. W.: We were invited by Humble for their “Decked Out Collection: Great On Handheld.” It wasn’t a surprise since we are fully “Steam Deck Verified,” and “Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands” had developed a reputation as a great handheld game. 

Do you think that’s opened it up to a new audience?

S. W.: It most certainly has! Last I checked, that bundle sold over 66,000 copies. Of course not every single person who installed the game, but quite a few have, and many have left us glowing Steam reviews.

Why port it over to consoles now?

K. J.: The plan was always to port it, but we knew it’d be a significant undertaking, so we waited until after the PC release. Once things with the PC release got settled, and we were able to update the game to a place we were happy with, we got to work… and it was a lot of work! 

Have you been working on a new game?

K. J.: We’re all solo-exploring some ideas but nothing concrete yet! 

It seems that Deathbulge Battle of the Bands was a lifetime in the making. Looking back, how do you feel about the journey that brought you to this point? 

K. J.:  Our friendship started when I kicked in the door of our neighbor’s fence, and now we’ve made a game prominently featuring door kicking. 

S. W.: The cycle is complete!

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Image Credit: Five Houses