We’ll be working on a review for Get-A-Grip Chip and the Body Bugs, so I got in touch with Redstart Interactive to talk a bit about the game. Come check it out!
PS4Blog: Hi! Good morning. Thank you for joining us. Could you please tell our readers a bit about yourself and your work?
Hello! My name is Jon, and I’m a co-founder of Redstart Interactive. We are a small indie studio based out of New York City. We started making games on Halloween day in 2019. So far, we have released two games: Get-A-Grip Chip and Get-A-Grip Chip and the Body Bugs. I handle a lot of the programming that goes into our games, along with about 100 million other daily tasks involved with building, producing, and publishing our games.
PS4B: Get-A-Grip Chip and the Body Bugs is your latest release on Nintendo Switch. What can you tell us about this project?
Get-A-Grip Chip and the Body Bugs was created in partnership with Games for Change as part of their STEM Your Game Challenge. The idea was to take an existing commercial game and transform it into an educational game, and we thought Get-A-Grip Chip would be a great title to do this! The original game focuses on a single grappling mechanic, and we thought we could layer in educational content and mechanics and create a new experience for our players. We had a fantastic experience working with Games for Change and their subject matter experts to create what we think is a carefully balanced mix of entertainment and educational content. We also decided to give Body Bugs away for free if you already own a copy of Get-A-Grip Chip!
PS4B: As someone who enjoyed Get-A-Grip Chip, I’m ready to dive into Get-A-Grip Chip and the Body Bugs. What are the main differences between one and the other?
I’m glad you enjoyed playing Get-A-Grip Chip! Body Bugs takes place in a totally new world – inside the human digestive system! You encounter three “Bugs” throughout the digestive system: an Allergen, a Bacteria, and a Virus. As you go through the game, you play as Chip, now a synthetic white blood cell whose mission is to find, collect, and activate the body’s white blood cells that represent different digestive educational concepts. Finding these will unlock new areas of the game, and ultimately you’ll have to fight each of the Body Bugs. For this game, we’ve also added a mechanic at the end of each level where you must match each of the white blood cells you’ve found with a definition of the concept they represent in order to finish the level. We also added some features to the game to help adjust the difficulty, to better match the educational context of the game.
PS4B: The soundtrack for Get-A-Grip Chip is available on Bandcamp and other music services, so I was wondering if there were any plans to complement that with a digital art book release that includes the design work for both games.
Our composer Stimmerman created an awesome soundtrack for the game, and we worked closely with them to get that working in the game, but also as a standalone album. Picking up a copy of the soundtrack on any platform (but especially on Bandcamp) will directly support Stimmerman and indie music, so definitely check it out! We don’t currently have plans to do an art book, but I really like that idea! We have a ton of early sketches, character and environment designs, and even early versions of the game that would be fun to compile into a book. Maybe that is something we can consider in the future.
PS4B: And now it’s time for us to go. Would you like to add anything else?
Thanks so much for having us here! Definitely check out the game on Switch, Steam, and Xbox. If you pick up a copy of Get-A-Grip Chip, you can download Body Bugs for free! If you want to hear more from us, our website has info on everywhere you can keep in touch with us. Come join us in Discord and chat directly with us!
