Hey there! We’re Grant Fennessy & Matt Tirre, founders of Lost Turnip and the developers behind Run From Mummies. We’ve been friends for longer than we care to admit, and naturally that’s led to us deciding to create a game together! Grant handles the programming side of things, whilst Matt takes care of the artwork and story.
The pitch came about around 2011 sometime, and like with many of the best (and worst) ideas, it originated with a bunch of college-age friends who often hung out at Grant’s parents house. Between rounds of Halo 3, TF2 and too many other great games to count, we’d have random brainstorming sessions about all kinds of things, but mostly ideas for the games we’d dream of making.
Run From Mummies started life as a simple sketch from Matt, who was thinking about possible ideas for mobile games. If memory serves, the entire idea came about all at once, and felt just funny and outrageous enough to work. Matt’s initial idea was a purely top-down, procedurally generated labyrinth where the tourists would try to navigate the maze Pac-Man style with only a flashlight to light your way, using traps to take out pursuing mummies.
Around September of 2020, the idea of creating a game together resurfaced and whilst a few pitches were thrown around, Run From Mummies wasn’t initially one of them. But after Matt stumbled across the old pitch document for RFM in a forgotten Google Drive and jokingly dropped it into our team’s chat, the rest became history.
The journey has been long and hard over the course of several years, but it’s not been without its rewards. As we’re entirely self-published and self-funded, taking the game to Kickstarter was a scary prospect. But we hit our goal, which helped us to cover things like the music, sounds, and full voice-acting.
The game was made on Unity, mostly because it’s easy to use and versatile enough to handle whatever Grant throws at it!
The biggest hurdle was probably figuring out the best way to focus the game around its combat loop. Run From Mummies is at its best when the mummies are right on your heels, so that required us to cut rooms that were either too small or too large and find clever ways to slow players down and speed mummies up. It also meant making sure that there were just enough health pickups on the map to keep tensions high while still allowing for players to make a few mistakes along the way!
Start small, and the rest will come with time. Pick an engine that’s easy to work with, come up with a core gameplay idea/concept, and refine it. Not everything you develop will make it into the final game, but so long as your core idea is fun and interesting, then the rest will fall into place (somewhat) naturally!
At the time of writing, there’s just over 1 week until Run From Mummies releases on Steam & PS5 on November 6th. So if you got this far, then put on your shoes and run to the storefronts to check it out!
-Grant & Matt
❤️
