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PBJ – The Musical
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Imagine Romeo and Juliet… but it’s Peanut Butter and Jelly? This handcrafted musical game tells the badly researched story of the iconic sandwich’s tragic origins.
Join peanut boy and strawberry girl on their journey across animated paper landscapes, to the music from famous Crumble Lady Lorraine Bowen – and unlock spinoff remixes from different artists!
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If Shakespeare lived today, what would he write about? Forget Romeo ond Juliet – »PBJ – The Musical« tells a romance of much more sweet- and saltiness: the invention of the Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich. Through 10 musical acts, written and performed by golden buzzer Lorraine Bowen, you will guide a rebelling strawberry and a disillusioned peanut through wonderfully odd paper collages. Everything is handmade: stop motion being cut out from vintage cook books, peanut butter and jelly freshly from the jar, and children giving their best to recite slightly misunderstood Shakespeare quotes. In the game, you can drag, pull and push everything to make the story your own. Will you discover what it takes to become a sandwich?
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· Every act features an unlockable remix from a different artist, as well as a new gameplay and visual interpretation!
· The game is for everyone, so it has multiple accessibility options: From automatically adapting difficulty to a guided mode, where a magic rubber band helps you through the levels.
· A unique soundtrack, composed and performed with live instruments specifically for the game.
· Hundreds of paper figures being cut out and animated by hand – no AI involved.
· Real children (and a few grown-ups) performing.
· Quirky characters and sceneries full of details to discover.
Even though I live and work in Germany, I watch UK television now and then. And when I saw Lorraine performing on Britain’s Got Talent in 2015, getting the Golden Buzzer from David Walliams, I knew I wanted to make something with her. The quirkiness of her songs totally resonated with the vibe of my games.
March 2020: After finishing Song of Bloom, I was ready for a new big project, and wrote Lorraine about my plans to make "Bacon – The Musical". I already had banger songs in my mind like "They call me fat" or "Grease 2", and needed musical and story writing support. And she didn’t like it at all. So I dived a bit more into storytelling, as my previous games were not so much story driven, and returned with the idea of an already epic play, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and bringing it into the 21st century by substituting Romeo with a peanut and Juliet with a strawberry, rewriting a tragical into a happy end, as their death should not only result in despair (boring), but in something wonderful for humanity, the Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich. She liked that idea much more.
I then broke everything down into ten acts and sent her the storyboards. The strawberry should live in a glamorous, colorful sweet world, and the peanut in a black and white capitalist’s world. And the final acts should play in a restaurant scene, where everything resembles a cookbook from the 80s. Based on these storyboards, we worked closely together to find the right music, you can read more about that in her comment below.
I wanted the game to be joy- and playful, so I chose it to resemble a paper stop motion like that of Monty Python. The strawberry’s world should resemble old fashion magazines, the peanut’s world looks like a newspaper collage, and the King’s world is a wild mashup of old cookbooks. If you look closely at the different elements in the kitchen scene, you will see that everything is made out of food – mmost hands are photos of raw meat, for example. I put a lot of effort into making it look and feel realistic, cutting out figures from magazines and books, and destroyed two printers by forcing old newspaper paper through them to get the right look for the peanut world.
Putting so much effort into the look made the interaction difficult. The paper feels very fragile, the diorama gameplay territory is uncharted, and the low framerate doesn’t really allow a smooth gameplay. So it took a long time to find clear and smooth user interfaces, and to be sure of what the interaction should actually be. In the end, I decided to make the framerate of elements in focus faster, allowing better controls, and I decided that there will be two major interactions: tapping and dragging. As there was much uncertainty in the testing process, you can also drag the world anywhere to move it, and help the character roll something down.
And I learned that many people didn’t really care for the gameplay – They wanted to hear the story and the music. So the game gently helps the player through the level with several methods: 1. If you are stuck, the character will subtly roll a bit into the right direction. 2. If you are stuck a bit longer, the whole gravity will shift slowly towards the goal. 3. A fully independent guided mode: Turn it on, and the character will be pulled through the level by a magical rubber band – But you can still interact with everything! When you touch the screen, the rubber band loosens a bit and lets you play better with your character, and then tightens again when you release it.
In the end, I am very happy with the result. It took a lot more effort than I thought – I lost myself in details now and then, and had to discard everything to start again multiple times. The cooperation with Lorraine was brilliant. She saw and played the game for the first time the week before its official announcement on Day of the Devs, December 11th 2024. This was a magical moment for both of us, and I hope we can enchant many more people with the game.
My name is Lorraine Bowen and I wrote the music for Peanut Butter and Jelly The Musical.
PBJ The Musical has got all the things that I absolutely love – catchy lyrics, catchy tunes and catchy characters. It’s an all-singing and all-dancing game extravaganza in a lo-fi high-five structure! It’s like a proper musical – it IS a proper musical but it’s in a game. I’ve even got Philipp the developer singing along in some of the choruses. Writing this musical was a blast from beginning to end and I hope you get some of the severe earworms I’ve got to keep you awake!
Rank up the audio controls to 11 and see you there!
Background
I was absolutely thrilled to be contacted by Philipp Stollenmayer to write the music for his next game, PBJ The Musical. He had spotted me winning a golden buzzer award on Britain’s Got Talent and when asked, I needed no persuasion. I’m not a gamer myself but realise that snappy tunes, concise lyrics, fun themes and dark humour are the ingredients of my work and marry exceptionally with Philipp’s work!
Mr Stollenmayer had the game all structured out from the start. Ten acts with a bonkers storyline, timings, characters, initial images looking like Monty Python on acid and a free reign to do what I wanted and create something quite special and unique.
Beginnings
I decided from the start to make the music quite intimate and very real sounding. I was given a budget and wanted to use local musicians I knew and trusted and would add a very human and raw vibe. Rather than a total digital sound, I wanted to leave in imperfections, celebrate the humanness and go for breaths, sounds of wood, real strings and character vocals that weren’t the normal ‘musical theatre’ voices that we know.
Structure
Philipp really knew what he wanted from the start and introduced me to the idea of creating the ‘songs’ and then having 8 bar, 16 bar ‘buffers’ of music from the themes or new musical sections to give the player the chance of moving on or having time to get to the next section of the game. I loved this idea. It was new and interesting to get out the normal songwriter’s pop song structure. I really enjoyed the challenge of this new way of working and enjoyed creating buffers galore with new solos and arrangements.
Characters
I think gamers will love the characters in the musical. The kids are exceptional. The strawberry is played by Bibi Wells and the Peanut Boy by Grover Slater. They both took well to being trained up on my vocally challenging tunes with large pitch ranges and emotions.
The peanut dad is a great friend, Ashley Slater, the other half of Freak Power with Norman Cook. He narrated the BBC TV Series ‘Boo!‘ He was also the creator of Mr Zoink, for Sesame Street Studios with Mark Taylor. The French chef is equally terrific and horrific and from a local community theatre so a range of talent abounds.
Time
The musical took just over ten months to write and record. My audio engineer, Wayne McIntyre, worked tirelessly with the mixes and I’m pleased with the overall sonorities. My favourite? They are all so different that each one arrives with a smile!
Philipp’s next idea was to take the initial songs and get them remixed for extras. The remixes are bonkersly fabulous with Europop mixer, Carsten Düsener grabbing hold of Act 9, I did an acapella version of Act 3, Act 7 going backwards and the final Act is championed by a local teenage indie band, The Veltmans, I saw at a local band night here in the UK. Lots of surprises.
Starring...
Music by Lorraine Bowen: (BGT Golden Buzzer, cult Casio Queen, performer/songwriting legend)
Charlotte Glasson: Nick Cave, Divine Comedy, Oasis
Drummer: Dave Smith Robert Plant’s Sensational Space Shifters, Juju, Loop Collective
Mixed and mastered by Wayne McIntyre Abbey Road, Roger Eno, Rita Coolidge, Mel C, Lisa Simone, Rebecca Ferguson
(C) Philipp Stollenmayer 2024 / kamibox