A VIDEO game that started life as a boredom buster project in lockdown goes on sale on global gaming platforms this week.

The game, Stories from Sol, takes its inspiration from the Japanese media that fascinated Jon Durham growing up in Lydney and Aylburton around the turn of the millennium.

The action takes place on board the patrol ship Gun-Dog which has been dispatched to investigate mysterious signals coming from beyond Jupiter.

Jon said: “As a kid, I'd always been interested in Japanese media as it had been coming over in drips and drabs in the mid nineties and it started being on TV in the 2000s.

“It was very visually distinctive with different narrative styles.

“Fast forward about two decades or so and that kind of desire to to do something had stayed in me, but I'd never really kind of got around it.”

The game had its genesis during lockdown when, unable to go to his job in the motor finance industry, Jon was looking for something to kill time at home in Cardiff.

Initially he was going to take on all aspects of creating the game: developing the storyline, programming, graphics and music – but then decided he didn’t like doing programming, music

“So I accidentally wound up assembling a small team of people.”

The game was initially promoted on social media where it gained traction and in 2022 Jon set up Space Colony Studio where he is lead writer and creative director.

“We had a a publishing company, one of those companies that's responsible for distributing video games and getting them press attention and getting them on the PlayStation and Nintendo.

“They said: ‘Have you got anyone doing this for you in Asia?’

“Wee were like, we don't have anyone doing it for us anywhere, so if you want to do that and be our guests.

“They were they were pretty good in kind of pushing us.”

The studio successfully applied to a government scheme that supports games developers into the multi-billion dollar industry.

The scheme funded a stand at the 2023 Games Developers Conference in San Francisco, where Stories From Sol gained a lot of attention.

Later in the year they won a free place at the Tokyo Games Show.

“I took a lot of the the visuals based off the old video games as well as kind of visuals you'd get on a Sega and old Nintendo.

“I think like that really resonated with the kind of middle-aged Japanese population who had grown up with it.

Many people thought it was actually Japanese.

In Tokyo, Stories from Sol was one of eight games selected to take part in the Sense of Wonder competition and won an award for best visuals.

“I think that's just how much it spoke to the nostalgia of the Japanese people that were judging it.

“And then it’s just gone from strength to strength.

“It's not something I ever intended to be a commercial product.

“I started it during lockdown for fun, but just because we kept taking chances and those chances paid off.

“So we apply for this thing in San Francisco and we got it.

“We'll apply for this thing in Tokyo and we got it and there's a video games magazine called Debug and we won an award for them for most anticipated game.”

There have been setbacks – such as having to completely overhaul the visuals.

“We were going for a retro look and so originally everything was green on black.

“When it came to actually looking at selling it, it was like a few people will know what we're trying to do here and like it, but anyone under 30 probably not.

So we had to redo the whole thing in in colour to to make more accessible to the younger audience.

“There’s been a lot of competitions we've applied for that we haven't won or we haven't gotten into.

“There's been two kids and a house along the way and all of us are working full-time jobs

It's really been like a surprise – it was never something I planned to do.

“It was never something I thought I could do, but it's just because we've put our all into it and never let ourselves think: ‘This won't go very far.’”

The game is being translated into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, German, and Spanish.

It is being released on Nintendo, PlayStation and PC download platform Steam tomorrow (Thursday, February 20).

The game will also be released on physical cartridges which Jon described as “quite an honour.” because it is relatively expensive.

The action is driven by player choices, an art Jon developed running Dungeons and Dragons games when he was younger.

“You learn to predict what people will want to do in certain situations and then account for that.

“It’s just sitting down and thinking what what would people want to do here?

“It's just a lot of pre-empting them and then I write the scenario, our programmer will build it into the game and then our visual artist will create anything extra.

“Then we just bring it all together, test it out, make sure it works and then then go from there.

“So it's very very collaborative. It's thinking about the audience first and then figuring out how we can achieve it.

“It takes place on a a spaceship that's gone out for a routine mission to check out unusual signals past Jupiter.

“Stuff starts going wrong like the the power goes off.

The the ship's doctor winds up dead and people start turning on each other.

“You play the ship's security officer, so it's up to you to solve these problems.

“It’s all done through making choices and you can investigate the ship to find clues.

It’s almost like an episode of a drama, except you make the choices as you you go along and you drive the plot in in that direction.”

To find out more visit the Space Colony Studio website.