Meet Mission Ctrl Studios and their first exclusive Nintendo Switch game, WRITHE

Meet Mission Ctrl Studios and their first exclusive Nintendo Switch game, WRITHE

Last weekend I got to interact with the lovely people of Mission Ctrl Studios who are publishing their very first Nintendo Switch game, WRITHE a Nintendo Switch exclusive on January 15th 2021.

WRITHE was actually made to celebrate the engagement of Thomas and Jodi, which took place in Thailand, so it’s a very personal first game for them, that on top of it being their first title to be self-published as Mission Ctrl Studios! 

About WRITHE

WRITHE transports you to an alternate ‘70s Thailand, where an endless horde of mutant sago worms terrorise the good people of Bangkok. Suit up and lock ‘n’ load- it’s your duty as an exterminator to hold back this wriggling tide to the last breath.

Blast your way through ceaseless swarms of grubs to a thumping industrial soundtrack, and throw yourself into an original arcade FPS that will test your mettle at every turn.

Fight to survive for as long as you can and earn your place among top exterminators on the global leaderboards. WRITHE is about knowing when to run and when to gun in a desperate struggle for precious seconds.

  • Retro style graphics with a modern twist
  • Endless waves of grubs both big and small to exterminate
  • Dual-wield a deadly shotgun and plasma rifle combo
  • Three unique arenas to take on
  • Defend your rank on the online leaderboards
  • Slay smoothly in both 30 and 60 FPS modes

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Future FREE updates

They intend to also add a couple more maps to play, a friend leaderboard and language support for a few other languages over the next coming months (tentatively aiming for easter to implement some of those features).

All of it just in the form of free patches, there’ll be no paid DLC or anything like that.

Q&A with Mission Ctrl Studios

Where you guys always into gaming before taking on the challenge of your first own game? 

Both Thomas and Jodi are long-time gamers anyway, Thomas is particularly into retro games (he’s a big Nintendo fanboy as well), and between the both of them they have a Sega Megadrive, Nintendo 64, Gamecube, original Xbox, Xbox 360, PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, Wii U and a variety of Nintendo DSs and Gameboys.

Oh, and of course Nintendo Switches!

Which games did inspire you to make your very own game

Lets first say the of WRITHE itself is erratic. We were heavily inspired by Devil Daggers, Super Crate Box, DOOM, Quake… and old FPS games in general. We didn’t really want to make a campaign, as we planned for the project to take a year or less, and wanted something with a lot of replayability. In the end, an arena-style, survival, arcade shooter was what we came up with!

I absolutely insisted on global leaderboards, which were probably the thing that took the longest to implement – much to Tom’s dismay – but if you ask either of us we can both say that the game is exactly what we intended it to be. It’s a challenging game, and we’re extremely excited to see how high a score people can get!

We tried to make deaths feel “fair”, and aimed for people to always feel like they could do better if they changed tactics or used the environments differently. There should definitely be a big focus on pupa/egg hunting in the game if players want a particularly successful run.

There are also “filters” that you can choose between (CRT, Retro and Modern) to change your graphics style, as well as some lore to read and a museum to explore. The little extras are just for when you need a bit of a break from all the action, and want to kick back for a bit- or even just learn more about the universe!

On your website I also see Jackhammer – Demolotion Dodgeball is that a new title already or?

Mission Ctrl Studios is an indie studio from the North East of England, and has been working on JackHammer: Demolition Dodgeball for the last four years, as a team of two. JackHammer is a future sports FPS game that we’re hoping to publish as soon as it’s ready.

More about future plans?

We’re already thinking up our next game, which we’re hoping to start as soon as WRITHE has officially launched.

We’ll be balancing making the new maps and updates for WRITHE along with starting our next project. Patrick exclusively works on JackHammer since he has another full-time job, but Thomas and I have worked on WRITHE full-time for the last year, and intend to do the same with the next game.

About Mission Ctrl Studios and who helped out

MCS was initially founded by Patrick and Tom (my fiancé), however Thomas and I (Jodi) started working on WRITHE together in January 2020 following a trip to Thailand in December, where we got engaged.

We both studied Game Art at De Montfort University, a few years apart (I’m 23 and he is 27). We really loved Thailand (especially the people) and wanted to make something that combined our personal gaming interests (we both love FPS games and retro-style graphics) with, well… Thailand! It started off with an idea that we wanted a mass of writhing enemies, kind of like a flood (worms fit the bill pretty quickly), which admittedly we knew would be potentially quite difficult for the Nintendo Switch to run.

We did some tests on the DevKit and ended up building the whole game as efficiently as we could, eventually getting a locked 30 and mostly stable 60 fps (which you can choose between in the menu). We made all of the art assets between us, Tom did all of the blueprinting (we use UE4) himself, with a little bit of help from Patrick and a couple of others, I made the sound effects, and we found The Music and Audio discord server while desperately searching last minute for someone to create us a soundtrack!

Vich Magic and Julia Bui were incredible to work with, and really stuck to our brief for it- I’m pretty sure the brief was “20% Thai, 80% industrial trance”, and the key word was “thumping”! 


So a quick tip; give WRITHE a shot when it releases exclusively on Nintendo Switch on January 15th, 2021!