My name is Ethan James Petty and Gnarled Scar is the label I use for my weirdo indie games. While I have many people helping me out along the way with specific tasks, I am the primary writer, artist, designer, scripter, grumbling voice actor, and sound designer for the games you will find here.
The first game released under Gnarled Scar was The Knobbly Crook, a ridiculous point-and-click adventure set in a surreal world where rock, paper, and scissors make up the primary physics of the land. It’s a full-length, fully voiced freeware game and it has always been free.
The new game is Something Seeps, which is pretty much the polar opposite of The Knobbly Crook in tone. Dead serious. Mature. Brutal. If all goes well, it’s going to be terrifying. And still a point-and-click. Will that work? Who knows, but it’s going to be a fun experiment. I’m using Unity and Adventure Creator to build it.
My first games came back in the shareware boom of the early 1990s, when I co-founded the “splatstick” indie game studio, Bloodlust Software. My side of it literally started in mom’s basement–we were two high school students. Those old games are still around and are likely even more shocking/offensive for some than originally intended, but it’s important to remember they came from a different era before the internet was a big thing, when censorship was running rampant. Bloodlust was an answer to the alarmists who thought video games were going to turn us into monsters. The games were intentionally gory, stupid, and shocking, inspired by 80s wrestling, Troma shlock movies, and over-the-top fighting game/brawler stereotypes. The blood flowed. The characters swore. We thought we could be the punk rockers of the Shareware market and we were making decent money at it, but Bloodlust did cross many lines that are even thicker now, thirty years later. I am proud of the technical work we accomplished, but do regret some of the “edgy” content. We all grow up. My programmer (Sardu) ended up working on emulators you may have heard of – NESticle, Callus, and Genecyst. Some of my terrible artwork was used in their GUI. I brought back Bloodlust for a short time during the “Click” game creator era, including some small projects for Troma (they paid me in B-movies, which was a dream come true).
Eventually, I moved to Canada and went on to do QA/Level Design/Lead Design at Strategy First, where I worked primarily on the Disciples franchise, eventually leading the design team for Disciples 2: Rise of the Elves. I moved on to Ubisoft, where I worked for about 14 years. I started in Level Design (including Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six) and went on to work as a Scriptwriter (including Rainbow Six, Assassin’s Creed, Watch_Dogs, and Watch_Dogs 2). I currently work as a Principal Writer at Eidos Montreal (where we shipped Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy), but I cannot yet reveal what I am working on npw. I do the smallest budget indie games possible at night and work on AAA studio games that sell millions of copies during the day. I’m currently working both ends of the dev spectrum.
You can primarily find me on twitter. I have a general rule that if you’re pleasant to me, I’m pleasant to you. So please feel free to come say hi, ask me questions, send me ideas, or share your project with me. I’d love to meet you!