William Barr – Her Majesty’s SPIFFING
[b]Ingmar[/b]: Aside from the difficulty level, please give us an idea of the different types of puzzles in the game.
Will[/b]: Gosh, spoilers! OK, seriously we have a lot of inventory puzzles; some things have to be used in a particular sequence in order to progress. Some items require you to inspect them to find something to progress to the next stage of a task. We have some mini-games in there as well that don’t really require any skill to complete, just a bit of lateral thinking. I’m not really selling it very well. Look, I can confirm that there is no pixel hunting; all the other polarizing adventure game tropes are there in spades!
[b]Ingmar[/b]: Earlier on, you showed me a hilarious scene involving some very nice gentlemen from France. I mean, there’s a bad way of being over-the top, and – as in this case – a very cool way…
Will[/b]: (grins) Yeah, later on in the game you land on this planet, and you find out the French got there before you, and you need to figure out a way to remove them. We try to ensure that we’re even-handed with the ridiculed. Obviously, there are a lot of the traditional English stereotypes, and a lot of the traditional French stereotypes, so everyone is equally berated.
[b]Ingmar[/b]: Can you give me a rough idea of the game’s length?
Will[/b]: The people who played through the game so far have taken around 3 – 3 ½ hours to finish.
[b]Ingmar[/b]: Well, I don’t know if it’s just me, but I prefer a shorter game with 3 hours of fun compared to a 10-hour game which is funny at times but also contains several hours of boring stuff.
Will[/b]: (laughs) Things could be worse, though. It could be a 3-hour game with you not having any fun, so I guess that would the worst-case scenario!
[b]Ingmar[/b]: Fortunately, based on what I have seen, I’m quite confident that’s not going to happen. (laughs) But anyway… what kind of work on Her Majesty’s SPIFFING is left to do for you?
Will[/b]: There is some sound design that needs to be finished up, and one or two animations that are missing and need to go in, but for the most part the actual development is finished. Our original plan was to try and release the game on PS4, Xbox One and PC at the same time. However we’ve conceded that’s asking a bit too much of of small development team, so we’ve reluctantly decided to push the PS4 version back a little bit. Right now we’re concentrating on finishing the Xbox and PC versions; avoiding any huge dramas both will be available at the end of October.
Developing for consoles involves much more red tape than self-publishing on PC; we’re going through the latter stages of the submission process with Microsoft at the moment. They test the game quite thoroughly to ensure the game doesn’t break the console, steal all your data, etc. The biggest task is ensuring the game complies with their specifications for things like saving and managing user profiles. But, as I say, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel!
[b]Ingmar[/b]: Would you delay releasing the game on PC and Xbox so you can release all of them at the same time?
Will[/b]: Honestly, in an ideal world, a world where I had access to a Scrooge McDuck money vault to swim in during lunchtimes, we probably would, yes. However, we’ve flown quite close to the sun developing SPIFFING and our bank manager often reminds us that our wax wings won’t last much longer! (Just to clarify, wax wings are an analogy for huge arranged overdraft facility.) We’re a small developer and have spent all of the last two years working on SPIFFING at this point. We’ve spent a lot of our own money on it and to avoid a similar fate to Icarus (in this analogy, Icarus’s bank manager forces Icarus to declare himself insolvent and closes his indie game studio), we need a few people to buy the game soon! Capitalism, innit.
[b]Ingmar[/b]: Well, hopefully, the game is going to sell well, so you don’t end up in prison because of that overdraft. (grins) Let’s say everything works out fine; is there already a long-term plan for Billy Goat Entertainment?
Will[/b]: (grins) Oh yeah, for sure! The art guys haven’t been working on Her Majesty’s SPIFFING as much in the last couple of months, so they have been working on the concept for the project we want to do afterwards. It’ll be something completely different, and quite a small game. We don’t intend to take as long developing it as we have done with Her Majesty’s SPIFFING. The idea is that that will hopefully buy us some time, so we can plan what the next project is. We very much hope that Her Majesty’s SPIFFING will sell enough copies so we can do a sequel to it. This is our first… I would say, proper game, and we have a vision for a series of SPIFFING games, and it would be nice to be able to go on to do that!
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