Gamescom 2023’s Opening Night Live was a total snooze fest. There were some good games, sure, but it was a very dry affair for most of the show and is ironically remembered more for being unmemorable than anything else. That was uಌntil Thank Goodness You’re Here interrupted the event with whimsy, colour, and an unending supply of British charm that Opening Night Live clearly needed.
“It waꦍs actually a convenient lineup for us that it was back-to-back shooty-bang-bang murder simulators,” technical lead Will Todd tells me. “And then we just jumped on with our stupid cartoon stuff - by contrast, it helped. It was all a secret, so to see it coming from a big stage with the big sound system that nearly gave me an aneurysm was quite surreꦰal.”
Tha🐎nk Goodness You’re Here Review - Reyt Good
🍒Thank Goodness You’re Here goes all🐠-in on its humour, but its loving parody of England makes it much more than a funny joke.
was in development for around two-and-a-half years and comes from Coal Supper, a small indie team founded and headed up by long-term friends a🐓nd Barnsley locals Will Todd and James Carbutt. , Todd and Carbutt set their sights on a new project that൩ started out as a series of vignettes before becoming the distinctly British delight it is today.
Bringing Barnsworth To Life
“The original idea was a series of vignettes, tiny little sequences almost like a sketch comedy,” lead illustrator James Carbutt reveals. “Think 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:WarioWare but with back-to-back vignettes. It slowly morphed into that being in a town🌊 because then there’d be lots of scenes. At some point, we 𒊎asked, ‘How do you get around this town’ and thought maybe you’re just a little guy who wanders around.”
The inspiration at the start was just ‘how can we do stupid little goofs in this tone of voice we’ve got?’ and figure out what the tone of voice is saying later. And we never really did. - James Car😼butt
Thank Goodness You’re Here has evolved a lot since the initial vignette idea but there are still hangovers of that in the fi✤nal game, as it splits itself up into chapter♋s and uses an interactive mini-game style in some of the sequences. While that original concept can be felt in the final game, there’s one part of that vision that was completely changed around.
During the early stages of Thank Goodness You’re Here, Barnsworth was going to have an open-world map that the player could explore at their leisure, a huge deviation from the linear progression of the final game. The plan to have a🍎 multi-path world to explore was eventually scrapped due to how much trouble it was for players an♉d how much of the humour it meant they were missing out on.
“It cau🍰sed so many headaches because there’s only so much you can do in the game because there’s only so much you can animate at that fidelity with the small team that we have,” Carbဣutt tells me. “ We found that players ended up doing a constant loop to find the one thing they needed to do and if they missed the plant pot they were supposed to jump in then the whole thing fell on its arse.”
Todd and Carbutt also ൲revealed that they were originally going to make The Good Time Garden 2, but strugg🐷led with finding a way to make its distinct tone work in a feature-length game.
Having A Laff
Although the change in scope might have made Thank Goodness a little smaller, it also allowed Coal Supper to fo🌳cus on the crux of the game - its humour. Thank Goodness is one of the funniest games I’ve played in sไome time, which is a real feat considering how many games struggle with being consistently funny.
This, Todd suggests, is because a lot of games take a more orthodox route to their humour by focusing more on gameplay and then layering the humour on top of that, resulting in everyone’s favourite effect - ludonarrative dissonance. As a bit of in-game graffiti s🥂howing Kilr♏oy taking a whizz on that phrase suggests, it’s not a problem for Coal Supper since “our whole game is dissonant”.
“Maybe it sounds a little arrogant, but the comedy comes to us easier than anything else,” Todd says. “Although it does come very slowly, the process was quite retracted - we’d get one good line per day and the rest of it was garbage. It’s probably a good job that it’s take✨n so long. We had the opposite problem in a way where we’d got the stupid voices and the funny bits down conceptually first and then we had to tease gameplay and mechanical stuff out of that.”
There was a point where The Good Time Garden 2 was the plan and it was going to be a lot m🍰ore mechanically focused. Same sort of aesthetic but… that’s thing, we’re just s**t at games design so it was like ‘make it a proper game and I guess there are these platforms and enemies’. - Will Todd
Dick, Dom, And Dread
That sense of humour is a culmination of everything that Todd and Carbutt have built up over the years, but there are some specific inspirations behind it. Carbutt notes that the British humour is in line with Vic and Bob and The Mighty Boosh, while the surreal side is partly inspired by kids ಞshows like Dic & Dom in da Bungalow and Basil Brush.
Thank Goodness You’re Here was also partly inspired by Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared and its dark twists on lighthearted situations. While Todd and Carbutt recognise that it was an influence on Thank Goodness, the final game steers away from i📖t much more than it was originally going to during deveܫlopment.
Carbutt also notes that the Thank Goodn♑ess’ art style is inspired by Dandy, Viz, and Beano comics, as well as cartoons like Adventure Time and Regular Show that he was watching when he started out as an illustrator.
“Dread is the word we use,” Todd laughs. “Initially we wanted to have this unsettling tone throughout. You’d be laughing through it and then be like ‘Oh what was that’. It was something that was a little difficult to balance. Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is obviously fantastic and they were one of the first in that era to do a kid’s thing that gets all creepy with gore, but by the time we got around to that it felt like it was a litt🀅le played out. We wanted it to be like the full experience has an unsettling tone.”
An Accidentally Heartfelt Love Letter To Britain
Beyond its wild and weird sense of humour, Thank Goodness You’re Here also stands out for its portrayal of small-town life in the UK. There aren’t too many games out there that feel distinctly British, but Thank Goodness reminds you of it at almo🌟st every turn, from obvious references like cups of tea and red post boxes to more deep cuts like the National Lottery mascot and products from JML.
Thank Goodness You’re Here is already sitting pretty on top of a red postbox when it comes to 𓆉gaming’s most British titles, but that wasn’t Coal Supper’s intent from th🎉e start. Carbutt points out that, as an illustrator, when he draws a lamppost he naturally thinks of the ones he’s seen and does that, rather than specifically setting out with that purpose.
“It was a slow journey to get to making it based on our hometown,” Carbutt says. “It started with vignettes in a town and then because we were using our accents we thought it’d be a Northern town. At some point Will just said ‘Then the bus drives past the welcome to Barnsworth 🤪sign’ and it was incidental that it was Barnsley-inspired. Even when we decided on that, we weren’t trying to make the most British thing ever - we’re just from there.”
In a game that’s full of references to🎐 British culture, perhaps the most obscure is a bit of gra🔯ffiti saying “I love you, will you marry me?”, .
Although Thank Goodness’ humour is distinctly British, Todd says that he’s not worried about it being lost in translation for an overseas audience due to British comedy being its own genre in the States in particular. The team made sure to accommoওdate anyone who’s not from the UK by reverse engineering the dialect into “normal English” that everyone can understand, along with making sure that the voice actors enunciated as much as🍬 possible.
“There’s an odd mix of hyper-local slang and dialect an๊d nonsense that even for someone from Barnsley a lot of it won’t make sense,” Carbutt says. “To an international audience they won’t feel too short-changed because it doesn’t really matter if it’s nonsense or Barnsley dialect, they’ll see it wrapped in this package of joyous verbal diarrhoea.”
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