Last year was packed with point-and-click adventure games. Perhaps the biggest headliner was Return to Monkey Island, a literal return to one of the titans in this classic genre. However, titles like Pentiment, Norco, and Immortality also saw widespread acclaim - even filling multiple categories at The Game Awards 2022. Numerous smaller games also hit shelves as part of this 'renaissance,' including Tall Story Games' commercial debut Lucy Dreaming.
Game Rant spoke to Tom and Emma Hardwidge about coming into the industry as 'non-gamers,' and preparing to bring their pandemic passion project to Nintendo Switch on February 28. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: What are your titles and responsibilities at Tall Story Games?
Tom: We kind of started Tall Story Games during COVID, so we've been established not even two years now. You're technically the director of the company because you're organized, but generally, I'm a solo indie dev. I do all the artwork, the dev, the writing, the game design.
Emma: We are husband and wife. We've worked together a long time and used to turn up to meetings where people didn't know we were married. We got the occasional, "Are you brother and sister?"
Tom: I hope not. That'd be weird.
Emma: Officially I am the director, but I'm generally in charge of organization and turning Tom's love into something that's going to make some money.
Tom: And PR.
Emma: Yes, I've been in charge of PR, chatting to people, trying to get us out there. Our old business is website design and digital marketing, we work with a lot of charities and museums, but during lockdown, everyone went quiet. Tom said "I've always wanted to make an adventure game," and after making one for a client, he really wanted to do a full-length one. I said if we're going to do this, we've got to do it properly and make a business out of it. We're going to lose you for weeks, months, years.
We'd also started chatting to people in the community, other developers, and we'd found they were investing tens of thousands of pounds into producing a game. I was sitting there saying "we're not doing that, Tom."
Tom: This is coming completely fresh into the games industry, I'm fairly hands-on. For little titles at game jams or Lucy Dreaming, I'm pretty much doing everything apart from the music and some voices. I've met a lot of other devs that are people who have an idea and then get a team together. I thought that was kind of strange, but I've realized I'm the strange one.
The learning curve has been straight up. Learning the tools, but also how it's a completely different business model than we're used to in marketing. Someone comes to us with a brief, we do the work, we get paid. Whereas for this, you put in a lot of work up-front, get it out there, and hope people buy in the end. The marketing is very different too, we've never had to put ourselves out there, contact people in the press.
Now we have a whole dev community and everyone's on Discord asking questions, obsessed with data and metrics, trying to find this magic formula or algorithm that makes their game slightly more successful.
Q: Before you got into game development, was any of your marketing experience related to the industry?
Tom: I'm not really a gamer, neither of us are. I used to play as a teenager, then I got a career. Even now I haven't played many games since I came straight into making one. I've made little web games, I used to do a lot of online banner ads going back 20 years. When Flash was in use, a lot of them were little interactive things like quizzes, puzzles, and relatively simple platformers. I've had a bit of experience with creative dev in that respect.
About five years ago, in a previous career, one of our clients was The Roman Baths museum in the UK. They came to us about wanting something interactive for their website. I think they were probably imagining a quiz or something, but I got over-excited and pitched a pixel art LucasArts-style point-and-click game. The clientele was a similar age as me, and one of them was a big fan of adventure games (which I didn't realize), so they signed off on the budget - which gave me about three months to figure out how I was going to do it.
At this point I'd never heard of game engines, as far as I knew independent developers and homebrew games didn't exist. I figured the old adventure games I used to like had dried up. So I went with the web technology I knew and built an HTML and JavaScript-based game engine. The animations were all animated gifs, with a mix of CSS because it had to be responsive on mobiles.
The game was maybe an hour long, it had some music loops but no voiceover. It wasn't particularly sophisticated, more like an Ace Attorney situation where you go into a scene and click on characters. It worked, but if I went back and looked at the code now I would probably be horrified.
When COVID hit, I had that load of cobbled-together code, and with that framework, I decided to make another game called Lockdown. It was all about the COVID lockdowns in the UK, trying to find toilet paper, homeschooling your children, and getting hand sanitizer when it all ran out. Bit of a comedy game. I decided to put that out on Twitter, though again I haven't used it much since my work at ad agencies, and suddenly found there was a whole community of nerds like me who enjoy making adventure games. The day I put it out happened to be after an adventure game jam, so people were in the mood for it. A Twitch stream stuck my game at the end of their roundup, and I hadn't even heard of Twitch. Suddenly I'm downloading all these apps. "Are you on Discord?" What's Discord?
Then I started meeting other devs, and they're asking what game engine I use. They sent me all these links to software, and I sat here like that would have been so much simpler. Spurred on by chatting to people, I wondered if I should look into a full game. Downloaded a couple of engines, and tried them out. The one I used for Lucy Dreaming was Visionaire Studio, it's a specialist point-and-click engine. The way it was structured sort of mirrored what I'd created in HTML, so it instinctively felt intuitive. It's obviously considerably more advanced, but I was able to pick it up and get a demo working in an afternoon.
That was the basic origins of Lucy Dreaming; testing things out, putting some scenes together. Around that time, I was chatting with other devs who were funding their games on Kickstarter. I had heard of Kickstarter before, and at this point, I had Emma on my shoulder saying if I was going to do this, it would have to pay for itself. I figured Kickstarter would be a risk-free thing: If we make enough money, brilliant. I'll dedicate some time to it, and we'll do it in a sensible time limit. If we don't fund it, I'll just do it in my spare time as a hobby, and 10 years down the line, I might have a game.
We allowed about six-to-eight months to go from completely unknown to a point where we could launch a Kickstarter campaign with a reasonable chance at funding. Nonstop Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, getting on all the groups. Gradually building up a community. About halfway through, I did a different kind of adventure game jam, creating Hair of the Dog. That was made in about 12 days, all me - apart from the voiceover. That gave me a relatively self-contained, solid, and finished game at a high standard.
Emma: Certainly for a game jam.
Q: And this was in Visionaire? Like a test run?
Tom: Yeah, I'd already been playing about with the engine for Lucy ahead of its Kickstarter, so I reskinned the bit I'd done with new characters and scenes. But this also gave us something to practice porting with, and because we weren't going to charge for it, the cheap version of this engine covered Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. Somehow doing all of those gave me a bit of a dry run for understanding how Steam works - I'd never used it before, and from the backend...
Emma: It's interesting.
Tom: Yeah. It's convoluted, not the simplest thing. Compared to PC and Android especially, Switch porting has been quite simple in a lot of ways, I think because the nature of the game is quite simple: it's single-player and 2D, using very little memory with low-res pixel art. The size is less than 300 MB, including voiceover and music. When you're porting to the Switch, avoiding boxes about multiplayer and live-service and so on, it means less hoops to jump through.
Hair of the Dog was our dry run for that, I got to do all my swearing at Steam, Android, and Apple before releasing a full game. Though Android completely changed how it works in the meantime, so I had to re-learn that again.
Then we ran the Kickstarter, and got almost three times what we were asking for. That gave us the budget to build the game, get a professional composer involved, a load more voice actors, and also translate it into German. Adventure games are very big in Germany. After that, we had a year and a half to build the thing and release it. That came to a head last October, and after that, I decided I would order a Switch dev kit.
I opened the box for the Switch dev kit-
Emma: Very exciting.
Tom: Very exciting, yes. I don't own a Switch myself, the only consoles I've got are a Super Nintendo, my old Game Boy, and a Wii I use to play my old GameCube games. But within maybe five or six hours, I managed to get a version of the game working on it. I'd already built in gamepad support.
Emma: I think because of the Steam Deck, originally.
Tom: And because I figured if I did that, it'd be there if I did want to port it to consoles. It wasn't perfect, I had to adjust the controls a bit, but it was 80-90 percent done without crashing all the time. So after we released on PC and mobile, I've been working on getting the Switch port sorted. That all got approved by Nintendo just before Christmas. We could have launched at the beginning of January, but wanted to make sure I hadn't misunderstood something.
Emma: And we wanted to talk with nice people like you.
Tom: Yes, drum up some interest. Give us a few weeks to get people sharing it again. We do marketing, so we understand the need not to just appear on the scene with a game. You have to put the time and energy in.
Did we mention Emma's done the voice of Lucy as well?
Q: No, you didn't. You want to tell me about that, Emma?
Emma: This goes back to the start when we were talking about how much the game was going to cost. Since Tom does so much, one of the biggest outside costs was voiceover. The game has a huge amount of dialogue since you can look at, talk to, pick up, or otherwise interact with pretty much everything in each scene; there are custom responses for all of those things. It's always a funny retort for why that thing isn't needed.
We got some costs from voice actors in the UK, and they were fair but slightly eye-watering when there's not a lot in the budget. We had the Kickstarter but couldn't plug things into that, and Tom said we'll probably just have to not voice it. Then someone asked if you'd let Emma have a go.
Tom: Emma has done a certain amount of acting in her younger days.
Emma: It's not super professional work.
Tom: But you're not a complete novice.
Emma: No. My biggest concern was I didn't want it to be rubbish since you were putting so much time in. I didn't want us to go with something just because I'm your wife, and it's cheaper. We decided to try putting my voice on the demo and if we get loads of negative feedback, don't use my voice. I did spend half the summer recording it under the duvet, but I was completely overwhelmed when everyone said the voice acting was great! So I wound up doing it for the full game, and I really enjoyed it.
Tom: And because we had the Kickstarter money, we were able to buy a vocal booth so that you didn't spend the whole time under a duvet with an iPhone.
Emma: It was a slightly professional duvet.
Tom: Some of the people who were originally put down to voice Lucy do other people in the game, and we also have a voiceover from Dominic Armato, Guybrush Threepwood in Monkey Island. He also happens to be the nicest man in the universe. Lovely, professional, considerate, and funny. We asked him to do that, and he agreed before any of us knew about the new Monkey Island, so as soon as that was announced, I'm sending him emails like, "Are we still good?"
He was plenty conscientious since he agreed to do it. And we were able to slightly piggyback since everyone wanted to interview him.
Q: I was going to ask about Dominic. Being a fan of old-school adventure games, was it weird going from this little pandemic project to working with a big name?
Emma: It was quite sweet in a way, because Tom did have this big fan level of excitement while also having his business mind on it.
Tom: He's so nice and professional as well. At the bottom of all his emails he'd say, "Here's new lines I recorded, let me know if they're rubbish." And I'm sitting here going you nailed it, because you sound like you! That's all I need. I only had him re-record a couple of lines, and that was because of his pronunciation rather than not getting the tone right. But there was also that fear like, "I can't send an email to Dominic Armato telling him he's done a rubbish job!" Luckily, he's a consummate professional. I didn't let the fanboy in me get too giggly when we were on Zoom calls.
Emma: He's lovely.
Tom: He's lovely, and he made the whole process very easy.
Q: So what about Lucy Dreaming made you feel it should be your first major project?
Tom: Bear in mind I've been learning as I go along, so the game and story has evolved.
Emma: I'm the kind of person who has to nail everything down before I do anything, whereas Tom is more free-flow, it happens organically.
Tom: The game itself has kind of meandered a bit, but the initial concept was born out of a couple of things. At the time, our son was five. We were spending a lot of time reading him bedtime stories, and the main game mechanic uses mostly books to inspire the character's dreams. Then she can enter dream worlds to learn hidden memories that help in the real world, and vice versa.
Our son used to have vivid, contextual dreams, so if you read him a story about owls and a story about sausages, he'd dream about owl-sausages. I love that idea. It was like, could we somehow craft his dreams? That was the initial spark.
I also wanted to create a game that wasn't stuck in any one genre, because it would be amazing to make a pirate game, but you'll always be compared to Monkey Island. With dreams, I thought something could be pirate-y if we wanted, or be in space, or underwater, all these different worlds. It wound up being more obscure and dream-like.
You often see dreams depicted as ethereal, wispy, cloudy colorscapes in games. I wanted it to be just a bit strange. For example, Lucy will be walking around and suddenly there's a giant crab she'll be talking to like it's the most normal thing in the world. It's only when you wake up that you go, "I shouldn't have talked to that giant crab." I like the idea of her taking it in stride.
I was also aware that there's a large gap in my gaming knowledge. I played a few of the Zelda games as I went through my 20s, but stopped playing games when I went to University. From chatting to other developers, I know there's a huge catalog of adventure games - mostly indies - that I haven't played. I was even researching other games with dreaming like The Dream Machine, or a game jam title called Snow Spirit that has a similar mechanic. I felt I had to chat with the developer, and he said go for it. Was making sure I didn't step on anyone's toes, revisiting old stuff, but so far people say it's really unique.
Emma: I feel you didn't overthink where you were going to start. This is the difference between the two of us. If someone said you have to make an adventure game, I'd probably spend five years worrying about what exactly the game was going to be and how I'd realize it. Tom is more like "I have an idea in my head and I'm going to run with it." It's a much quicker way of working.
Tom: I scribbled a few ideas on a bit of paper one evening, and the next day started drawing Lucy. Within a week I had a mockup of her bedroom and had her walking around. It was only recently people asked what her bedroom is based on, and Emma pointed out it's basically what I would have liked my bedroom to be.
I didn't have a set plan for exactly what every item was going to be and how it was used. I'd create an environment, add a set of shelves or drawers or something like that, and then add bits of dialogue. I'd start throwing stuff into it, and most of the time it would stick. Sometimes I'd end up going down a path with it that'd be weird or boring, but even quite important narrative parts have been born out of just putting something on the wall or having a character say something. Maybe it starts as a joke and I say, "What if that's a bit of backstory, how would this character react?"
I had basic narrative milestones, but in between, I've just meandered my way through. If you go back and visit my original notes, I'd wager it's nothing like the final game.
Q: British humor is a pretty specific brand, but your games also tackle serious subjects like COVID and murder mysteries. How do you balance those?
Tom: I think my natural way of viewing the world is through a slightly sarcastic lens. There have been slightly darker things in my games, but I try not to dwell too much on them. I've tried to stay away from particularly controversial topics.
Though there is one character in Lucy Dreaming, her brother, who has a penchant for hunting animals and mounting them on the wall. It's not a random trait, it carries through the game and there is a reason. But we've had reviews from people who say they don't like the hints of animal cruelty. You don't see anything, but I think that's the only topic that was not handled as sensitively as it could have been. Yet that would have been to the detriment of the narrative and humor.
A bit of me goes you can't please everyone, everyone draws that line of sensitivity at different places. If that's the worst I've done in over 11,000 lines of dialogue - most of which are bad jokes - I think I got away quite well.
It's very much a kind of love letter to my past, there are a lot of references to pop culture and British stuff. One scene is a sweets shop where there are hundreds of different hot spots with products you can interact with. None of them are actually brand names, they're knock-offs. If there's an opportunity for a bad joke, I'm putting it in there.
There are a few references to other adventure games as well, some people have said hundreds. It honestly hasn't, there are maybe 10 or 20 references - some of which are maybe a little too obvious. But there are also "references" people have spotted that aren't because I've never played them. In those cases, I just go "you got me." Did you like the reference? It's intentional. Did you not? Total coincidence.
Emma: I think your general demeanor is to balance the worst bits of life with humor, and your nature comes through in the game. You're not one for an overly happy story.
Tom: No, I don't really like a sappy ending. And the lens Lucy sees life through is not just mine, it's both of ours. Part of what made Emma doing the voiceover so much easier is when she saw a sarcastic line, she instantly knew how it should be delivered because that's how we talk to each other.
Emma: Yeah, it was very easy to go, "I know what she's thinking."
Q: That seems like a good segue to ask how you got together. Obviously, the long span of your marriage had a big impact here.
Tom: I'll leave you to this, I actually don't remember.
Emma: We both originally studied animation, but Tom switched courses to media design. We were at the same Uni, and I ended up living with some guys Tom had. He came back for a Halloween party, and they were all talking about this Tom - his nickname was Magic Tom at the time, because he used to do magic tricks.
Tom: Nothing too exciting, just card tricks.
Emma: At the time I was working at HOT Animation, the studio that made Bob the Builder and Pingu. It had been a long week, so when everyone was going out for a Friday night, I figured I'd have the house to myself with a hot chocolate.
Tom: Let me just add, she wasn't doing marketing, she made props and such. Much cooler than anything I've ever done.
Emma: And then Tom turned up at the door and I went, "You know what I'm going to go get changed, I'm coming out tonight."
Tom: Everybody loves Magic Tom.
Emma: So Tom moved down to London to work at ad agencies, and we commuted for quite a few years since I was in Manchester. Eventually, he moved up north, I started work in design agencies, and then we started a business.
Tom: And got married - but that's neither here nor there, apparently.
Emma: Since we'd already worked together a bit at different agencies, we figured we would see how it goes. We're still running that. People always ask, "How do you work together? How does that work?" Some people can't see it.
Tom: But I've been surprised how many husband and wife teams there are since we got involved with the adventure game dev community. Another three or four we know have released games in the last couple of years.
Emma: Not just adventure games either, it's quite an interesting thing.
Tom: Some people will say if we work together in the same room we'll kill each other. But for us...
Emma: We have very different roles, and I think that's really important. If we tried to do the same job, that would really not work at all.
Tom: Because you're not as good as me.
Emma: Basically. In your eyes, anyway.
Tom: In the last couple of weeks, we've started thinking about future game projects as well, playing with other ideas, and we're definitely planning to work on that together as well. I know, planning - my god. Some organization.
Emma: Tom, I think you needed this to be your creative outlet.
Tom: Lucy, yeah. Getting it out there. But I do think I've got a lot of that out of my system. At least I've created something, seen it through to completion. Recently I sent my brother a key for Lucy, and he sent me a photo of it downloaded on his Switch. It was Lucy Dreaming, and to either side was Mario and Zelda. Like, my god! That's amazing. I know it's just my brother's thing, but as far as I'm concerned, having it appear in the same menu as things I grew up loving - that's insane.
The whole idea of releasing a game was great, but having it on a Nintendo device makes it feel proper. You know what I mean? When the page went live on the Nintendo eShop as well, like it's actually happening. There's a Nintendo logo and then my game. That's official. That's magic.
Q: Emma, earlier you mentioned losing Tom in hours of work. But with both of you on this same project, how did you balance things like family time?
Emma: It is really hard. We had the lockdown, so our little boy was home too. He's eight now, and we've worked at home with him growing up. We're used to balancing things, but there have been times when the game was really tough. Two things in particular. One is that when Tom is doing dev and on a roll with something, he doesn't want to put it down until 4 a.m.
Tom: I want to put it down, I just haven't fixed it yet!
Emma: You know, I'd come into the office and ask whether he's coming to bed, but sometimes you have to know when to just shut the door and leave him to it.
Tom: I am aware I've been quite absent.
Emma: At times.
Tom: Well, not just physically absent, but mentally.
Emma: Yeah yeah, like he'll do a day of coding and then sit there looking very glazed.
Tom: Staring into the middle distance.
Emma: And I'll go, "Are you still coding in your head?" He's like, "Yeah. Yeah, I think I just worked something out."
Tom: "I'm just going to go back to the office to try it."
Emma: The other thing that takes a huge amount of time, in spite of our knowledge of marketing, I don't think we anticipated the community management side of things leading up to Kickstarter and launch.
Tom: It's intense, because you have to keep responding to keep things going, but you're not just dealing with your own time zone. I'd wake up at five in the morning and there would be 40 or 50 notifications from various channels. By the time I've dealt with some of them, others have replied...
Emma: It's a full-time job, and Tom will not leave anybody hanging. It's to your credit, but it's also a silent curse on social media. There's that feeling of the person I don't reply to, is that the person whose maybe the journalist that wants to talk?
Generally, I think we've balanced it quite well. Working together for a long time before this has helped. While there's work/life balance, we've also accepted along the way that we do work together - you can't then sit down, have dinner, and not talk about work.
Tom: A bit.
Emma: A bit. Because it's what you've been doing all day, so there's nothing wrong with having a conversation about it. Sometimes it's more stressful to go "we're not going to talk about work tonight" than it is to accept you'll talk about it. And if you've had enough, someone will say, and you move on to something else. The thing is, if you spend all evening talking about it and you've had a nice evening, that's okay as well.
Tom: I don't want to jinx future projects, but I know we've gone from a complete standing start to release on Lucy. Whereas now, we're not huge, but we are established. We have released a game, we're ticking up more and more followers every day. If we wanted to repeat a similar thing, we've forged relationships with journalists and other people in the industry. While I know we'll have to do a lot more work to release another game, I'm hoping...
Emma: We've learned stuff as well.
Tom: What's worth spending the time on, what isn't. Hopefully, we're now one step up on the latter, so next time is easier in some ways - as long as the game's good. That's the most important thing.
Emma: And our son provides two of the voices in the game. He was very excited. He hadn't had much experience with gaming or screens, then all of a sudden daddy is making a computer game. This is a big thing, and mommy's doing a voice. "Can I have a go?" But we told him if the voice recording doesn't work right and we can't use it, you mustn't be upset. But then we gave him these lines and listened to it, and we were both like "he's really nailed that."
Q: He's got a future.
Emma: It's been really sweet.
Tom: He tested the Switch version for me, and the iPad version as well. To his credit, he found some bugs and made little notes - if I do this, and this, and this, it breaks. Like, okay. His method on the touchscreen is just to go absolutely nuts.
Emma: It's like he's speedrunning.
Tom: Yeah, like he's trying to break it. It's good, except when he breaks it. Then it's annoying. But he was very excited to have his name in the credits.
Emma: And we've tried hard to not work past Fridays. We've had more weekends over the past few years than we've ever done.
Tom: But also more late nights. We've been balancing the other business as well, so that's taking up my time during the day, and like Emma said I like to respond to people. If I have clients emailing me, I have trouble concentrating on another project. That's the guilt, I feel like I shouldn't be doing this game - I should be doing "real work." So if I wait until the working day is finished, I can work on the game without feeling pressure.
Working late at night, even if it's absolutely knackering, at least gave me time to do it when I felt less guilty because it was "personal time" rather than time that belongs to other people.
The next one will be fine, much easier.
Q: Speaking of the next one, are you intending to stick with point-and-click games?
Emma: How much are we intending to say?
Tom: With adventure games, I love the balance - the amount of dev, the amount of storytelling, the artwork. I would be loathed to do something that was a complete departure from Lucy Dreaming because I think it wouldn't capitalize on what we've done and what I want to make. I think that's what people would expect, too. If I suddenly made a first-person shooter, people would start to wonder. Coming from our marketing background, as a brand, if Tall Story Games makes humorous narrative-adventure games and then suddenly we come up with a Doom clone, people will wonder what on Earth is going on.
I enjoy doing the pixel art, and that has worked really well from a practical point of view. It's nice, crisp, and clear on a lot of different screens whilst also being low memory. For mobile devices you have a download that's 275 MB, which is perfectly acceptable. If I wanted to do it in 4K, all of a sudden people are downloading two or three gigs, which is too much.
I like the low-res artwork, and I think I'm okay at it. I've never really done pixel art before.
Emma: You have done bits over the years, it's something you've definitely meddled with.
Tom: Sure, but I've never actually finished a picture. I've always loved the aesthetic. So anyway, there will definitely be another point-and-click. I've learned a lot about UI design in releasing this, and so I've been playing around with how I can be true to classic point-and-click games but also evolve it a bit. With Lucy Dreaming, you can use the touch screen on Switch, but you can also move the cursor around with the control sticks, speeding up or slowing down depending on which shoulder button you use.
Emma: But that's not optimizing the use of consoles.
Tom: No, exactly. Whereas if you look at something like Return to Monkey Island or Lost in Play, they make better use of the controls. I'm hoping to have a bit of a hybrid between those two, maybe flip between them.
Emma: Future plans are slightly under wraps at the moment, is what I will say. One thing at a time.
Q: Well, is there an intent to extend the operation beyond your family for elements like community management?
Emma: With our other business, we started looking at hiring people. Tom and I went out to dinner one night after being around an office, and looked at one another like, "Is this what we want to do?" At the moment, we don't want to grow too fast - that's quite important. We are not in the business of making high-earning games yet.
Tom: It's niche.
Emma: It's a niche market, and it had a great year last year with things like Monkey Island.
Tom: Then you've got Colossal Cave and Simon the Sorcerer. They're talking about a new Broken Sword as well. As a genre, there's a bit of a renaissance going on.
Emma: But you know, we're not making Among Us. That's not where we're at. We've got to do it carefully. So yes, there is the potential to get more help as we go along. That may become essential - it would be lovely for it to become essential.
Tom: The music we outsource anyway, and voiceover to a degree. At the moment, the only other thing I would consider outsourcing is some of the animation. Despite the fact I studied animation originally, I changed courses halfway through for a reason. I don't want that to end up being something where if I'm not enjoying them, they won't be great.
Emma: Down the line, there might be a conversation about artwork if we decide to go down a different road.
Tom: Exactly, if I want to do a non-pixel art game. I can draw, but I have a very distinctive style, so I'd maybe want to work with someone else. But the profit margin is so much higher when it's just me, once you start involving someone else it's like half your profits. When you're talking about something more niche, that's a large portion of it.
Q: Coming off your original launch, are you excited to see any particular reactions when Lucy Dreaming hits Switch?
Emma: Everybody says, "Is it doing well? What is success going to look like?" Actually launching the game was a massive success since so many indie games just don't even happen. Even Kickstarted ones; things happen. The big thing is, people have enjoyed it. Reviews have been lovely, we've been really lucky that they're overwhelmingly in our favor.
Tom: I was having a chat with Ron Gilbert earlier this week on Mastodon, which again is surreal for me, and he was talking about Thimbleweed Park. He said as a percentage, Switch and Steam are pretty much equal in terms of sales, but PlayStation and Xbox are only about 10 percent of that.
In terms of reactions, on Steam, we're still at about 100 percent positive reviews. I think a lot of people find it through the algorithm or friends who also like point-and-click games, so few people who like FPS or MMO titles are going to find it. I would expect the reaction on Switch will be similar to mobile in that people will be intrigued without knowing what it is, alongside those who are looking for adventure games and recognize it.
A certain number of people will give it a go because they like the trailer, so my guess is the reviews won't necessarily be 100 percent positive. But even with the wider demographic on mobile, we're still at four-and-a-half to five-star ratings on average. We've sent a few Switch keys out and the feedback has come back good so far. I hope that'll continue.
Emma: It is just wanting people to like it at the end of the day. Obviously, please go buy it so that we can make another one, but the satisfaction is you just want people to enjoy it. Plus, you get to see it next to Zelda.
Tom: Yes, I already peaked when my brother sent that screenshot. But going back, the main reason for creating it was I wanted to make something I would have enjoyed. If others enjoy it too, that's my level of success.
Emma: I look at having a child now, and younger people playing games are not discovering adventure games. I just think it's such a shame, you want to engage children in stories, yet when they're gaming that's not necessarily what they're playing.
Tom: Yeah, it's more endorphin-rush stuff.
Emma: When we've been to events, some who come sit down are younger players led by a parent who spotted it and said, "These are the kinds of games I used to play.." The child looks suspicious.
Tom: They'll instinctively sit down and put their fingers on WASD and the other hand on the mouse. We go, "Have you ever played a point-and-click game before?" "No." "Well, you're not going to need that hand." We sit down to explain it, and it's a much slower kind of game. There's no time limit, no peril, you can save and come back later.
Emma: Almost unanimously, they all get into it.
Tom: And the whole family would come, or groups of friends work it out together. Parents say, "Have you tried doing this?" You can see these lightbulb moments when they finally put a piece of the puzzle together. This 10 or 11-year-old girl playing it and going, "I know what to do!" I remember that from when I was younger. Being the first point-and-click game that someone has ever played and seeing them come away like "do you have any more?" I've had to get out my game jam game on convention floors.
Emma: That's the true joy.
Tom: That's just magic as far as I'm concerned. I'm hoping that if it's on something like Switch, it can open that up to more people.
One more thing. When our son was starting to test it, there's not really bad language - a bit of "crap," "bugger," things like that. I built into the settings a toggle to turn rude words off so that when our son was testing it, I didn't have to keep coughing. A couple of other people have tested it as well, some turn it off, and some don't. I quite like that feature, and it didn't take long to implement because there are only about 10 or 15 slightly naughty words.
Emma: I really enjoy that kind of family game. We got this lovely picture at Christmas where someone had gone on holiday and their uncle downloaded the game. They were playing on Steam, and the picture is this whole family sitting on the sofa because they all got so into it. Obviously, people want to play games on their own, but the fact that it can be something other people are involved with is lovely.
Tom: I think that's the most important thing for a first game as well. You don't necessarily just want units sold, just the money. You want to be building a brand, a reputation. You want people to be excited about the potential of another game in the future.
Emma: Which is also slightly terrifying, isn't it?
Tom: Yeah, no pressure.
[END]
Lucy Dreaming is available now on Mobile and PC, with a Nintendo Switch port releasing on February 28, 2023.