“You’ve got to go weird or go home!” Yorkshire Gubbins Developer Charlotte Gore tells all
“If you’re an indie dev and playing it safe, you’ve already failed. You’ve got to do something completely insane. So I’m going for completely insane!”
Last week we spoke to Charlotte Gore, creator of Yorkshire Gubbins, a PixelArt game set in God’s country. Ahead of her talk at this week’s Leeds Continue event, Charlotte takes us through her land of broken robots and whimsy. She tells us about her experience as an independent developer and as a woman in the games industry.
NVF: How did you get into developing?
Charlotte: I’ve got 10 years professional Javascript experience — I was a Web Developer and I realised I could probably make games with that. I’d had enough so I started doing Game Jams. Yorkshire Gubbins is the first time I’ve managed to get a full commercial project together. It’s taken me a few years to figure out what kind of Game Developer I actually am. I figured it out last year and that’s where Gubbins came from. My background is quite unorthodox; I had the skills for it and it occurred to me one day I could try it — I just got lucky really. There’s no specific path really!
Did you develop Yorkshire Gubbins off your own back, or was it alongside a company?
It was all me. A few years ago I had an idea off the back of another game, that I wanted to have Yorkshire robots. These Yorkshire robots were going to have this thing about them — they weren’t going to be fancy Japanese robots, they were going to be made from broken parts, not quite right in the head. The only people that would use them were old people, and young people think they’re naff and boring. Down to earth robots. That concept kind of stuck.
This game has so much back story but the original game didn’t go anywhere. The idea was always ticking away in the background, the idea of making a game that looks like where I live. I look out the window and I see dry stone walls, beige buildings and it just occurred to me that no-one has used it as a backdrop. I couldn’t understand, so I was determined to put it into a game somehow. The idea of creating an adventure game where I could bring in stories, characters, narratives and dialogue; once I figured out a genre that worked for it, it fell into place. I tried to shoehorn it into other things here and there but this is the first thing that has actually worked.
What was your top priority in the game?
I guess, tone. It was all about tone for me and I’d like to say comedy — but it’s hard! If I can do it, that’s a brilliant niche to have as an indie game dev, because comedy is so hard. Games writing in general is quite hard, taking it to the next level is really hard. For me it’s all about tone and humour, about characters and the dialogue. I’m not so fussed about puzzles. I don’t think people care about puzzles so much. For me it’s all about the entertainment, like people can sit down on a Sunday afternoon, spend a couple of hours playing this little, funny game that’s just different. I like that, it’s a space that I can live in that I feel comfortable in — it feels like it’s my voice, uniquely my stuff. Everything else I’ve ever made is about me doing some random game that doesn’t feel like it’s mine.
So where next for Gubbins?
It’s still going — I’m adding more content to it as I go along, I’m not charging people any more for the extra stuff. I’m in audience building mode — I need to have an audience for this sort of thing. Adding more content means that other people who already have Yorkshire Gubbins will get the new content and hopefully they’ll talk about it and spread the word. By the end of this month I should have Professor Ooo and the Buttons of Doom added, which is an extra half hour of content. It’s vaguely based on Doctor Who because the new Doctor Who is from Yorkshire. We’ve also got Adventure Jam coming up, which is a two week ‘make an adventure game’ jam, and it was the event last year that started all this for me. I was making a VR project and I wanted to do PixelArt again, so I did the jam to see if I could make an adventure game using PixelArt. It went down really well and people liked it.
Every other thing I’ve made, I’ve thought I was doing the right thing but I didn’t know and there were always other examples that I thought had done it better, whereas with this I felt for the first time in my life I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew I was doing different to everyone else. Having never made an adventure game before I suddenly felt like I was an expert — I know I’m not, and looking back I sucked! I can’t believe I was so arrogant!
I’m doing AdventureJam again this year, but rather than just make an adventure game, I’m going to try and push the envelope a bit. The technology I have means that potentially I can make a musical, like actual theatre. The whole thing will be sung, with loads of different songs, yet still be an adventure game. If it works, it might be the first time anyone has ever done that. I don’t think there’s any other musical game — there are games with music in, about music and rhythm games, but no-one has made a musical yet. I’ve got all the tech, got the actors, I just need to come up with a story and some music for it.
I’m going to keep adding to Gubbins and I think I’m going through an experimental phase. I think, these days, you’ve got to go weird or go home. If you’re an indie dev and playing it safe, you’ve already failed. You’ve got to do something completely insane. So I’m going for completely insane!
You came from quite an unusual background, what advice would you give people coming from different backgrounds who maybe didn’t learn programming or coding in a conventional way?
There are so many different ways to make games, so many different types of games and so many tools. If you have programming skills it’s a bonus, but if you don’t it’s not a barrier. It depends what you want to do. One of the areas I’m weak on — I know I’m weak on it because I haven’t focused on it at all — is thinking up new ideas and creating new game mechanics. Some people are naturally good at that, I’m not. If you’re that kind of person, there are so many ways in which you can implement those ideas. If you want a job in the games industry, you’re going to need to pick a thing that you want to be good at and find a way to use that. If you want to make games for yourself, you can learn — anything I needed to learn, I Iearned by Googling it.
There are no real barriers. I would just say, don’t make just anything. You need to find things that you feel like you were put on the earth to make. It doesn’t matter what medium or genre it is, as long as that’s how it feels then you’re doing the right thing.
It sounds like you’ve got to that point now
Yeah, I’ve got there. I enjoyed doing game dev, but I felt like an imposter, like I didn’t know what I was doing. Now I feel like I know what I’m doing, even if I don’t.
Do you think that certain groups — including women and minority ethnic groups — are underrepresented? As a woman in the games industry, what has been your experience?
In terms of under-representation, obviously there is a huge gender imbalance in the industry at large. I go out of my way to support other women devs. So from my point of view the industry is full of women who are doing amazing things, but it may be that they’re not quite that visible.
Part of me doesn’t know if, hypothetically Yorkshire Gubbins was made by a guy would it have sold more copies? I don’t advertise myself — I try to make the games about the game and not about me. I use my company brand, Stairfall Institute, and I don’t publicise that my work is made by a solo female dev. I try and avoid all that spectacle. I personally have been very lucky that I’ve never had any problems of any kind. I know so many people have and if the greater internet decides they don’t like you then that’s it. Fortunately that’s never happened. That could be because I don’t make a big deal about who I am, I want it to be about my work and forget anything like that.
Maybe that’s a mistake on my part? Maybe letting people know who I am would help them understand the game better, but I don’t think so. I like to let the work speak for itself.
I wanted to briefly speak about EGX Rezzed, could you tell us about what Rezzed tries to achieve who it’s aimed at?
EGX Rezzed is a big convention that ranges from big games publishers — X-Box and PlayStation level — down to indie level. This year’s indie presence was huge. It’s stalls aimed at consumers; lots of exhibitors go in there to promote their own games. The section I was in is called Leftfield Collection, which is curated by David Haywood. That bit is to showcase weird, creative, different, diverse stuff in gaming. It’s stuff that isn’t necessarily very corporate, hasn’t necessarily got much commercial value, but has more artistic value. For me, Rezzed is the Leftfield bit — every time I go to Rezzed as a consumer, that’s the bit I’m interested in because that’s where the really weird, creative stuff is. I guess that’s me, as a dev I’m looking for stuff that’s inspiring, different and impressively weird.
I didn’t mean to be this way, I used to be much more corporate than this but I’ve become much more about the art of game dev, which is a surprise to me. I think when you start making ‘arty’ games, you end up having to open your mind to a lot of things.
That seems like a similar story to many people in the industry; people don’t necessarily plan to go in the direction that they have done.
Yeah, I mean — Gubbins lives in a very strange space. It’s a point and click adventure, which automatically puts off a huge swathe of people who wouldn’t want to play it, but it does attract others. Gubbins is sat on Steam at the moment with 100% very positive ratings — everyone who has played it has given it a thumbs up, which is ridiculous! That’s partly because it does live in its own little bubble, it’s not attracting random ad hoc purchases from hardcore gamers. It appeals to people who aren’t necessarily ‘normal’ gamers — older people and kids, men and women, people all over the world. The people who are willing to sit down and play it, enjoy it — there are a lot of people who refuse to play it, and that’s fine. It’s for people who appreciate whimsy and stupid things.
You’re going to be at the Continue event in Leeds on the 27th of April, can you tell us what you’re going to talk about?
Honestly, I haven’t thought! From a cultural point of view, I don’t really know if what I’m doing is necessarily ‘cultural’. I think it is, in that I make local based games. I can see why you came to me. But if you were to ask me if my games were art, I would say no. To me they are my art, my art is making these games, I just don’t feel like they are high art. Anything that has that many jokes in it can’t be high art — it’s low art!
We need that though, not everything has to be serious. Not everything has to be about big grand emotions and big dramas, I want to get away from that. So many games are about the world ending; a lot of indie games are on very serious topics — and there’s a space for that and they’re needed, and they’re welcome — but I’m making something different. The world is just so flipping awful that we need an escape — my games are escapism in a different way. They’re squishy and humorous.
I steal from sitcoms I suppose, if you look at sitcoms over the years there’s all these characters and relationships that we haven’t explored in games. Most of television has been ignored in games. We end up setting games in generic forest world, generic ice world, generic space world. We do it and don’t even think about it. Why not look out your window and see what’s actually out there — make a game about that! Why is that such a radical thing to do? To me that’s the most natural, obvious thing to do. It’s what artists, writers and creatives of all kinds and mediums have always done, but not in games.
That’s really interesting to hear about your idea of art. Gubbins seems like it is art, but in an unpretentious way. You don’t see yourself as an ‘artsy’ person, but others might see it in a different light.
The way I see myself culturally — the best metaphor I can come up with is that I feel like a folk singer, going around with a guitar doing gigs. That’s where the art is, the people I connect with and the relationship I have with people. Is that art? I don’t know! It’s not pretentious, I’m definitely not avant-garde or even post-modern.
I’m trying very hard to stop being ironic all the time, which is difficult. The most pretentious thing I do is, I describe the art of my games as ‘neo-impressionist pixelism’ — basically as a joke. The art is very, very low resolution — if I want to represent something I can’t really do it in detail, I have to do it with colour and shape. Technically that’s what impressionists do, so I call it neo-impressionist pixelism. If I’m talking to a normal person, that’ll be a joke. If I’m talking to an arty person, they’ll take me seriously.
If you want to check out Yorkshire Gubbins, it’s available on Steam now. Come and see Charlotte speak about her experience as an indie game dev this Friday 27th April at our Continue event at Headrow House, Leeds.
