We caught up with James Woodrow, one of the amiable folk from the brilliantly named Utopian World Of Sandwiches, the only indie dev with a name that makes us hungry. After a quick snack break, it was on to the questions.
- We’ve noticed a trend with gaming studios, particularly with indie studios, that they have a tendency to have rather obscure names. What inspired your studio name?
“When we started out, we had full time jobs. We talked a lot about the company and what we believe about games and how they can make the world a better place to live, about our ideals of how we wanted our working life to be.
We had all these analogies of how we wanted our games to be like sandwiches instead of four course meals; about how when someone who loves you makes a sandwich for you then it tastes like the best sandwich ever; how working in a sandwich shop would be more fun than working in a four star restaurant; how a sandwich is a really personal thing even though it’s made up of the same things your sandwich will be totally different from someone elses. So we are utopians and we have a sandwich based approach to game development.”
- Who makes up Utopian World of Sandwiches?
“I (James Woodrow) do the graphics, sound and game design, Adam is the technical brains and Sarah does the concepts and experience design. Sarah is my other half and Adam is a good friend. We live and work together in the Utopian World of Sandwiches.”
- Can you give us a run-down of your back catalogue?
“We’ve been doing this full time for about 6 months. Chompy Chomp Chomp is our first game. We have loads of ideas in the works though!”
- Chompy Chomp Chomp is insanely fun and a very unique idea, what was the inspiration behind it?
“We wanted to make a game to bring families and friends together. The best memories we have of gaming are from playing games with our friends. We wanted to create a game that people would have happy memories of playing. So we talked about the multiplayer games that we loved when we were younger and still love now, and thought about how we could create a game that captured those same feelings.
We talked about Chu Chu Rocket first. Then we talked about if you could have a cat and mouse style game which lead us onto Pac-Man. Sarah asked, “Does a multiplayer Pac-Man exist?” and we just kind of went from there. We also looked at Bomberman as that game has given almost endless hours of fun in my life and even the multiplayer parts of Billy Hatcher, that forgotten Gamecube gem.”
- What was it like developing Chompy Chomp Chomp? Is there anything in particular that you learned from this title?
“It was good fun. We learned a lot about working together and how to project manage future games. Probably the biggest learning curve has been the marketing side. It’s something that a lot of indies struggle with due to budget constraints but every day we learn to be more creative with our marketing and think of new ways of getting our games out into the world.”
- What are you currently working on?
“We are working on several prototypes at the moment, we like to play test them all and see what people like most. We are thinking of making our prototypes publicly available so that people can let us know what they think early on in the development process.”
- Do you have a dream title that you would some day like to work on?
“To be honest, Chompy Chomp Chomp was the exact game I wanted to make, in exactly the way I wanted to make it. We didn’t have a fixed idea of what it would end up being; it was a very fluid process. We were designing to a philosophy of fun and just playing our own game and enjoying it and putting in features that we thought added a lot of enjoyment.
I’ve done my time working in big teams in the games industry and it wasn’t really much fun. This is why I like working on smaller titles like this because that fluidity is lost when the development team grows too large.
So yeah, Chompies was my dream title really, I want every game I make to fulfil a part of what I have always felt can be achieved in games. As long as we can keep making games as the Utopian World of Sandwiches then I’ll be happy.”
- What is it that attracted you to game development?
“I’ve always wanted to work on games. Games just felt so engaging. I was always wondering how things were made, what lies just off screen. At a really young age I believed there was a little world in there and I just loved the exploration. The thought of giving that sense of wonder to someone else is just incredibly inspiring and is probably the reason why I try to design games to be enjoyed by all ages, so that young kids and big old kids like me can share the enjoyment.”
- Which games have particularly inspired you?
“We love simple retro games, with depth and character. I have never really got rid of any games or systems that I have owned so I have a huge collection which I use for ‘research’ and inspiration. The thing I love about retro is the gameplay has to shine through to provide the enjoyment. Time is not kind to many games, but it’s nice to go back to those ones you enjoyed years ago and find that they still have that something special. It’s these games that I love to analyse and to figure out why they remain so timeless. Some examples are Cannon Fodder and Sensible Soccer by Sensible Software who I loved as a kid.”
- Is there another indie game or studio that has particularly inspired or impressed you?
“It’s hard to pinpoint any one game or studio as direct inspiration. There are so many amazing indies out there right now. On the Xbox we’ve played a lot of Hidden In Plain Sight which is a fantastic local multiplayer game where you pretend to be NPCs and try and spot the human opponents. It’s an incredibly fun concept.
And I have a soft spot for the Apple Jack games because they have such a beautiful atmosphere and they’re so British; it kind of reminds me of the Spectrum era when there were bedroom coders making quirky British games. It’s that kind of quirk and personality that is often missing from big budget titles so it’s great to see in indie games.”
- How do you think publishers and the gaming community can help Indie developers?
“I think that it is mainly down to marketing and visibility that can make an indie game studio succeed or fail. If you love an indie game tell your friends, go on forums, talk about it – tell the world! Publishers…. I don’t know. In an ideal world publishers would be more open to letting developers keep their intellectual property. Publishers take a huge risk in funding a game’s development and they need a return but not wanting to let our IP go closes a lot of doors for us in the traditional publishing sense.”
- What do you think about piracy, particularly of Indie games?
“People will pirate games. There is no point in fighting it. It’s going to happen. I don’t view a pirated game as a lost sale as most of the time those people were never going to buy your game anyway. Pirates don’t think they are doing anything wrong, and any piracy measures generally inconvenience the paying customers who don’t deserve it.
We could spend a huge amount of time moaning about it and get nowhere. If we see piracy as a fact and put that energy into considering innovative and different ways to make money we’ll have a better chance of surviving as a business. We need some platforms such as the Xbox to catch up in terms of monetisation options for us to achieve this but we will do whatever it takes to bring happiness to the people who play our games. We are not in this business for the money. We want people to have fun playing our games, we do need some money to be able to do that, but fun will always be our main focus.”
- What should we expect to see from you in the future?
“The idea of sandwiches was that we would make small, simple, polished games, that are made with love and play tested with our friends and family to make them as fun as possible. We’ll be making more small, fun and colourful games with character and style. We’re looking at various platforms, and we design our games based on the context of how people will play games on those platforms, we let our players’ experience and emotions drive the designs of the games.”
- Any anecdotes you’d like to share about life in the indie studios?
“The most fun part of making Chompies was definitely play testing. We made all of our friends playtest the game every time they came around to the house, our close friends became major experts at the game. When we play tested with new people they had to come up with new interesting strategies to lose sometimes so that we could see what people really thought of the game before they got too annoyed.
We knew we wanted to make people swear at the game, because those moments of frustration always make the other people in the room laugh. We call it gamer tourettes, when you can’t control the words that you say, and they normally come out as crazy combos of nonsense. But one time the game made our friend swear in front of her two year old for the first time and she was so embarrassed. We felt bad and a bit proud at the same time, that the game had lowered her inhibitions so much.”
- What advice would you have for aspiring games developers or those who’d like to start their own indie studios?
“Spread your skills, but not too far. We started with just Sarah and me, but we realised that we couldn’t do the code ourselves. When we started working with Adam we could concentrate on doing the things we do best well. We find working in a team together means that we can focus on doing most things to the quality that we want to. If you are starting out, it is worth looking at your core skills and getting help with the things that you aren’t so good at. You always want to aim to make something exceptional, so if you know someone better than you at something get them involved.
It takes a huge amount of passion, drive and commitment. It is not easy. You need to be ready to change your plans at short notice, keep things as small as possible and make the games with the people who you want to play them in mind. Constantly ask for help and feedback, be open, honest and believe in yourself and what you are doing.”
Thanks for the interview, Utopians!
Make sure you check out our review of the absolutely nomtastic Chompy Chomp Chomp, available now on the XBLA and coming soon to PC.
