Thank Goodness You’re Here! devs on their approach to comedy

“To be honest, the most difficult part is deciding how you actually interact with the characters. Because the player character serves as a kind of straight man for the comedy, it was difficult to know when their interactions with the townsfolk felt too involved. Also, because of the fairly flat visual presentation, it was tough to signal to the player who and what is important in a scene at any given moment. I think we circumnavigated this issue by making the whole thing a sort of send up of fetch quests, which meant we could be fairly hamfisted with ‘briefing’ the player.”

“Our approach to development is comedy first, and then tease out ‘gameplay’ from those bits. So, it usually involves us both drinking 4 tins of Stella a piece and screaming obscenities in a room until one of us says something funny (usually Will). We write good stuff in the pub. But then sometimes there might be a particular visual composition we’d like to explore, or a particular setting, and things are built out from there.”