![]() I’d say the biggest lesson we’ve learnt through all of this is how to approach all those new challenges and meet them as a group, how to work closely with your best friends, how to argue well, and always find time to stop and have a laugh.”Īt the time of writing, Untitled Goose Game is the number one selling game on the Nintendo Switch in Australia and second only to the remake of The Legend Of Zelda: Link’s Awakening in the United Kingdom. I see the development of Untitled Goose Game as being a direct continuation of that learning process, and it was full of all sorts of hurdles that were entirely new to us. The whole three years of development, from starting out as four friends wanting to make something together over a summer, to getting Film Victoria funding, to moving out of our living rooms and into a studio space, to having to design menus, to getting it ported to PS4, to actually releasing it, was one huge learning process. “ Push Me Pull You was the first video game any of us had made. All these elements coalesced into the idea of a goose ruining an English country town fete.” We were also very interested in making a game about a community of funny characters, and really into 3D modelling very mundane, everyday objects. A 3D third-person single-player game, featuring a nice little expressive character with a wide verb-set that the player could puppeteer. We wanted to make something entirely different from Push Me Pull You. “As Push Me Pull You’s development was wrapping up, we had a few different ideas kicking around for game number two, and Untitled Goose Game ended up being a synthesis of a bunch of formal ingredients we were interested in exploring, and that stock photo of a goose. With Push Me Pull You, it was a sketch of two people joined at the waist having an argument, and with the goose game it was just a regular stock photo of a goose.” ![]() “ Untitled Goose Game started with an image that made us laugh. Now, two games later, Strasser and the rest of the team have learned to take simple ideas and run with them. A bizarrely compelling and hilariously uncomfortable multiplayer experience where players took control of fleshly beings with two heads which grew longer the more you played. In 2016, House House published their first title, Push Me Pull You. By the end, and helped in no small part by composer Dan Golding’s majestic piano score, Untitled Goose Game is undeniably perfect. The more quests that you complete and the more time you spend as the titular bird, the less it feels like you’re witnessing an experiment or in-joke. It takes a highly original, off-the-wall idea and somehow convinces the player within a matter of hours that it was always meant to be. But as the player settles into the waddling mechanics and waits patiently for a shop owner to turn their back, the game begins to feel absolute. At the beginning, the concept of controlling an angry goose seems almost dismissively absurd. The more quests that you complete and the more time you spend as the titular bird, the less it feels like you’re witnessing an experiment or in-joke.Īs more areas of the village open up, a strange, comforting vibe emerges through the game. The quests use vague hallmarks of a familiar stealth-game framework, but instead of stopping a nuclear war or snapping enemy necks, the goose runs off with a gardener’s radio, hides in delivery boxes or multiplies their honk on television screens. It is the only weapon that is present in the game as the goose crosses off completed quests consisting of stealing items, ruining lunches and generally disrupting everyone’s day. The goose’s vocals are used to garner attention, distract people and more than a few times, convey anger. The first action you take as a player in Untitled Goose Game is to honk. All that’s left for us is to tweet occasionally and wait.” Our publisher Panic is handling a lot of the nitty-gritty platform stuff for us, and builds are sitting on Nintendo and Epic’s servers ready to go. “I feel like we could have dropped everything earlier this week and disappeared into the bush and the game would still release okay. I think we’ve made something pretty special so I feel a little like a protective parent letting their kid out into the world.” I’m nervously excited to find out how those expectations are going to match up to the actual thing. It’s been almost two years since we first announced the game and realised how strongly people felt about geese, and how excited they were to play our game. “It doesn’t feel especially real,” Strasser tells me, “and I’m not entirely sure what to expect. I interviewed Strasser (who spent most of his time working on level design and environmental art) just prior to release, and he says the team of four developers at House House were eagerly anticipating the moment when everyone could get hold of their own version of the goose.
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