No Man’s Sky may be catching all the headlines recently, but there’s another British procedurally generated space game that’s looking to be worth your attention. Well, OK, it may not be in quite the same league as Hello Games’ increasingly impressive looking space opera, but Harry Howarth and Jon King of Midnight Launch Studios have been working flat-out on their indie debut The Only Certainty, and it’s starting to look very interesting indeed. Tom Francis, creator of the brilliant Gunpoint, who is working on his own space game Heat Signature (there must be something in the water, right?), certainly thinks so and recently tweeted the game out to his followers. After seeing the game at the recent Norwich Gaming Festival I spoke to Harry Howarth, who lives in the small seaside town of Lowestoft, about the trials and tribulations of learning to be a game developer out in the sticks.
Ready Up: You were showing your game at the Norwich Gaming Festival as part of the Norfolk Indie Game Developers (NIGD). Did you realise there was such a strong indie developer community in East Anglia when you set out making your game? How has it helped?
Harry Howarth: To be honest, when we started our little adventure into game development, we just focused on making our game and learning how to code. Shortly after coming up with a name for our little indie operation, we both got a bit more active on Twitter and during the course of random tweets one of the founders of NIGD randomly got in touch and pointed me towards the meet up group.
It was fairly small group back a couple of years ago. There were only 15-20 members I think. They put on meet-ups every month or so based around show-and-tell evenings, talks and Game Jams. I went to as many as I could but living in Lowestoft plus working full-time shift work prevented me from getting stuck-in in person. Plus, Jon lives in Essex so that was even less optimal!
Having said that, I really don’t think we’d be anywhere near as capable or connected with the Indie community if it wasn’t for NIGD. Simply talking to other members via Twitter has connected us to so many other fantastic people who’ve helped and inspired us, directly or indirectly.
RU: What are your impressions of the Norwich Gaming Festival?
Now it’s something akin to the lovechild of Don’t Starve and Monaco, assuming that love child watched nothing but Red Dwarf growing up
Harry: The Norwich Gaming Festival was not at all what we expected. We’ve only exhibited once before, and that was at last year’s NIGD Expo which was very much an Indie Game Expo for gamers and devs. We went into this one expecting another intense, non-stop experience but in reality, it was a much more relaxed affair.
That’s not to say it wasn’t busy, but there was less pressure overall. The entire day felt much more like an art exhibition of sorts, where fellow devs could just have their projects on display to the general public; an audience whose experience of gaming may just extend to Minecraft or the latest Call of Duty their children are playing.
And this was actually really useful for us because it allowed us to get feedback from people who are looking at our games with fresh eyes, untainted by the onslaught of the indie scene over the last few years. More importantly, it was a family event and we got a lot of young children playing our games, and they are really honest with their feedback.
Our highlight of the event was actually meeting up with the other developers who were exhibiting that Sunday; the guys at Utopian World of Sandwiches, Freekstorm, and Forgotten Ball dev Joshua Croft are all people we know and interact with via Twitter but rarely get the chance to see in person.
RU: You’re working on your debut game The Only Certainty. Could you sum up in your own words what the game is about?
Harry: The Only Certainty is a brutal top-down space exploration game. You are tasked with piloting the Epitaph, a ship whose data banks are filled with hundreds of years of history and knowledge from your now long-dead home world. Your only mission is to track down some remnant of humanity still alive within the depths of space, so that your home world will not be forgotten.
Sounds cheerful, right? We didn’t so much settle on this project, it sorted itself out as we watched on the sidelines, occasionally throwing chunks of code at it and hoping something stuck. Initially, we wanted to make a 2D platformer that crossed Mirror’s Edge with Spelunky and Castlevania. We’ve still got our concept art for that and going back to that project is our long-term plan, but because we were self-teaching ourselves code, that sort of project was far too ambitious for a first game.
So we went back to the drawing board, and we just taught ourselves basic code and eventually we got a spaceship moving across a blank level. We then got it to crash into asteroids and have things chase after it. And thus, the basic premise of The Only Certainty was born. From that point, it evolved from an RTS to an open-world survival game, and now it’s something akin to the lovechild of Don’t Starve and Monaco, assuming that love child watched nothing but Red Dwarf growing up.
RU: You mentioned that you’re based in Lowestoft, which is not particularly renowned for videogames production. Has working in such an isolated location been a help or a hindrance? Do you think it has influenced the game in any way (I’m thinking of the theme of the loneliness of space)?
Harry: Ha, I had a good laugh reading this question. Yes, Lowestoft is isolated. Very much so. It’s even worse if you don’t have a car (and even then not by much). Jon is London born and bred, and I’m a Northerner and proud. I hail from somewhere near Leeds, so we both come from urban sprawls and we’re both used to ease of travel and being surrounded by the vast press of humanity on all sides.
In terms of it being a help or hindrance, I guess it’s been a bit of both. On the one hand, it’s an absolute nightmare trying to go anywhere outside of Lowestoft. I miss London’s public transport and the Motorways of the North. Like I said above, this has contributed to me not being able to get to many Expos, NIGD meet ups and into London for meet-ups with fantastic devs on Twitter.
On the flip side: Twitter. I cannot understate how important Twitter is and has been. It’s been a lifeline, and has brought us together with some incredible people without us having to leave our houses. Plus living by the sea is sometimes harsh, but always beautiful and I can’t really complain in the end!
As for its influence on The Only Certainty, it’s not something I’d ever consciously drawn upon when coming up with the story for our game. However, as a writer I can’t dismiss this just because I didn’t overtly draw on it for inspiration. What we write always reveals more about the writer than we initially realise, and the more I think about it the more I’m starting to question just where my inspirations come from, so thank you for that!
RU: Do you think the development of videogames outside of the big urban centres like London is growing and is this important?
Harry: I think the development of video-games within the UK as a whole is becoming more prominent, and thanks to the explosion of social networking and meet up groups, it’s never been easier to find other like-minded people and make awesome stuff! Naturally, cities will always focus this growth and multiply it far more than in less populated areas, but because of the Internet I don’t think there will be much of a noticeable skew in favour of urban centers.
I think I’d underestimated the raw power of Minecraft as a catalyst for this continued growth until the Festival; almost every child that played our game said they wanted to make games, or their parents were actively encouraging them to because they played Minecraft and were creating things within that game. It was amazing to see, and even more incredible to be the ones encouraging kids and parents alike to get into game development.
Games are art, and I can’t wait to see what the game dev community looks like in a few years from now.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.