3rd May, 2018

Welcome to Ask Glitch, where we sit down with the Glitcher community in Discord and answer whatever questions they throw at us. We’ll be hosting these regularly so please join us at the next one!

“My Colorful Life” the book in the nursery in the Forever Lost asylum…Is Leanne Cullen a real children’s author? Or does the story of a deaf child relate to any of you gentleman’s story? Guess I’m just asking what the story on the story is.

Graham: Lianne is my wife 🙂 When Glitch first started we made some educational apps for kids, the first of which was an interactive story book called My Colourful Life, and for this Lianne wrote us a lovely little story that Simon could illustrate.

The story behind the story is that Lianne is British Sign Language user for her job as a Communication Support Worker in education.

And for the write up after the session I will most likely edit this when she tells me a better way to describe her job 🙂

Ok, so Simon is more the artistic side of things, Graham, are you a programmer/code writer/I don’t know computer words.

Graham: Yes that’s correct, anything in the game that looks pretty is done by Simon, and anything in the game that is broken or buggy is done by myself.

I’ve play tested 3 or 4 Pre-release builds now for you guys, and A Short Tale is one of my favourite Glitch games. Some may be surprised reading that!
I just loved the colourful vibe and the some of the puzzles were so good.
– What was your favourite puzzle and least favourite?

Graham: I really liked the Train of Thought puzzle in that game, generally any word based puzzles like that are probably my favourite. As for least favourite, I can’t think of any I didn’t particularly like.

I do get quite a few emails about how the voice activated remote in the game is broken because people are shouting the commands into their phones and it’s not picking it up, so I guess that’s also one I really like because of the mental images that creates but dislike because we maybe should have made that clearer?

Simon: You’ve been very helpful to us. Testing and helping to fix some very broken builds. 🙂
My favourite puzzle was the voice activated remote that Graham mentioned.

Any chance of you doing a live, video q&a?

Simon: I’m not comfortable in front of any camera, but perhaps Graham would like to?

Graham: We’d probably be terribly boring people to watch live, but if there was enough interest ( and we got drunk enough ) we could probably do something. I’ve been looking into Caffeine a bit recently so that could be something we’d do in the future – https://www.caffeine.tv/

Have you been tempted to make a ‘The Room’ style game yet?

Simon: According to many reviews, some of our games are similar to The Room games already. I personally don’t see it. I couldn’t make anything that pretty.

Graham: You mean a game that’s wildly successful worldwide earning its creators financial freedom? We’ve certainly tried… 🙂

What game do you guys wish that you had made?

Simon: This is a hard question and I don’t think I have an answer.

Graham: Tough question. I guess I’d have loved to have worked on the Monkey Island games, however if that happened I’d also now be considerably older than I am so that’s less fun.

I picked up on the Breaking Bad references and the ( I think ) Half Life references in the games, but are there any other pop culture references that I might have missed?

Simon: Our games are full of pop culture references. So, if they’re the only ones you can think of, you’ve missed loads! 😀

Graham: There are quite a few in there, lots of TV shows, music, movies, books. We pretty much litter the games with them, however they are also relevant rather than just things we like. One day we should probably list them all like a word-search.

Why do all the TVs say that there’s never anything on? Do you guys hate tv?

Simon: It is a lot of hassle to create something animated for an in-game tv. So it’s just become a running joke.

Graham: It’s considerably easier to just have static than an actual TV show 🙂

The educational app, My Colourful Life, sounds very interesting!    Graham, did you and Simon study creative writing or literary analysis?  Your plot, characters, literary elements, use of atmosphere and suspense etc. are just amazing; you are so talented. The stories and characters you create are so memorable and thought-provoking!!!

Graham: We learned everything we know in regards to literary analysis from the streets, no formal training of any kind.

Who is behind the quotes always written on the walls?

Simon: The quotes are from both of us, but I’d say mostly Graham.

Graham: That’s mainly because that’s something I can do that doesn’t require art skills, I just list a bunch of things and then Simon writes them on the walls.

Would you guys be down for having a competition to get a loyal Glitcher’s name in the game somewhere?

Simon: We’ve actually discussed this. Any suggestions?

I think a Mastermind competition would be good… and the chosen subject is …. “the complete works of Glitch Games”

Simon: Graham and I would suck at that category on Mastermind.

Hi all, question for Simon. I know that graham uses Corona, but you with which design tool do you use to create the sceneries ?

Simon: I use Blender to create the 3D scenes and then edit them in Photoshop after.

If you guys weren’t designing games for a living, what would you be doing?

Graham: I’d like to think I was doing something else as creative yet equally foolish as a way to make money, like novel writing or something.

Simon: I also like being creative and I couldn’t imagine being in a profession where I’m not. If not, something active. Maybe I’d build myself a gym or something.

Which one of you monsters conjured up the final puzzle in Short Tale? It gave me grey hair.

Simon: I can’t even remember what the final puzzle was in A Short Tale.

Graham: Haha yea sorry, I can’t remember which puzzle that would have been, however I have an inkling a train was involved?

Simon: I think the reason that most people struggled with that puzzle was because the train was used for 2 puzzles. If it had been used only for the final puzzle then I think it would have been easier.

Bit of a random question, but do you guys find other puzzle games easier given that you’re in the business of making them? If not, which games did you find particularly tricky?

Graham: I never seem to find enough time to play many games however when I do I find most of them harder as they’ve yet to steal the Glitch Camera.

Simon: I don’t really play many escape games. I used to play a few but I find that doing so can hinder my creativeness.

Can we see Graham’s stick figures?

Graham: It’s probably for the best that these have never seen the light of day. Somewhere I have notebooks full of puzzle ideas etc however as I’ve recently reorganised my office one part of that was moving all the filled up ones away from the desk.

We also have loads of much better sketches and plans from Simon as well.

I think at some point we’ll grab a bunch and take some photos of them for a sort of Behind the Puzzles: A Glitch Game Retrospective style blogpost.

Simon: Tbh, my 2D drawing is only fractionally better than yours Graham.

Graham: We’ve all seen Ferris.

Simon: Exactly!

You two are so modest.

Graham: He’s more modest than I am. He’s the most modest, I’m terrible at being modest.

How do you balance your time; family, friends, work, play, etc.? Also, how did your family’s respond when you told them this was your career choice, and launched your first game?

Graham: It’s hard, I’m not going to lie, but I guess it’s all about priorities. We’re lucky in that the job we have allows us to spend time with those aspects of our lives when we want, but that’s only because we probably didn’t spend enough time with them for the first couple of years of Glitch.

Lianne and the rest of my family have always been incredibly supportive of my desire to make games so that’s never really been a problem, no matter how silly a career choice it can be at times.

Simon: Right, where do I begin.

I don’t think I do balance my time well enough. I usually always want to be working and because of that I don’t get enough sleep etc. So recently I’ve been forcing myself to turn my laptop off by 8pm and then make sure I’m in bed by 10pm

When I told my family I was going to set up a company called Glitch Games, a few members of my family tried persuading me to get a ‘real job’ and even though we didn’t do amazingly well with our first few games, I’m glad it worked out in the end and they supported me regardless.

Graham: Yea I am by no means great at this still, it’s sort of the curse with working at home. It can be hard to “switch off” knowing your office is just around the corner. You’ll be watching a film or something but somewhere in your mind will be this little voice saying “you should probably be working, go on, you know you want to, your laptop is right there…”

Simon: Exactly. I think that is a huge benefit to having an external place of work that isn’t your home.

Graham: I guess I could upgrade my shed.

Will there ever be anything else about Forever lost? If so, can you give us a ETA. And please don’t say maybe.

Simon: Perhaps!?

Graham: Personally there are two things I’d absolutely love to do with the FL games, the first being a sort of “director’s cut” re-release of all 3 games, plus Cabin, fully remastered into a single game. However, that would take a crazy amount of time for just the two of us and so probably wouldn’t happen unless we actually went looking for some funding.

And the second thing would be Forever Lost: The Movie, and then as with the director’s cut version of the game, that’d have the same issue.

So I guess the answer to the question is, “potentially?”

Simon: I think Ep3 rounded off the series nicely and I would hate to ruin that by creating another episode for a pay-cheque. However, like Graham said, there are other options we could do with the series.

Have you ever considered doing a Forever Lost game from the position of the people watching Jason?

Simon: That’s an interesting idea, but it’s very hard to even think how we’d incorporate any gameplay or puzzle based interaction into the game considering the people ‘watching’ Jason created the puzzles.

You made Cabin escape about Alice but you never elaborated on it. Can we expect anything from Jason and Alice again?

Graham: I feel we did elaborate on her throughout the whole series really?

Simon: If we were ever to do another game related to Forever Lost then this would probably be the way we’d do it. A side game focusing on another character in some way.

Graham: Yea another side game could be a possibility.

Was Forever Lost 3’s story rushed or did you always plan on ending it that way?

Graham: This one is a simple question to answer; we had the ending planned right from the beginning.

In FL1, in the first room, there is the box that stores the camera and written on the wall is “LOOK INSIDE”, but in FL3 when you ( spoiler alert ) get back to that very same room you see that it actually said “LOOK IN SIDE” and there is a little secret hatch with the tape player.

There was also flashbacks of the tape in FL1, 2 games before you pick up the tape in FL3.

Simon: Rushed? :-0

Graham: I wish we knew how to rush these things, we’d get games out quicker.

When will All That Remains chapter 2 come out?

Simon: Hmm, It’s hard to say. Since we can only work on one game at a time and we’re currently working on Veritas, it certainly won’t be this year. However, we do already know how the story will progress and end.

Graham: I guess all that remains is for us to actually make it.

Honestly, you guys make what you want when you want. We trust that it will be amazing every time. Hey Simon, you’re into running, how many days do you need to be running each week to get into half marathon running.

Simon: I wish I was more into running, I’m quite tall and my joints can’t take it anymore. My girlfriend runs regularly and she usually runs between 10 and 15k twice a week in preparation for a half marathon. Any more than that and she usually ends up with an injury.