Thank Goodness You’re Here! How ‘the most northern game’ got made

Will and James, who provide voices for many characters in the game, say the distinctive script came naturally as they developed it.

“The more we worked on it, the more we started drawing out characters that just sounded more and more like us, because we’re doing it in our voices,” says Will.

The video games industry has been criticised for becoming more risk-averse and leaning into sequels and remakes as the cost of making blockbuster titles has increased.

James and Will admit that a lot of publishers were “sceptical” when they pitched their unique project to them.

“I think part of that was we were obviously trying to shirk traditional game design,” says Will.

“Tropes and genres and stuff. And it wasn’t necessarily super-clear what the game was going to be.”

They say the Yorkshire setting was a bit of a hurdle too.

Some of the bigger indie game publishers are US-based and Will says there are “assumptions about what Britishness is when you’re pitching for funding”.

“Colin Firth and the rain British,” says James.

“This is more like flat caps and whippets,” adds Will.

They eventually signed a deal with Panic! – the publisher behind mega-hit Untitled Goose Game, which cast players as a wildfowl on a mission to cause havoc in a small village.

The publisher helped them to get IT Crowd and What We Do in the Shadows actor Matt Berry – known for his deadpan baritone – on board for a bit of star power.

And they have made some allowances for an international audience.

“There’s subtitles for people from Yorkshire and subtitles for proper English – translation options for Southerners,” says James.

“If we wrote the script in the dialect and then recorded everything, we had to go through and then put the proper English in,” says Will.