Whenever it came time to add more things to the game, we’d go back to the list and see what seemed like it would fit. The list was mostly a bunch of slapstick cliches, things like “Steal someone’s glasses, they grope around on the ground for them” or “Cause a fight between two people”. So, we ended up borrowing a lot of tropes from stealth games, like giving our characters very limited vision, or having very discrete AI states for when characters had noticed something missing or had spotted the goose.įor the puzzles with more one-off conceits, we often drew from a big list of gags that we wrote up early on. After experimenting for a while, we realized that it was funnier when the goose tried to steal things when people weren’t looking than it was for the goose to just run up and take things. To create the core interactions between the goose and the people, we spent a lot of time iterating on how if felt to steal objects from a single character. We wanted players to have a lot of different things they could do with their goose body so that controlling the goose felt performative as though the player was controlling a puppet for an audience, even if that audience was just the player themselves.
The goose’s verbs are the things we thought a goose does: honking, running, moving their neck, flapping their wings.
For production, we just keep a big spreadsheet of jobs that needed doing. We used Blender for all the modeling and animation. So we decided to try to make a goose game. I remember the four of us deciding one afternoon that even if it didn’t work out, it would at least be very fun to work on for a while. But the more we thought about it, the more the concept seemed to make sense. The goose idea seemed to have very niche appeal, and like it would take too much work for a small team. We thought our real project would have to be something else. The idea made us all laugh, but it took a while for us to come around to the idea that we should actually make it. This made us imagine a game where you played as this goose that everyone is afraid of, going on a big rampage through a small village. People regularly have confrontations with scary geese? It seemed so silly. We didn’t know much about geese ourselves (there aren’t many geese in urban Melbourne), but as we looked into them further, we found out that people who live near geese are deathly afraid of them for some reason. This got us all excited because geese are very funny animals, even just visually. We also had some ideas about this character interacting with a range of everyday objects - the kinds of things you might find around your house.Īnd around the same time, Stuart posted a stock photograph of a goose in our group chat and said “let’s make a game about this”. I (Nico) had just started teaching myself programming, and had made some web-based drawing toys and the compass & straight edge puzzle game Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Geometry.Īfter finishing our last game, we knew that we wanted to make something where you were a third person character with a very expressive body.
#Untitled goose game tvtropes full
We expected that game to just be a hobby project, but people seemed to really like it, so after a while (and thanks to grant from our state government) it ended up becoming a full commercial release.īefore House House, Jake came from film & television. In late 2013, after a year of playing local multiplayer games, we decided to try making a videogame together, and began making our first game, Push Me Pull You. The four of us were friends before we started making games together. Kalonica helped with art and animation, and Cherie Davidson did additional programming. Working with us on the game were Em Halberstadt who did the sound design, Dan Golding who created all the music, including the incredible Debussy performances. The four of us designed the game together as a group, and I always see that as the main part of what we do, but my individual responsibility was for the game’s programming.
We made Push Me Pull You and now an Untitled Goose Game. I’m Nico Disseldorp, and along with Stuart Gillespie-Cook, Jake Strasser, and Michael McMaster, I’m part of House House, a small videogame company from Melbourne. Nico Disseldorp of House House sat down with Gamasutra to talk about how the idea of a mean-spirited goose captivated the studio, the accidental genius of their use of music in the game, and the appeal of a more kind-hearted cruelty in games. Untitled Goose Game is a stealth game of causing trouble around a peaceful town as an ill-mannered goose, honking and spreading mayhem wherever you go.
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