Strategy Informer: Okay, first could you introduce yourself please!
Nick Clarkson: I'm Nick Clarkson and I am the Senior Business Development guy at Team 17. It's a broad umbrella, I get my fingers in everything really! I've been in videogames for thirty-plus years now, and with Team 17 for just over two years although I did work with them back in 1995 on the original Worms with Ocean Software. I was with Ocean for nine or ten years. It's exciting now at Team 17, we've got a lot going on!
Strategy Informer: It's easy to forget that Team 17 are one of the oldest still-running developers around, particularly in the UK.
Nick Clarkson: Sometimes when we write stuff out I want to put "the world's oldest indie"! Certainly in the UK I think. It was held by the Oliver Brothers with Blitz Games, but sadly they closed last year. Team 17 formed in 1990, so it's knocking on a bit... as are some of the staff there! [we laugh] To be fair there's a lot of young talent coming through there too, partially because of the way we've changed our coding style. We've got our in-house propriety tech anyway, but things like Unity allow our new designers (fresh from the country's best universities) to come up with an idea and create a proof of concept straight away to show off! We've got all these designers creating rough-and-ready concepts quickly and that's just fantastic.
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Strategy Informer: That sounds a bit similar to what Tim Schafer's Double Fine team get up to with their Amnesia Fortnight sessions.
Nick Clarkson: We've actually done that sort of thing internally with proper game jams. They're a bit sporadic depending on our workload and the state of those projects at the time, but we encourage it. Two or three people of different skills will get together and just pop up an idea. This year we actually took part in the Great British Game Jam, and our game won! The game was Retry? and that's number one on IndieDB at the moment. It's a retro shooter-survival see-how-long-you-can-last game and we put it on yesterday. Because it's on Unity it's on Linux, Mac and PC.
Strategy Informer: I've heard nothing but praise for Unity from most quarters!
Nick Clarkson: It's just such a powerful tool in the way it gets you almost instant results. We've got very strong tech in-house but it's not instantaneous, you have to compile the code together to spit out something for you to play with. With Unity it's press and go. It's very good, we're big fans.
Strategy Informer: Now, Team 17 seem to be getting into publishing again, that's big news!
Nick Clarkson: I'm glad you said "again"! Back in the early days they published themselves and it was all mail order stuff and easy to do so, then they started getting publishers. Why are we getting back into it again now? I think because as we're an indie studio we've got good relationships with all the other indies, and we've got the capacity to take some games. We see hundreds but we'll only sign up with a handful. Of course we've got to look after our own stuff too like Flockers. Within a half year I reckon we could probably handle 5-6 titles at any one time. Any more than that and I don't think we're doing justice to everyone else. There are one or two developers that we're looking at right now [at Rezzed] that we're really keen to work with.
We're aiming for all platforms. We just signed our first mobile game, Hay Ewe, by Rocket Rainbow Studios who are made up of a load of guys who used to work at PopCap. Route to market is easy, it's easy to get on to stores now, it's getting noticed on those stores that's the hard work. Each deal that we do is different and we tailor it to the needs of each individual indie. If they want to handle the translations themselves, fine, but if needs be we'll handle that. It's a partnership - we don't want to own their IP, they've worked long and hard on it. Unless they pitch up and say that they've got no money and can they have half a million pounds then we might talk about the IP ownership, but generally the deals that we do we just want to help indies grow a sustainable business. At the moment some of them are working out of a converted garage with beans on toast to live on...
Strategy Informer: Just like the good old days!
Nick Clarkson: Yeah! Well what we want them to do is be successful so we can see what their next games will be like. You don't want to be in a garage eating beans for your whole life! We want them to be the masters of their own destiny, and we don't sign them up for long contracts - it's game by game, and good luck to them all in the future. We'd love to work with them again, but if someone waves a big cheque at them then all the best to them!
Strategy Informer: There definitely seems to be a parallel with what Andy Davidson did with Worms back in the '90s [he took his unfinished game to Team 17 in 1994 who immediately asked him if he wanted to publish it].
Nick Clarkson: Yeah, and Andy still gets the royalties with Worms! It's allowed him to go off and live the kind of life he wants to do. I'm not sure what he's up to right now but he's given us Worms and we'll be eternally grateful for it.
Strategy Informer: What has changed that's made Team 17 want to get back into publishing?
Nick Clarkson: [Nick has a think for a good long time] I think it's the ability to create games, and Unity might be part of that, where indie games are popping up all over the place. We've got The Escapists and that's just one guy, Chris, and he previously used to be a roofer! He's created this fantastic game using a third-party middleware bit of kit. The passion that these guys show, we want to help them channel that passion and their skills. If Chris had to then go off and do PR, marketing, sales, translations, that game wouldn't see the light of day for years. We offer ourselves as a service, we've done it ourselves and know how hard it can be, and we just like to be associated with some of those great games that are out there. We like to guide them too, for example they're all on PC but we might say that one would do well on next-gen consoles or handhelds, and just help them get going.
Strategy Informer: What drew you guys to The Escapists in particular?
Nick Clarkson: Numerous things. We like the look, the retro 8-bit graphics style, that was cool but it's the humour he's got in there as well. When you actually sit down and play it... he must have a massive spreadsheet with all of the "what if" responses, like "what if I'm that guy and I talk to that guy"... then that will be the response. It's also genuinely funny. I think everybody's watched The Great Escape, The Shawshank Redemption or Escape From Alcatraz at one time or another, and that prison break genre is just fantastic. The way he's mixed that with the humour is great. It's great to see our guys internally playing it in their own free time. One of our animators took it home and played it with his 15-year-old son, and teenage sons can be quite difficult of course, and they had a fantastic weekend just playing this game, laughing like mad at what was going on, and enjoying playing together. There's just something about the game that's inherently fun to play. Chris is also such a nice guy, we want him to get on the ladder and keep going. Just not to another roof! [we laugh]
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Strategy Informer: How involved is Team 17 in the making of The Escapists?
Nick Clarkson: We offer, and we like, to give our opinion on what's happening. One of our other games we're publishing Light, it's a two-man team and they're doing this stealth-mystery game with a strong narrative. After signed them up, we looked at the artwork and said to them "if you did this, this and this it would leap off the page a bit better". We like to go in and offer our input on what we think would make the game better. Sometimes we're wrong! They took us up on the art style thing, and they've tweaked it so there's more of an edge to it now. We do like to see regular builds coming through so we can see there's progress going on. As Chris is on his own [with The Escapists] and needs help with the music we've got a music department and we can plug them in to him. We do get involved but it's their project, we'll only suggest and give them a helping hand along the way.
Strategy Informer: Okay, on to Flockers then - Lemmings for a new generation?
Nick Clarkson: Yeah we're happy with the comparison, and if I could write one line to sum the game up it would be that. Of course Team 17 made the last Lemmings for Sony so we know all about it! There's definitely a large dose of Lemmings in Flockers as you can see. There's actually been discussion in the company about the level of blood 'n' guts in the game...
Strategy Informer: [laughs] I was going to say about that! Most bits are just over-the-top silly cartoon violence but there's a couple of really shocking moments, like a sheep getting impaled on spikes.
Nick Clarkson: You have to remember that they're cartoon sheep made out of pixels, but it does make people look up! We don't know where we're going with that. We're going to put the game on Steam Early Access late April to May time. We'll put it out with about 20 levels in it to get people's reactions to it, like did they like the blood, what did they want to see more of, etc. There are far more contraptions, like an anti-gravity device that attaches the sheep to the ceiling [note: I did see this later]. Some will get the chop, but hey! We'll put those in at various points. At the beginning they get shot out of a cannon, if they hit the anti-grav you can have sheep all over the screen, there's some nice little touches in there.
We're also using Steam Workshop and a level editor, which isn't quite as powerful as our own one but it's not far off. It'll be interesting to see what the community comes up with - the objective's to save the sheep, but I'd like to see one where the goal is not to save the sheep! You can complete a level with one sheep but the idea is to get as many as you can across to get a better rating. One thing we're toying with is a type of "morality meter" where if you don't kill the sheep you get halos and angels will sing, and if you do kill sheep... it'll recognise that you're a sheep-slayer! There's something very satisfying in the way the buzz-saws come down and just seeing sheep get obliterated... [I laugh somewhat nervously] maybe it's just me! Some people look and wince, some just look and laugh! But it gets a reaction, which is lovely.
Strategy Informer: That's probably the thing that people remember most about Lemmings really, the sickening violence. Flockers is in-house isn't it?
Nick Clarkson: Yes, in fact it's being made by a lot of the Worms team. Dave Wood is the producer and he's worked on Clan Wars and a lot of the previous Worms games. What you've seen today represents about five month's work, so it's been quick. Soon we'll be in Early Access of course, and then we'll be taking on what the community have to say.
Strategy Informer: Are those eight abilities going to be set over the entire game or will they be changed up?
Nick Clarkson: At the moment that's set. You have the Jumpers, the guys with woolly hats on, you have the Super Sheep...
Strategy Informer: The classic one!
Nick Clarkson: We actually had a meeting on Tuesday where we discussed if when you clicked on a Super Sheep whether or not it would play the fanfare! We'll see! There's definitely going to be other nods to Worms in there. If you look closely in the background you'll see that it's the Worms weapons factory, and moving around are some silhouettes of worms, there's a conveyor belt where a Concrete Donkey is being made. They're not integral to the game though. Then again, if the game really takes off in Early Access we'll see! Will the abilities change? Maybe, nothings set in stone really.
Strategy Informer: Of course the major thing it has over Lemmings is the physics system, like with that giant wheel that slowly sets off and crushes all of them.
Nick Clarkson: Yes, that's the technology we use in the more modern versions of Worms, but the designers are thinking "what can we do with this?" We're very pleased with it!
Strategy Informer: Is it possible to 100% the levels?
Nick Clarkson: Yes, in its own way. There are instances where you have to sacrifice a sheep - there are sacrificial lambs! ["Wahey!"] On a level where you know there will be two sheep who have to die and there are 30 in total it will tell you only need 28, and that is always possible to do. It brings quite a sense of achievement. I played one of the levels and I was convinced there was no way I could get that last sheep. I must've stayed at work until 8pm just playing that one level! Finally I did it and I went home happy.
Strategy Informer: How did Worms: Clan Wars do, especially with the Clans?
Nick Clarkson: Sadly not as well as we'd hoped. As a game it's probably the most complete version of Worms out there, at least on PC. Certainly post-launch the support for it was very good, there was bugs here and there and the team kept on top of it. We've purposefully moved away from Worms for this year, apart from Battlegrounds [the next-gen version ofWorms] which was already in the pipeline, just so we can regroup and see what we can do. Worms is 20 next year, so we're thinking what can we do for a Worms anniversary?
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Nick Clarkson: Yes but not at a cost of doing our own stuff as well. When we say "publishing" we see it as more of a sort of partnership. We're like an arm around an indie, helping them along. However never overstretching ourselves to the point where we can't provide the best possible service to those indies and our own titles. We'll continue to go along as we are. A handful of games at any one time unless we drastically up staffing, but the vibe within the studio as it is right now is just nice. There's a "can do" attitude, we've got a great mixture of old-school staff (one of the designers on Flockers has been with us since Worms United!) and some fantastic new guys that come in with fresh ideas and fresh ways of thinking. It's like a football team, you need the old heads in the mid-field driving it in, but then the legs and the creativity out on the wings! We're like that, and it's nice.
Strategy Informer: I have no idea what you just said, but I'll let you off. Thanks for chatting with us!
A big thanks to Nick Clarkson for taking the time out to have a hot chocolate and a chat with me, although apparently I was saving him from a worm-suit-shaped fate. Our preview of Flockers can be found elsewhere on the site and it's shaping up to be a fun sheep herdin'-and-murderin' simulator. Until next year's Rezzed when I'll undoubtedly chat with another long-serving member of Team 17, victory!
