As part of the Yorkshire Games Festival Reception event, Game Republic hosted a Fireside Chat with Coal Supper – creators of the brilliantly funny surreal game Thank Goodness You’re Here! set in the Yorkshire/ Northern town of Barnsworth. The event supported the launch reception of the Yorkshire Games Festival that rand from 12-23rd February in Bradford and formed part of the Game Republic events programme for 2025 supported by our Official Partners Red Kite Games and Barclays Games and Creative
Thank Goodness You’re Here! is an absurd comedy slapformer set in the bizarre Northern English town of Barnsworth. As a traveling salesman, take the time to see the sights and meet the locals, who are very eager to give you a series of increasingly odd jobs…Founded by Will Todd and James Carbutt, Coal Supper is a creative studio from Yorkshire, UK focusing on playful hand-drawn experiences. The studio’s debut title, The Good Time Garden, was launched for free on Steam in 2019, and since then they’ve been hard at work on Thank Goodness You’re Here!
Here are some of the stories James Carbutt and Will Todd shared during the interview with GR’s Jamie Sefton…
Did you expect the game to resonate so much with players here in Yorkshire and around the world?
Yes, it was a massive surprise that worked out. Yeah. I think in America, we especially were worried because quite a lot of the audience for games is in America. So, it was in our financial interest to get that audience and when we decided not to, we were a bit worried, but I think it worked out in the end.
So, how did you meet each other and how come you know each other? You’ve known each other for quite a long time, haven’t you?
Yeah. High school. Childhood enemies, comrades, colleagues. It was enemies to friends. We went further to school, and then we got closer and closer and then we went our separate ways to universities, took our separate disciplines, but we always wanted to work together. I was always into animation, but we never quite had the skills, then we eventually just about had enough skills to cull together our first game, ‘The Good Time Garden’. It was so rewarding that we kept on going.
‘The Good Time Garden’ really nailed that hand drawn art style. So, James, as you did the artwork, how did you come by that art style? Have you been inspired by different artists?
It’s inspired by the stuff that I watched growing up, like ‘Adventure Time’ was a big influence for me. Obviously, I was a bit older when I started watching that. But, also, just the weird little creatures I would draw in my lecture notes, when I was supposed to be paying attention. I didn’t really draw anything with that scale until ‘The Good Time Garden’. I think it was working with Will that was so inspiring and that’s when it really started developing.
So, Will, how did ‘Coal Supper’ come together? When did you decide, you were going to start making games?
So, like Jim says, because it was outside of our studies or jobs when we didn’t have the higher skills there, it stumbled before it really started. But then we just tried it enough times, and we decided let’s not do a game, let’s not start with a huge concept. Let’s just get a little thing moving around. So, I drew a weird little pink goblin thing – that’s the first time I drew. It was on a loaf of garlic bread. So that was a concept art and then we just stuck with it. It was supposed to be a weekend thing, but it took a better part of a year, part time. But there’s something about that immediate feedback of getting a thing walking around. It was just really engaging and hooked us and kept us going for the whole time. We didn’t have the luxury of figuring out what’s worth doing. So, just the first ideas we had, we just carried forward.
In fact, I went home the other day and found, like, an A4 piece of paper that was from that time. There was, like, I guess, the design document, which just had like ‘butthole man’ and then ‘butthole tree.’ In a way, it was nice because it was an uncomplicated way of doing things.
“I think we were putting, first and foremost the tone of voice. I don’t know if we were able to, at that point, put it into words. What we just did instead was create a conceptual demo. It was this intense distilled version of what it was we were trying to evoke. We knew why and how that would work and how to create this feeling of unease but humour too. We just knew certain things we were interested in, like, weird compositions and interactive vignettes and the ability to go down alleyways and through tunnels and tubes and stuff.”
‘The Good Time Garden game’, which was free, was described as a ‘throbbing pink world’ I mean, you just enjoy that kind of silly seaside postcard, knock about sort of silliness, don’t you? I think you mentioned Vic and Bob as being a big influence on that surreal silliness and they’re northern as well.
Yes. ‘I think, with ‘The Good Time Garden’, it was a lot more free form, and we had a lot of ideas that didn’t really make it into the game because we we’re doing this straight ahead approach of we just write out the bullet points, and then we fully animate and then realize it is going to be a lot more complicated. We wanted to create a complete package, so we scoped it back down again.
When it came to doing ‘Thank Goodness’ It started off being called something else and it was visually very different as well. We got to a point where we were doing pre-production, we got the money, and we still didn’t really know what it was that we were supposed to be making. Then the one night I I was looking for inspiration and I went home and just finished all ‘Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out’. I came back and was like let’s do this.
So, was it set in Yorkshire from the beginning?
Nope, we never decided where it was set, really. We were voicing these stupid characters back and forth to each other it was in our accents and so we decided these characters are from Yorkshire.
Did you sign with Panic quite early in the process?
Yeah. We had a demo, and we had an overcooked pitch deck with custom art on every page and that was the thing that got us in the door.
I read somewhere that you you went to 80 publishers. Is that an exaggeration?
That’s right Yeah. A few of them didn’t respond a few of the bigger ones didn’t respond. I had endless email chains of people who just couldn’t see the vision.
Did you get any pressure from any of the publishers wanting it to be a social multiplayer game or anything like that?
I think early on, when we didn’t have as much confidence in ourselves. Some publishers would ask things like, ‘well, can you make it can you make it eight hours long instead of six?’ I think it was only when we met Panic and some other publishers, we got our confidence and we’re like maybe we’ll be alright here.
Where did the slap come from? It’s such a silly kind of playful, quite violent way of having a main character interact with, other characters.
It was just a very simple, easy, meaty way to get you to interact with the characters. I guess it was also a handover from ‘The Good Time Garden’ where you could slap, pick up, and then water things with your nostrils.
‘Thank Goodness You’re Here’, it’s your kind of self-contained world, isn’t it? You don’t invite anyone else to to write or anything, do you? Is it just purely you guys that write it?
Yeah. We are quite tyrannical with the dialogue, and we know exactly how it’s supposed to sound. We give it a very specific direction. There’s a bit of room for improvisation with some of the cast because they’re all largely just from the comedy circuit. But that has challenges because we’ll get someone in, and they’re just riffing. We’re in hysterics, but then you come to listen to it back and don’t know how to put it into the game.
How did you kind of cast the characters? Did you did you often have voices in in mind for the different characters?
So, I think there was one where we had Jon ‘Log’ Blyth – we had his voice in mind maybe when we were writing the lines. When he sent me the first line reads, I genuinely was in tears. I mean getting Matt Berry too was amazing.
So, with a lot of the game and the tasks involved, which there’s some surreal and strange stuff going on like the sausage man. How did you come up with the tasks? On your talk you said you gave up on puzzles. Is that right?
The process starts with us saying the stupid voices to each other, and then we loosely build a sketch around that. Then it’s sketch comedy and we think how do we make this into gameplay. So, it was a very tenuous, painful process. We started with the gag first and then built out what’s the punchline of the thing that you do. So, it was like mainly built around the beats of the joke and loosely putting that into a structure.
It’s difficult to make a funny game because of the kind of timing and the fact that you have a character that is controlled by the player. Were you quite daunted by that?
Yeah. I think we just know when to give the player control and when to take it away from them and knowing when their input makes it funny and when their input won’t.
We must mention as well, Pip who works on the animation with you, and she’s done a wonderful job of bringing these characters to life. I mean, her contribution is huge as well, isn’t it?
Yeah. She’s incredible. She has a beautiful way of making characters move, and the way they moved informed how we wanted them to act and then how they acted, informed how we wrote. So, it was nice circular process.
I think this will be the final question I ask you guys, but can you talk a little bit about advice for new companies wanting to create a game?
After getting noticed, I suppose, I think, crucially, you need to have something that you’re saying. I think that’s super important. I think you can push games from an orthodox approach or just mechanics first. I think that’s fine and interesting stuff comes out with that. But if you’re going to do it our way, you need to first think about what’s the underlying vibe. It’s all vibe based, really. I think that that is so important, you must understand the creative choices you are making and what decision fits with the feeling that you’re trying to evoke and the vibes you are trying to create. Also, what’s the thing that’s special about your game? You should be able to answer that question in my opinion.
What did you say about what was special about ‘Thank Goodness You’re Here?’
I think we were putting, first and foremost the tone of voice. I don’t know if we were able to, at that point, put it into words. What we just did instead was create a conceptual demo. It was this intense distilled version of what it was we were trying to evoke. We knew why and how that would work and how to create this feeling of unease but humour too. We just knew certain things we were interested in, like, weird compositions and interactive vignettes and the ability to go down alleyways and through tunnels and tubes and stuff.
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