Upcoming game Two Point Campus is the latest title from Two Point Studios that’s all about managing a successful college campus. From the same development team behind the critically-acclaimed tycoon simulation game Two Point Hospital, Two Point Campus brings the series’ trademark humor and complex management mechanics to a new venue. The new title will have players managing courses, teachers, campus life, and more as they strive to have the best university possible.
Two Point Campus puts a silly yet strategic spin on college life, with each level in the game featuring a differently themed campus. For example, one campus is set in a castle – with courses focusing on knighthood – while another takes a more magical slant in its layout and coursework, with classes about potions and spells. Players must manage the school’s budget while hiring employees, providing amenities for students and staff to fill their needs, and making sure students maintain their happiness as well as their grades.
Two Point Studios Director Mark Webley and Senior Animator Chris Knott sat down for two different interviews with Screen Rant in which they discuss their history in the industry, what players can expect from Two Point Campus, and what fans will see in the future from the studio.
Comparing Two Point Campus to past titles, what inspired you to switch the venue from hospital to school campus? Were there other business tycoon scenarios you imagined besides this? How did you narrow it down?
Mark Webley: When we started the company, we wanted to make these little people games that we’ve kind of all been involved in, going back to Theme Hospital and Theme Park before that. We love these games, and we wanted a studio to make the games that we really enjoyed making and playing.
We had a lot of different ideas, but [one was] this idea of a place called Two Point County where these games existed, and the characters lived. We started with a hospital, and then we moved on to what are we going to do next? And there was a lot of different ideas, but we were a small team; probably about 10-15 of us. We’re thinking, “Okay, what do we do when we finish?” Because we were still independent then, so you finish the game and you’ve got to assign something else after to make sure you’ve got some money coming in to pay the bills.
And I think the one that we kept coming back to, and the one that really excited us most, was Campus. It was just kind of like, “Oh, we could do this. That would be brilliant.” It ticked a lot of boxes of where we wanted to go with our series of games.
Chris Knott: We were thinking of what we could do next that we couldn’t have done in Hospital. What we wish we could have done: “We could do that in Campus!”
Mark Webley: I think we’re getting closer to our little people as well, and trying to create an environment where the player can actually care about them. Hospital was great, but people come in, get diagnosed and hopefully are cured and go home. And that’s it; they’re paying their bills and going.
We spend a bit more time with the students. Education is the backbone to this game, so there’s whatever courses they’re doing. But then there’s their social life and their relationships; the clubs and all the different events they can go to. I think when people talk about university, they’re not necessarily going, “We had such a great lecture.” They would say, “I saw this amazing band. I met my best friend there and fell in love for the first time.” Those are the kind of things that we thought would be so cool to be able to start tapping into that.
The creativity side as well; we wanted to grow that as well.
There’s a lot more interpersonal elements than in Two Point Hospital, where I’m pretty much just managing my employees. But now the students and the faculty are needing to be a little micromanaged. Humor and silliness are a core part of the series, so how have you tapped into that same humor in this new setting?
Chris Knott: Well, I think we’ve gone from illnesses to courses. It’s the course is where we get the most fun. When you start on Gastronomy, that’s when you start to see where we have fun with the animations. And that was where we got a lot of that humor from. But we do have big set piece items for courses, so each course has a very large set piece. For Gastronomy, it’s this huge oven where you can cook massive pies and pizzas – huge and ridiculously over the top. But then all the students are on little pots all around the edge, so they are all doing what they do.
And that’s where we’ve put all the fun; in the animations that they’re all doing, as well as when they’re not there. I think that was the biggest thing. As you said in Hospital, they came in and either got cured or died. All you had to do was look after your staff, whereas now you’ve got these students for three years. They live on your campus, and you’ve got to look after them. Their well-being is much more important to the gameplay. You may have a student that’s incredibly intelligent, and doing really well academically, but they’re struggling mentally. They’re not particularly well; they might be really miserable. And you’ve got to manage the needs more in this game. But that’s the fun bit; the way they tell you what they want.
Mark Webley: I think it’s our approach to the topics – really, a hospital is quite boring topic. I remember when we were first entering Hospital, and we were part of EA then, all the execs were coming over and going, “What’s this game about?” Just not taking itself too seriously.
We kind of like the idea of this approachableness to a game. You kind of think, “This looks fun. I could play this. I don’t like sim games, but I could play this.” And then just finding the layers, if you’re interested, and delving down and fiddling with it a lot more bits. We had that in Theme Hospital and, over the years with experience and kind of stealing from other people’s games – paying homage, because we’re players who love playing games. You think, “That’s a cool idea,” And hopefully evolve that.
With Campus, if we can make somebody fall in love with our little people, then we can retire and our work is done. I mean, we’re not there yet. But I think that would be nice, to be able to have players caring more and more about our little people.
In terms of the game’s aesthetic, at least from what I’ve seen, there’s a pretty big slant towards a fantasy or medieval look. What led you to that main aesthetic choice, and how did you expand it into these whole levels?
Mark Webley: One of your favorite courses is Robotics, and that’s high science. When you get to the Robotics level where that’s kind of introduced, the whole journey around Two Point is a journey around the world. It’s interesting hearing you say that.
Chris Knott: Both of those courses are very, very medieval, but the rest of the game is very different.
Mark Webley: You’re digging holes for treasure with the students [in some], so they’re quite different. Obviously some of the magic was influenced by some Harry Potter thing.
Chris Knott: By nothing, we thought of it all ourselves!
You were mentioning before deriving a lot of the entertainment from the big machines that are in the game. Do you have any favorites besides the Gastronomy machine that you mentioned?
Chris Knott: I just like mechs and building giant robots.
Mark Webley: Mine doesn’t have a machine. But my favorite is Archaeology. It’s a simple hole in the ground, but it just gets deeper and deeper as the students build it. And if you’re lucky enough, and you do enough excavating, you might even find a giant dinosaur fossil. I think that’s just pretty cool; I kind of like the excitement of unwrapping what you have found. If you find the dinosaur, you can then put that as a prop. So the students, when they walk around, can interact with it. There’s rewards for everything you do.
In every room, we’ve got the main centerpiece machine. We’ve got loads of workstations and animations as well.
Chris Knott: The spy level’s got some cool gadgets as well. We did a reveal, and there’s some very cool high-tech things. We’ve got archetypes, and they’ve all different kinds of animations and different traits; different personalities.
Mark Webley: There’s a toff, which is a very wealthy person, who whenever they level up, their family gives a donation to your campus. It’s quite a lucrative source of funding.
Chris Knott: You can combine them with your society, and then you can make a lot.
Mark Webley: And you can maybe combine that with one of the courses, because they don’t pay very high fees. You have to augment your income.
Chris Knott: Combine your toff with archaeology, because you don’t get much money for the archaeology, other than what you can sell. But if you have toffs, that kind of balances out.
In Two Point Hospital, the main goals are curing patients, keeping up your reputation, and earning money. We’ve talked about how the interpersonal is a much bigger part of it. How else would you say Campus differs from the goals of Two Point Hospital, in terms of the tycoon management gameplay?
Mark Webley: The interesting conversation we’ve had along the way is about money; you need money, you make money, and you spend it. In some of the levels, money is more important than others. But there’s the idea of your overall grade for your courses. Are you happy with C students, and do you want average students who are very happy?
There’s a bunch of things to balance, and we’re keen for people to [decide]. We’ll give them some guidance and say, “Achieve these things,” but how you play is really up to you. When you’re horrible like Chris, all he’s interested in is making the world beautiful, and he doesn’t actually care about their academic grade.
Chris Knott: I just want the campus to look pretty. But that’s what we have done in this one that wasn’t in Hospital; the outside part of this game is just as important as the inside. Because in Hospital, you’ve got the building – and that was kind of it. The outside was largely cosmetic.
Whereas in this, the outside is just as important for the students’ well-being, it makes them happier.
Mark Webley: It makes them healthier as well.
Chris Knott: There’s relationship items that you can get, like a bench press so you can get two people going and working out together. Or sitting on a bench together and chatting, or a rose garden. There are so many of those in Campus.
Mark Webley: The ultimate one is the love bed – they’re called jump beds, because there’s nothing gratuitous in our games, thank you very much. Bouncing on beds.
Is there anything that you would like readers to know about Two Point Campus?
Mark Webley: This has been a real passion for us. We released Hospital in 2018, and we spent the next 12 to 24 months updating the game, adding in copy rooms and quality of life things. But we’re starting Campus with all those features. Whether you’re really interested in PC or console, from day one we’ve been building this for a controller and for mouse and keyboard. It plays beautifully on Switch, Xbox, PlayStation – and of course on PC.
Chris Knott: We listened. We listened to feedback, and that’s one of the biggest things that helped us develop and change and add to the games. We just listened to what the player feedback was.
Mark Webley: You’re never finished on a game, because you’ve got to get it out and keep playing. But it’s great, because we’ve come from a time some years ago where we released a console game like Fable, and that would largely be it. There wouldn’t be continual dev and DLC or some patches to fix things.
But we can actually just keep making the game better when you’ve got great fans and a great community like we seem to have. They go, “Can you change this?” or “Can you add this?” It’s great stuff to hear, because we want to do that, and they’re cool ideas.
I want to delve into your guy’s history a bit, for readers who may not be familiar. In the past with Lionhead Studios, you worked on the simulation game The Movies.
Mark Webley: Quite a few of the team here worked on it. Gary Carr, the studio director with me here, ran the studio. I worked on it pretty closely with Ben Huskins on the design side.
Chris Knott: I came about three months before Gary.
Mark Webley: That’s right, on The Movies. The Movies had so much animation; there a big team.
Chris Knott: Hundreds.
That was a big favorite of mine, I would play it for hours.
Mark Webley: We liked it as well. It was one that we thought was gonna do better than it did. I think there was a bit of a decline in PC gaming at that time. We had great hopes for it, and it did okay, but it didn’t do as well as we thought.
And you guys also had a part in making the Fable series.
Mark Webley: We started making these little people games, like Bullfrog, and Theme Park, which I worked with Peter on. In fact, that was the reason Gary decided to leave Bullfrog, because he thought it was just too cutesy a game. He then came back and worked with me on Theme Hospital.
We did The Movies, and then Fable just kind of became the main thing. We never really got back to doing things like The Movies, and we missed those little sim games that are fun to play and give a different perspective. Everything became Fable now. As much as I love Fable, I hate it now.
Chris Knott: I came over and started on The Movies, but as it was ending, I knew I wanted to go on to Fable. I wanted to do the creatures; I was just desperate to start on the creatures.
Going on to Fable for me was awesome, because I just spent the next eight years animating monsters and my little guys. It was great for me.
Mark Webley: I think of our founding eight when we set up the studio, they’re all line headers. They’d all worked on Fable for many years, so it’s all in there somewhere.
In every single one of these games there’s been some element of humor. Fable III even had comedic actors like John Cleese in it. Where would you say your comedic inspiration and influences come from with the games you make?
Mark Webley: I think the humor stuff is really a British thing, but I think we all like funny things. In fact, when we did Two Point Radio, we wanted to have a hospital radio – and it’s actually Alan Partridge on the depths of his career. We tried to get him, and he was busy for the next couple of years, so he couldn’t do it.
I think the humor aspect for us is just that we like humor. It’s funny. I think it allows us to take liberties, and I think games can sometimes take themselves too seriously. We’re maybe taking the mickey out of ourselves as well.
Chris Knott: Our heroes – the heroes in Fable are self-deprecating. The hero is never a hero; it’s always a very fallen hero. They’re very fallible, but that’s what makes you root for them more. There are quite a lot of games now that do that: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Borderlands, Gearbox. They get humor; they get that thing that’s a bit weird, and even the heroes are a little bit odd.
But I think that’s a nice contrast to your more stereotypical Hollywood type games, like God of War or GTA, where everything is relatively serious. It has to be, because they’re telling almost a film-like narrative. Whereas with our games, you bond with the characters because they’re not perfect.
Speaking of humor, I wanted to talk a bit about Two Point Radio, which is both in Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus. It’s hilarious, with crazy DJs and bands like “All Chemical Friendship.” How did the idea for that come about?
Mark Webley: I think the radio works in a hospital. You have a hospital radio; there might be music being piped through to the various wards and stuff, and then some hammy sort of DJ speaker. The idea was pretty good, and it also meant we could kind of intersperse as much commentary and dialogue as we could possibly write and record – with maybe 10 different pieces of music.
And then we knew we can grow this, if we add a bit more music as we go along. We must have added about 15 or so tracks, and then your Halloween spooky remix of the tracks, but then add more DJ commentary and more radio shows. It was quite a nice thing to grow again; another chance for humor, and another chance to reference Two Point County as this is a living breathing place.
Chris Knott: There’s a line Alan Partridge says, where he’s going on about how he used to be a hospital DJ. “I could play what I want, because most of my listeners are infirm.” It’s always that autonomy; the hospital DJs aren’t proper DJs because they know that they can just do what they want, because no one’s really paying attention.
But that leads itself to the humor and to those really nice little lines, where they’re saying things and you go, “Did they just say that? What are we talking about?” And you end up listening a little more intently, because you’re wondering what they’re going to say next.
Mark Webley: Harry does most of the writing, but Ben Huskins certainly did a lot of the earlier writing on Two Point Hospital – and a guy called Mark Hill, a writer we’ve worked with in the past. Harry and Mark Hill had sketched out some outlines of what these characters might be like, and sort of went through a process with us all. The characters were just divided up that way, but they’re all voiced by Marc Silk.
And then for Campus, we brought on a few more voice actors, including the student radio idea as well. A few students are part of a really happening radio station with rubbish news articles about the best salami sandwich. It’s important stuff.
My next question is a bit random, but both Two Point titles use an in-game currency called Kudosh. Where did that name come from?
Mark Webley: Ben Huskins named it kudosh, which in English means money. Kudosh, we kind of imagine it a bit like a cryptocurrency. We just wanted to have another currency, but not gems, because everyone has gems and it seemed like a pay-to-play thing.
In fact, some people did react that way, like, “Oh my God. They’ve got an extra currency. They want more transactions.” But no, we’re not like that.
This game strikes a really delicate balance, where it can be as complicated as players want it to be, but also accessible enough for a newcomer. How did you manage that?
Mark Webley: We’ve just always thought like that. And we have a range of players in the studio; there are some people who are never ever going to look at that screen. We were building UI screens, and we had a log of every transaction that went on. And I remember Gary saying, “Why are we doing this? We’re never ever going to look at that.” And now he goes, “I’m always using the log now.”
We kind of always think like that, because I think we want people to be able to touch the surface and just go, “Oh, yeah.” And we can hope for them to slowly get into a bit more here, if you’re interested. You can play at quite a high level – we’re trying to entertain people, so that’s the goal. It’s not to show off how clever we are at making real simulations.
As we think about features, there’s the top level of things that people will need to do. But because there are some of us that love the nitty gritty, we put those things in as well. I think it’s what you said about hooking people in; the art and animation does a great job of going, “This doesn’t look scary.” I love games like Cities: Skylines, but I know my wife would go, “God, I’m not playing that.”
But thinking back to games like The Movies, Theme Hospital, and Theme Park – they were quite accessible and didn’t look scary, but there was a lot under the hood once you got into it. With this art style, we were trying to get this claymation [look] that we’re hopeful in 10 years’ time doesn’t look really dated. With Theme Hospital, all the way back when, all the other teams were just moving into 3D graphics. They looked good at the time, but five years later, it looks awful. And our little game still looked pretty good – it hadn’t aged, because it was so old anyway.
We’ve tried to get some like that for this; something that looks handmade, kind of like Wallace and Gromit that will not look too dated in 30 years’ time if people are still buying it.
There’s a lot of small details in Two Point Campus that really reward players for paying attention, for example seeing a student open their closet to reveal skeletons inside. How did you brainstorm those little things and why did you make a point to include them?
Chris Knott: I think it was a follow-on from Hospital, because we did exactly the same thing on Hospital. Generally when you’re playing a simulation game, there is a game loop that you will see over and over again. Every time you have students in, there is an intake, and they will always go to the cupboard or they will always get to bed or they’ll have a shower. They will do that every time you play the game. So, invariably, those will be the animations that you’ve seen over and over again. And you’ll go, “Not this again!” when you stop paying attention to it.
Those are the ones that we always thought have got to have the most variation, even if they don’t play very often. The biggest thing I love hearing whenever we talk to anybody is always, “When you were playing, did you notice that?” When you’re playing and you see something loads of times, every now and again, you’ll see something that you didn’t see before or that you haven’t seen for a while. It just brings you back to that moment again, and it makes you pay a little bit more attention to them just pottering around generally. Because we put the variation in, it just makes it more interesting.
Mark Webley: It’s fun, not being on the animation side, just playing the game and occasionally seeing stuff that the guys have put in. Then, of course, it’s too late. I go, “Have you seen…?” and it’s gone. “I can’t wait to see that again!” It’s just fun to see those kinds of things. And the other thing is I’ve got different characters to interact with each other in different ways.
Chris Knott: The animation content in Campus compared to Hospital is night and day. There’s so much more. The rig is much more detailed now; we’ve actually got a full-face rig. In Hospital, we only had blendshapes – I think we had six or five – to make all the expressions, which was a feat in and of itself. We’ve got a full face rig now, just so the characters can properly emote to the player from further away.
When you’re playing, you get this nice broad view. And if someone’s annoyed, you can instantly tell without having to look up something. You can go, “That student looks really angry. I have to find out why.” Because that was always something I didn’t like in simulation games, where you’re playing and something’s going wrong – and there’s nothing visually telling you what’s happening. Unless you look it up, there’s no real telegraph to say, “This is wrong. Something’s wrong.”
We wanted to do that in a way that was also funny. We wanted them to do stupid things and to look silly, while still drawing your attention to the different things that needed to be done.
Another example of the little details is in the game menus with things like silly traits and employee names – some personal favorites I’ve seen are Lando Cyanide and Jayne Shirtdress. How are those generated? Does the game just pull from a pool?
Mark Webley: Essentially, that’s right. The names are a bunch of first names and surnames, and there’s been some that you kind of go, “Oh my God, we have to take that one out.”
Chris Knott: My favorite one was a condiment. It’s horrible.
Mark Webley: Occasionally, we have a bunch of our names and partner names. But just pairing them with the wrong kind of surname is just –
Chris Knott: That’s part of the fun. I’ve hired doctors purely on their name, even if they’re not the best doctor. I’ve gone, “I don’t care, I’m having that one.” It’s the same with the teachers or the janitors. I don’t care if they’re not that good. I just want to hire that person.
Mark Webley: I guess the traits and personality stuff as well, they’re kind of designed with annoying traits and good traits. The staff are generated, and the students are picked from that pool. And sometimes, it’s just not worth it. I’ve seen a janitor that was a litterer. He’d pick something up, and then drop some litter. It’s just funny
Chris Knott: Going back to the first question about the difficulty and accessibility of the game, you can hire people like that if you just want to have fun. It doesn’t force you. If you want to hire somebody who is rubbish because they amuse you, you can do that if you want. You don’t have to take on hundreds of students; you can have a small amount of students and just enjoy everything you build in.
In Hospital, the more successful you were, the more things that were thrown at you. It’s constantly saying, “You’re that good? Let’s see if you can do that.” Whereas Campus has got a different thing. If you don’t want to have that, then you don’t have to. You can just have those and enjoy looking after them more. Take on some people who aren’t quite as good but amuse you, because they’ve got funny character traits, and then you’ll enjoy the experience a bit more.
Mark Webley: Some of the different archetypes also have traits. One of the ones I thought was funny when it was first implemented, because it seemed like a bug, was the greases – in films like Grease, they’re repairing cars. So, we gave them a track where they actually do maintenance if a machine was broken. But of course, you’d see these pink ladies and these greases taking things out to the bins. That wasn’t intentional, but it was quite interesting.
It was cool to see them fixing vending machines or something like that.
Chris Knott: We tend to have people pulling out items from nowhere anywhere, but to have an entire trash bag full of rubbish is fun.
Something that I think is a life-changing new feature that’s easy to overlook in Two Point Campus is the new ability to make changes to the building shapes given with the campus building tool. What made you want to add that to the game?
Mark Webley: I think it almost seems like the most obvious thing to do. When Hospital came out, the one thing we noticed when watching different streamers is that when somebody’s playing the first through third level, it all looks quite similar. We knew we wanted to give the player more creative tools.
There’s this dichotomy between players that just want to mess around at a high level, and those who want to get into the details. When you buy a new plot, do you want a designed building or have a blank piece of land that you can build yourself? This is a feature that people don’t have to get into, but once you know, it’s actually very easy to extend the building and build different shapes or just keep growing it. We absolutely decided, day one, to let people do that.
Chris Knott: Plus, with Hospital, the outside of the hospital wasn’t really needed for the gameplay. The patients never wandered around the gardens, so it never really seemed like a necessity. It was always one of those things we thought would be nice if you could play with it.
Mark Webley: Day one, we decided we’re going to want to go outside. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on outside.
Another new feature in the game is clubs, like Speed Walking Club and Bookworms, which can help improve students’ skills like speed or studying. How did that come about?
Mark Webley: When you think about universities, clubs are a big part of university. I don’t know if I ever joined a club, but there was a mass society. Which is a mad idea, but all they ever did was have discos and parties. I think that’s definitely the inspiration.
Because you can’t directly pick up the students and go, “I’m going to put you in the library.” You’re actually having clubs to encourage the players and then giving them those perks to level up the club and get enough of them to join. You’re acting that twist on your world.
I’m curious, as I couldn’t tell while I was playing – do clubs contribute to social needs and happiness as well, or is it just skills?
Mark Webley: There’s social and happiness as well. The way we would try to think about these things is kind of what you’d expect. You go to a club, you meet people and have fun, and you also get good at walking fast as well.
Chris Knott: Plus, they’re really handy later on – like the Walking club. When you’ve got a really huge campus, if your students have got speed boots when they’re walking, that does help. Because they get places much faster, as opposed to having to walk three miles to get to the library. They can do it much, much faster. They may look kind of funny and have funny animations, but they’re really important.
They’ve got some really nice items with those as well.
Earlier we discussed how every feature was added to Two Point Hospital with DLC will be in Two Point Campus on day one. Since that’s the case, where do you plan to go from here?
We’ll be interested to see what people like yourself and other press people have have said about it. For us, that’s often our next audience – and then the fans that are out there just going, “Can we have this? Can we have that?” And it’s great. There’s things that we haven’t thought of, so it’s good to hear what people want when the game is actually out there.
If somebody said, “You’ve got another two years to work on this game,” I would’ve been going, “Ugh, God, no.” But I think we can spend another two years polishing and tidying, and just going okay, “What about also doing this?” or adding more clubs. I think we can easily be busy for the next year or two, just with updating the quality of life. We tried to put in everything we can think of, but we did in Hospital as well. There’s a lot of different players out there, so it’d be great to hear what they want to do
Chris Knott: That was a huge part of what informed us on Hospital. That informed what we did after the release of Hospital.
Maybe adding new classes or majors, something like that?
Mark Webley: Yeah, I think so. I think once our heads aren’t full of just the polish on this main game, we will think about new courses. With Hospital, we freshened up every now and then with some different challenges, and we introduced things like remix mode as well. You could replay the levels just with different game mechanics that were introduced in DLC, so the DLC is bringing something also to the main game.
For people that don’t buy the DLC, there’s an awful lot of things like music. We had three tracks; when we released the DLC, everyone got three new tracks and a bit more radio. It’s great for us to kind of keep it alive, and the people want more content.
But what that’s going to be, we just don’t know yet. We’ll think about that as soon as it’s in the box.
Chris Knott: The ideas are never-ending, if you think of a campus and all the courses you could do. You look around, and there’s so many things you think, “That would be a great course.” It’s not like we’re short of inspiration. It’s just trying to work out which ones would fit the best, I suppose.
When you’re several years down the road, completely satisfied with Two Point Campus, what do you think is next for you guys? Do you plan on staying in the Two Point County universe, or trying something entirely new?
Mark Webley: From the outset, we wanted to make these little people games. Where we go after Campus? You could go anywhere; you can take any little business. One of our tech director’s favorite ideas is Two Point Service Station. It sounds rubbish, but we almost have this idea that if it sounds dull, it’s actually quite good.
Chris Knott: It’s quite a nice little vignette. It’s a small thing that you can have loads from. I mean, the amount of horror films about being in a petrol station. The amount of things that you could put in to make it funny. There’s always that thing of, “We can make this funny, on top of it being a simulator.”
Mark Webley: By the way, that’s not our next game. There are a bunch of ideas around. But I think we’ll stay in Two Point County until we’re sick of it, when the rest of the world will go, “No more of those.” But there’s enough ideas in here to keep going.
One thing people often ask is are we going to be doing Two Point Theme Park, and we’re not. I think there’s games like Architect and Roller Coaster Tycoon, and the Planet Coaster as well. Those guys have done such a good job. They nailed it, so can we add much to it? Maybe a bit more humor, but it’s such a good game.
I have to admit, part of that question was my thinly-veiled way of asking if there would ever be plans to remaster The Movies. I can’t find it available for purchase anywhere.
Chris Knott: We’ve heard that before, didn’t we? Someone said they couldn’t find The Movies.
Mark Webley: Yeah, it’s not on Steam anymore. I don’t know why. But what about Film School as a DLC? That’d be quite cool.
And this was a time before YouTube. If we had YouTube, there was a whole backend called The Movies Online that we had to create for people to upload their movies to. That would have been a whole chunk of work we wouldn’t have had to do. We inspired the creation of YouTube.
It seems that no matter where your careers have taken you, you’ve always come back to, as you called them, “little people games.” What do you think keeps you coming back to the simulation tycoon genre? What keeps players coming back?
Mark Webley: Personally, I think my favorite games that I’ve made have been these little people sims. I like playing sim games, but I do like playing all sorts of games. I can’t say that I only ever played these sort of games.
One of my favorite games is probably Zelda, and then you’ve got Assassin’s Creed, which is also good. But I love things like The Sims and Cities: Skylines. But I’ve had most fun [on this], and I think the size of the team has been key to it as well. I mean, you didn’t have a choice. We just made you come work here. [Laughs]
Chris Knott: I was working on very serious combat. It was challenging, and it was fun. But as an animator, I’ve always preferred the comedy and the character in games; making you feel for the character you’re playing.
That’s what I did with Fable, with the hobbes. I wanted them to be like little petulant children, because it’s more fun. If you think you’re being attacked by a monster that’s not completely dead, that’s just like killing them. Whereas if it’s got a little bit of mischief, it’s kind of like it’s playing a game. But it could also kill you. There’s something more to it than just fighting.
That’s instantly more for me, when I’m fighting an enemy, like with Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. The enemies taunt you and have a character of their own. You instantly go, “I’m not sure I want to take this out. I want to watch it for a bit and see what it does.” It’s drawing me in, and that’s the big thing with simulation games. Like with Startopia, it’s drawing you in and making you want to watch these little things putter about. It’s like watching an ant colony; there’s so much going on.
That’s the same thing that I really love about simulation games, especially the ones that we’ve made. If it has that humor, you instantly just want to watch what you’ve made play out as opposed to going, “I finished that. Next!” They’re just robots performing a function, but if they’re performing it with personality and feeling, and they’re their own character, you want to watch them do it. You instantly invest, which the best games always make you do.
God of War, I was so invested in that because it was a father and his child. Or with The Last of Us. That opening? Good God. I was in tears watching that, like, “I don’t want to play this anymore.” It just instantly makes you care, and if a game does that, that’s half the battle.
Mark Webley: Making people care is what we certainly try to do with the nurturing aspect; with the students that it’s your job to look after. I guess that’s what The Sims did very well. You have a Sim, and you’re responsible for it getting a job and staying clean.
Chris Knott: It’s Tamagotchi. You go, “There you go. There’s a little pixel thing. Just don’t let it die.” You go, “That’s rubbish, I’m not doing that.” And then five minutes later, you’re going, “It’s hungry again.” It’s that human instinct to care, to nurture, and to stop things dying.
So many games now are about killing; kill as many things as you can. And simulation is, in our case, the opposite. It’s trying to make these things survive, and trying to stop people dying. It’s just a much nicer thing. I can play these games with my daughter, and she likes watching them play around. “Can we follow that one for a bit?” And it’s just that thing of caring.
Mark Webley: I think that’s often influenced with how far we go with the relationships. If you’ve ever got somebody to the highest level, and you built a bounce bed, – because we’re very aware and embarrassed about showing your game to young kids.
Chris Knott: I made a dreadful mistake a few weeks ago, I was playing Assassin’s Creed. My daughter came in, and I was in the middle of a fight. I completely forgot what I was playing, and I was suddenly aware that my seven-year-old daughter was standing next to me going, “She’s ever so angry.”
I was like, “No, no. I just knocked them out.” I cannot let her see that type thing.
But Two Point County is just fun. It’s nostalgia. It’s harkening back to those things that everyone has been through. Everyone’s been to a hospital or been to school or been to a service station. [laughs] But everyone has that nostalgic thing of memories that are personal only to you. You then project them onto the game, and you go, “I used to do this. I always wanted that in my campus.” It just instantly connects you a little bit more.
I’ve never been a Greek god. I’ve never been a Viking, and I’ve never been a gangster. I’ve never done all of these things, so it’s that very different experience that you get. You live vicariously through other games, whereas I think with ours you connect with them because you see yourself to an extent.
And of course, you’ll always have players on the opposite end of the spectrum who want to make things as bad as possible. I have a friend who used to make the worst hospitals possible in Theme Hospital. But either way, the player is invested in life.
Mark Webley: It’s this ant farm thing, where you’re nurturing and feeding it, and then occasionally poking it with a stick.
Chris Knott: Your hand goes to the magnifying glass. It’s that evil child thing, isn’t it? “I’ve created this. Now shall I destroy it?”
To wrap things up, I know we touched on this in our last interview, but what do you want players to know about Two Point Campus?
Mark Webley: We hope people enjoy it when it comes out, of course. That’s why we make these games. They are a labor of love, and it’s amazing when people come back and go, “We liked it. We liked that.” And it’s even okay when they go, “We don’t like this bit too much.”
Chris Knott: At least we know.
Mark Webley: At least we know, and we can change it. It’s been a weird two years in the middle of making it, just with lockdown, which hasn’t been fun. But we’re pretty much mostly in the office now.
Chris Knott: Isolating in the office.
Mark Webley: Our big, lovely new office. Which to be honest, we’ve only really had it for about two years now. It’s been locked down, but Chris enjoyed it.
Chris Knott: It’s been great. I got relatively grumpy when everyone came back. “What are you doing in my office? This is weird. Who are you people?”
This interview is a product of two separate sit-down interviews. They have been edited together for clarity.
