“If we made a three-star game…
But yes, we’ll get to that.
Laser Dog is two people, Simon Renshaw and Rob Allison.
Since 2013 they’ve been making astonishingly brisk and playable arcade games, generally for smartphones.
Two people made all these games?
Watch the video and you sense a partnership where the individuals are starting to blend a bit.
It’s hard to tell.
“Well thats nice, and great that it comes across, cause its true.”
Fittingly I can’t tell you that either.
And very quickly it became impossible to tell the duo apart.
So for most of the time I was talking to the Laser Dog hivemind.
I suspect it would have felt like this over Skype anyway, tbh.
These games are clearly made by people who finish each others' sentences.
“We can make very quick decisions,” says Laser Dog when asked about the way they work.
“Often completely overhauling significant parts of games in what feels like an instant!
It sounds like it.
“We do everything, not just ‘make a fun game’, but manage a business (kinda!
Simon emerges briefly from the hivemind here.
Possibly why were not in the best spot right now!”
So let’s deal with that.
It was an endless runner set in space, called Alone.
You rushed along and dodged rocks.
Brilliantly, the controls were inverted: pull down to move up, push up to move down.
Alone managed to make the iPhone screen feelelastic.
More games followed, always on smartphones, always memorable.
And then for me it went quiet.
In truth, the team was making something much bigger.
“Deathrun TV came out of our love for roguelikes,” the hivemind tells me.
It’s a twin-stick PC game that’s out this summerand I love it.
“Were also big fans of the original Doom and how that feels to play.
But for a team used to making smartphone games, Deathrun TV seemed like a daunting project.
“We had just finished a two year contract with a mobile publisher and the timing felt just right.
We pitched a prototype (called Zombocalypse, then Greed) to Merge Games, and got started.”
At first it was brilliant.
“The first half of the development for Deathrun TV was incredibly exciting and fun.
We just loved working on it.
Soon an opportunity came up - to announce the game at E3 and offer a demo.
But… “That demo made us realise how big a roguelike can be,” the hivemind says.
The latter half of development was us racing to finish features, whilst constantly adding more.
We were our own worst enemy!”
When Deathrun TV was completed, the team was in a very tricky spot financially.
“I say [all this] in past-tense,” someone, I think Simon, says.
“Whilst actually, it is unfortunately very much present tense!
A return from Deathrun TV seemed a long way off, so what should they do?
“We quickly repaired the bugs that were preventing people playing our older games,” Laser Dog explains.
“And started on our next game.”
And it is impossible to talk about Catchee without telling you about my life for the last few days.
Catchee entered my house on Thursday.
The first time I heard All About You, I thought, “Oh, that’s nice.
“It’s all about you/and the happy things you do…What a nice song!
Then, an hour later, I was taking the bins out.
The next day, I wake up humming it.
The day after that, my wife wakes up humming it.
Over the weekend, my daughter has a sleepover with her school friends.
Oh how my feelings grow.
My heart may explode.This isn’t me talking.
These are still lyrics.
They’re a part of me now.
Here’s the point.
Catchee is a lovely, beautifully judged music-action game.
It’s invertedSpace Invaders, I guess.
But there’s more: as you catch each bit of stuff it triggers part of a song.
So you play the song by catching stuff.
And when you miss you die.
But when you don’t miss?
You get to hear one of the most insistent earworms ever created.
And, like the rest of Catchee, it was all knocked out in the space of two months.
It was a great distraction.
Just to be silly and overly positive felt like a huge weight off!”
“Recording the vocals in our office is always really embarrassing,” Rob says.
“Were not singers and the walls are paper thin.
Thank goodness for autotune!”
The game itself was a combination of things, the biggest one being pressure.
Sunday afternoon, sat on my sofa, I was thinking - while worrying like hell!
- about where we are most efficient as game developers, assuming we had a month to make something!
I know were both happy doing these things.
So this kinda defined them rules: make something Fun - for us!
- and make it quick.
The idea came from scrolling through Instagram and spotting a cute kawaii graphic of a bowl full of grapes.
“It hit me!”
“We even managed a night out and a game of pool.
Polish, in fact, feels like the studio’s thing.
It comes back to that idea of controls - of getting them just right.
The tiny little Alone ship for example, has very subtle movement all over the place!
This attention to detail is all present in Catchee.
- dance the Catcher does when idling.
Plus loads of layers of nice particles to confirm ‘that was a good thing, do it again’.
At least some of it comes down to the platform.
And in the end?
“People are being really positive about Catchee,” they tell me.
“Its really heartwarming for us.
It was a joy to make, and were hoping people can feel that when playing.
The positive feedback has been great.
So well have to see!
What were really hoping for is Catchee helps us get back into working independently.”
I can’t wait.)
“If we made a three-star ‘this is ok’ game, I think that would kill us!!
Wed feel like we havent convinced anyone there.”
