During Gamescom this year, I had the chance to talk to Matt Houghton and Matty McGory from Observer Interactive, the developers behind the soon-to-be-released “petroidvania”, Good Boy. The game is an ecosystem-driven metroidvania game published by Team17 set to release on PS5, Switch 2, and PC (Steam, GoG, Epic).
Founded in 2023, Observer Interactive is an independent game developer based in the North of England. The studio brings together a seasoned team with a collective experience of over 60 years spanning AAA, AA and indie game development. “Retro sensibilities for a modern audience” is at the core of Observer’s approach to game development.
They firmly believe that smaller, focused teams working well together can produce unbelievable games, as shown in the brief conversations I had with them before and after our interview.
Personally, I really got the impression that they’re very passionate about their craft and that they have a truly incredible game at their hands with Good Boy. I’m super happy that I got to do this interview and that I can finally share it with all of you!
What is Good Boy about?
Matt: So, in the universe of our game, if you love your dog and have to unfortunately say goodbye to them, you can sign up for a thing called the LAIKA program, which means that you upload that dog’s consciousness to a space rover, and they live forever amongst the stars as an explorer.
You play as one of those rovers, but you wake up and have no memories. But when you go on this amazing adventure, you meet a variety of different rovers that are all based on real dogs, so every rover in the game is one of the real developers’ dogs. Their appearance, their personality and the quests you do for them are based on a real dog and their owner as well.
Whenever you go through and complete a quest for one of those rovers, you unlock a VHS-style memory tape of that dog’s memories as well.
What does that look like in the game?
Matty: The process for recording memories isn’t perfect, and over time, they start losing them. So, every rover is given a little something from the explorer’s path that is an item from home. Like, one of the rovers has this teddy bear which they liked back at home. And they also have a videotape which is our home videos recorded of them as a puppy up until now, cut together as a little montage to watch back.
It brings back the memories, so that they can remember their families.
Matt: Our game isn’t a metroidvania, or rather, we kinda define our game as a PETroidvania. A lot of the characters are based on our real pets, but the way we handle traditional metroidvania mechanics – which normally involve a lot of combat, a lot of blockers, a lot of upgrades – is to use the creatures on the planet to overcome those obstacles.
As you play the game, you can capture creatures and then use their abilities to remove those blockers. You may encounter, for instance, a bunch of built-up plants, and when you go capture a firefly, you can then bring it to burn down those plants, and that’s how we do our PETroidvania gameplay.
Oh, so it has little minigames to capture the creatures, then?
Matty: So, we’ve had a bunch of minigames tied to various tools. The first one you get is the net, which is the one Matt is using right now in the game (points at the screen in front of me). So, when you go and try capturing with the net, it will trigger a little minigame based on the difficulty of the creature – but we also do have accessibility options to turn that off.
When someone does struggle with like the timing of minigames or if it’s something they’re just not fond of, they can turn that off to enable auto-capture. As the game progresses, you meet more complex creatures, so may need a different piece of equipment, or sometimes you may use another creature to subdue it and then catch the other.
So, we’ve got this guy over here called a lovebug. Lovebugs’ ability is that they make other creatures fall in love with them. If you encounter a hostile creature, you can use Lovebugs, for instance, to make them fall in love, and then you use a piece of equipment to capture them.
This is something that you gradually unlock, you know, the different pieces of equipment in the game. You can also buy upgrades in the store. A little bit of that gameplay is going into the world, capturing creatures, bringing them back, researching them for credits, and then spending those credits on upgrades or equipment, and then going out into the world again to explore a little bit further.
So, it’s explore, capture, research, upgrade, as the core gameplay loop essentially?
Matt: We also make a point of emphasising that we don’t take creatures back to base and put them into the research machine to grind them up for money. It is very much like, every creature you capture, you bring them in, scan them, and then you release them safely back into the wild.
I see, so the game is very non-violent in its approach. There’s no combat encounters either, I assume?
Matty: No, the only thing you encounter is these sorts of hostile creatures, and the way that they react is purely defensive.
For instance, we’ve got a creature in the game called a webslinger, and if you go up too close to them, they shoot a big ball of web at you. This causes Good Boy’s battery to reduce, and it kinda traps him for a couple of seconds. If his battery reaches zero, you go into a shutdown mode and respawn at home base, and you can go back.
Hence, there are a bunch of hostile elements in the world with the plants and creatures you encounter and the equipment you use to overcome them. If you drive into deep water or swamps, it just means your battery will be reduced, and you might drop some items… but there’s no real combat or anything like that. It’s still quite fun, quite relaxed, this one.
Where does the overall inspiration come from?
Matty: It was kind of originally inspired by when the Mars rovers got finally turned off, there was a poem sent to them. We started talking about the connection that we have with inanimate objects and robotics. We try and infuse them with life, treat them like people. Like with Boston Robotics, when a robot falls over, you do feel compassion for them. So, we started thinking about something like that, a game where you control a Mars rover – and we kind of treat rovers like they’re pets.
We’re all big animal lovers at the studio. We wanted to kind of mimic those moments, like the first time our dog got sick, the first time they got out the back door, the first time they ate something they shouldn’t have eaten… We tried to mimic those beats.
Matt: We wanted to base these rovers on our actual dogs and these moments. We had these Eureka!-moments where we’re like: Let’s just make these literally our dogs, and just go from there. I think it really drives that emotional aspect as well: We wanted to immortalise our dogs!
Matty: We’re doing what the company in the game does but in real life! We have a ton of photos of our pets as polaroids in the credits as well.
Matt: In terms of games, Pikmin and Pokémon Ranger were massive inspirations as well and we wanted to really capture those “Eureka!” moments of “Oh, we have enough guys, so now we can do the next thing!” in terms of gameplay, and I think we managed to encapsulate that quite well.
So, how many different biomes and, perhaps more importantly, dogs are in the game?
Matt: So, there’s four different biomes in the game, the first is called the pastoral quarry (?) and is like a lush kind of almost jungle-like environment. Our second biome is a toxic swamp. Our third environment is a caustic caldera, and our fourth biome is a snowy mountaintop. Each biome has two specific rovers in it as well as four distinct biome-specific creatures that you can use for the metroidvania aspect, as well as some general creatures that are able to be captured and can be found in different biomes.As you progress through the story, you gradually meet all the rovers, unlock all the biomes, and each biome also has an underground cave system – so it’s pretty big!
Are those cave systems interconnected, and can you use them to travel to different biomes?
Matt: Yeah, some of them you can use as shortcuts! At the start of the game, you might still have to go through each biome… but later on, you can capture the biome-specific creatures to then unlock the different shortcuts in the caves. We also have this stage in the game where every time you find a new biome, you have to find the perfect landing spot for the base. You can always go back to home base and lift it up and drop it into the next biome.
There is also a bigger mystery present with many clues about the humans that lived there previously on the planet, since the planet was actually inhabited at one point by humans as well.
What was one of the biggest challenges when designing the game?
Matt: Doing a metroidvania!
(we laugh)
I think for us it was a challenge because we all love metroidvania games but we know that they are not for everyone. We were kind of hoping we could take some of the cool aspects of the genre and make them more approachable for other people. Kind of trick them into playing the genre. We’d love for it to be the gateway into metroidvanias, we just call it a petroidvania.
So, the biggest challenge for us was to do that in a way that is still fun, super approachable, super adorable.
The other big challenge was the art style. We are trying to make the game look like toys in the back garden. A lot of the challenges there are that we have to design spaces in a very specific manner: We have to be very careful about where we place the camera. We want everyone to be able to play the game, so we don’t want people to have to spin the camera. So, we need to present the world in a way that is very easily digestible. There are probably a hundred other things that were hard to do, but those are the main ones.
Thank you very much!
I had an amazing time talking to the developers and am very thankful to their publisher, Team17, for organising this opportunity for me to talk to them. Sadly, it took me ages to transcribe the interview given the fact that recording audio on my phone during a big convention is a terrible idea…
Still, I’m happy to get this interview out now and I hope that you got a good impression of the game and what it is about. I find it truly interesting, from the cute idea of immortalizing the developers’ pets to the exploration and Pokémon Ranger-style puzzle-solving mechanics to the general vibe and aesthetic of the game… I’m really looking forward to this release!
It’d be awesome if you could share the news about the game and wishlist the title on Steam, as it helps the developers a ton with the algorithm gods.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
Indiecator 
Leave a comment