"To have this little space where we could be together really meant a lot to us"
You know, I've been thinking about going for a nice big walk sometime soon. Well, not that soon, maybe sometime in the summer? Before I lock anything in, I'll just watch this new thing about House House's Big Walk and… oh, would you look at that! It's got a release date now, and for this summer too!
Summer being August 4th, a little under a couple of months away. A fresh look was offered at the multiplayer puzzle game and all the ways you can mess about and chat to your friends in appropriately goofy and delightful ways. I'm fond of how it's looking, but I've also been curious about where the idea came from in the first place, given House House's previous game Untitled Goose Game. Luckily, GamesIndustry.biz has a nifty little interview with the devs going into just that.
According to Stuart Gillespie-Cook of House House, a big driving force for the game was thanks to COVID lockdowns, and the ways we all had to learn to socialise with one another, including for birthdays. "I remember thinking about how I'd been to a bunch of Zoom birthday parties, which were horrible: just like 40 people in one Zoom call and only one person could talk at the time," Gillespie-Cook explains . "So very early on, one of the very earliest pictures was like, 'We'll just put [in] proximity voice chat, and it'll just be a space where we can meet with our friends'."
The first prototype for Big Walk was put together in about a week, leaving the team feeling like they really had something, admitting to being stuck indoors thanks to lockdown and missing one another factoring into that. "To have this little space where we could be together really meant a lot to us," Gillespie-Cook continued. "But once we tapped into that feeling, we were like, 'We need this game to be about this feeling.' And we've been chasing that for six years."
It's well worth reading the full interview, as the devs also go into that trendy new thing called friendslop, and their initial uncertainty in making Big Walk when there wasn't really a weird (even a semi ironic one like friendslop) to describe what they were making. And you can also read about what Edwin felt while playing it a while back, which was a whole lot of awkwardness, but in sort of a good way, actually.