Interview: Andy Santos, Director of Polterguys

Question: How did you come to be the director of Polterguys?

So as I was saying, Polterguys is the results of a prototype prototyping initiative that we had the company called from Pronto Protos that the team itself did a whole bunch of prototypes and this was the one that was selected. So at the time it didn't have this sort of supernatural look or feel. It was just spheres and cubes. And basically it played as a sphere running away from a big cube that eventually became the monster that we have in the game today.

Question:  So started off very, very simple?

Yeah, very, very much a prototype. And me and the CEO of the company, we grew up playing games like Gauntlet on the old systems and in games like that you would have moments where your going around the dungeon, you unlock a door, and then this monster, death, was released and then you'd be arguing amongst yourselves.

Who did that? Who did that? And we wanted our game, that kind of brought that back. Yeah, and in a game where you could kind of mess round with your friends, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and you could fall out with one another whilst you're playing the game. And basically that's what we did. So we started talking. We start developing the idea.

We have this kind of form follows function approach, and we started to have the form that you see that they took those spheres and made them into little ghosts and went like, "Can we put the ghost into objects?" Oh yes, we can! And started to bring things to life. And then the monster itself is kind of like death from Gauntlet, I don't know maybe this is bringing on a law suit?

Question: With with this sort of building up of the idea, what was your favorite growth or new feature?

There's so many of them. So because it's a team the team just try things out and we don't try to control it. So when you're working in triple-A, you have to be very controlled because you're spending so much money. Whereas on this team they kinda can... any team member can come up with an idea and go, "What about this?" So if you play the build today there's like a, there's like a gumball and you can collect that and use it and fire it and somebody and it... It takes them with the shot and if it hits wall it sticks them to a wall right? So that that came out of somebody just decided to do it one day, spent a day on it. And then we found out about it in the meeting. And then the CEO, who's behind you he'd be like, should we spend more time on it? He's like, "What the h**l?" In this case, let's just do it.

So it's it's very organic how it's evolved, maybe too organic. And for me, it's, it's incredibly liberating because when you're working on, I don't know, a Horizon Game or a Resident Evil game, or Skate or something like that, you got so many people. The boundary is so huge. You have to make sure your going through feature by feature and then prioritize, was... If somebody has a great idea, we're going to put it in.

Question: Yeah I mean with some of those bigger games as all you got that big publisher sitting on your shoulder going that can't happen. So you don't have that? 

Yeah. Yeah, we don't have that at the moment. We don't have a publisher. So if you want to publish the game, get in touch with us. We don't have that publisher at the moment, so we, you know, basically we control our own finances. So basically it's, shall we do this? Is it worth spending the day or two? Probably. We're going to get results and it's going to be fun. Excellent. So basically, it's a lot of fun working on this.

It's also very serendipitous because I mean, me and my boss over there, we went to the same school and we wanted to make video games together in school. And so it's great to be able to do that professionally. Know it's like the fulfillment of a dream, but it's really weird as well because when we young guys I was probably the programmer and he was more creative guy even though he's a great really creative force this well, it was totally game design. He went on the coding route working on Sleeping Dogs, Call of Duty and games like that. So we have a very sort of complementary skill set and the team is like that as well. The team wears many hats. Our concept artist is in Finland. So a lot of ideas start there.

Question: It's really it's quite interesting that both of you worked on these like big franchises. You got Horizon, Resident Evil, Call of Duty and all this. And now you're indie developer just like that.

Yeah, it's quite crazy. And it's not related to anything we've worked on as well, you know? So it's not like here's Skate 4 for or another Call of Duty that that's what I like about it. It's maybe a bit unexpected if you look at our back catalog of games, but it's still fun nonetheless you know.

It's the first game I can play with my kids as they couldn't play Resident Evil. So yeah, that's tweens and teens and they like playing it and the Team likes playing it. We took the game so EGX and we had 700 people play the game and we did a survey at EGX and about a hundred people answered.

The largest age group to play this game was over 35, which is kind of surprising. So we got a game that really works for all ages, which is know if you go back to triple-A again, we need to pitch to an audience. Yeah. And if I went into a boardroom and said this game is for all ages I'd get laughed out.

Question: With this wide audience you've gained, does it influence your approach to accessibility in games?

Totally, it's really interesting because prior to this event we had like we were trying out some ideas. We put in a new hub and then I had to write up how to play the game and it was like a 4 page document. "Go here, take the left, jump on the arcade machine. Activate the arcade machine, choose play online." You know, so if you think about it today, you can just literally start playing the game. We enter the game with the monster so the objective should be quite clear. You know, it's like 3,2,1 RUN!. And so yeah, we were just talking Jim Bagley Old school games you didn't need to have tutorials because the objective was really clear and that's what we're trying to do with this game. You know, it's the monsters versus the ghosts.You play the ghosts, it's that simple. The controls, we're still working on them and we're refining them. But we the game is a couch co-op game too. So that means we have to design for the little controller for the switch, for example. So it's super simple. It's all about choosing the direction, we've got boost control, we have a button for abilities and that's it really. Although in this build specifically, you can maneuver the camera. So it could be like you change your camera for the switch version on the couch co-op and make it even less. Yeah, less demands on input on it that make sense.

So yeah, it's even more simple. But yeah, we gotta make sure that like I, I have a really good test of my youngest daughter's 7 and she can play the game so if she can keep playing the game we're in a good space, right?

Question: So you mentioned Switch. Have you guys got the game lined up for all the platforms?

You know, this is the "What if?" question. At the moment we're all looking for a publisher, so we are speaking to publishers right now. If we self-publish, we're aiming for Halloween as a release date, which makes sense with the theme. We have a really terrifying monster. Super terrifying. Not really, but yeah, Halloween to be a good spot for us to launch. If we got a publisher we'd want to enrich the feature set so it'd be probably early in the next year. If we are launching ourselves it will be on PC first and then hopefully we'll we'll get an audience and then port over to different consoles. Madorium, the company that I'm part of, they actually specialize in ports and co-development. So the last games were Hello Neighbor 2 and The Pathless which we brought to Xbox and and the switch. The switch already works. We test it at home on the switch. So hopefully...

Question: So you just need the the final push to get it out there?

The cash, the marketing as well. Well, I mean I can't see it not getting an audience it does look like a lot of fun. Yeah it's interesting. There's a few things in the pipeline.

We have a Hollywood actor that is going to voice Letty on the strength of the franchise itself. So that's kind of cool. You present something to a Hollywood actor and they're like, I'll be part of this. There is also somebody that's interested in making an animated feature from this as well, which is really cool. So we're working with a Netflix artist right now on an animatic and that kind of shows off the animation quality the game can have so it's really cool. We have some interplay between these two key characters, Letty and Humph, made by the artist in Finland.

They've become our key characters and it's really about them trying to find these objects that you have in the game that we that they use as armor. So the idea is the objects are armor, or objects also have physical properties. So in the final game, not in this build, that means if you go into an inflatable object, you can float on water, you go into a heavy object, you'll be able to sink under water and things like that. So but in the animation, they're just frenzied. They're trying to get, you know, armor before monster. 

End: Thank you very much for talking to us. Thank you. And obviously, best of luck with your launch of Polterguys.

Yeah, cheers thank you very much. Hopefully, you know it'll go out on TV and you'll see Polterguys everywhere and have like Polterguys plushes.