Indie Game Spotlight: Good Company
Happy New Year, Tumblr, and welcome to our first Indie Game Spotlight of the decade! Good Company is a top-down production and business simulation game in which you take the role of the tech company leader—setting up production lines, managing employees, researching new technologies, and designing new products. Your goal is to build up and sustain a successful business.
We chatted with Paul Lawitzki, who is the game design lead on the project and is also responsible for frontend programming, and Dominik Schneider, the co-founder of Chasing Carrots (and what they call Vision Keeper for Good Company), who also does the backend programming. Read on!
How did the team come up with the concept behind the game?
Dominik: That’s actually a funny story. After releasing our previous game Pressure Overdrive, we were frantically thinking about which game idea to pursue next. We were thinking about game ideas so much that I actually started dreaming about pitching game ideas to the team, and one of those ideas was the basics of Good Company. And when I woke up I thought: that idea is not bad at all, let’s write it down and pitch it for real.
Paul: I remember the conversations very well. I was skeptical at first, but then I got super hyped about Dominik’s pitch. It was surreal.
How long have you been working on the game?
Dominik: We had the idea for Good Company in August 2017, started pre-production with part of the team one month later, and full production in November 2017. So the game has been in production for a little more than 2 years now.
Why did the team decide to have it set in the 80s?
Paul: The decision for the setting was mainly a visual one. Many simulation games have a cold and futuristic feel to them. Our goal was to give the player a warm and comfy feeling while playing the game. During pre-production, our art direction came up with a unique set of visual rules and pleasantly warm color palettes that evoked feelings of 70s/80s nostalgia, so we decided to follow through with it. We think of it as not being strictly 80s, rather an alternative reality inspired by the aesthetics of the 70s and 80s—mainly to circumvent technological restrictions that would come with actually setting the game in that era.
Are there any personal experiences that went into the creation of this business simulation?
Paul: Some of us at Chasing Carrots used to work for a couple of very different companies. Some of us used to work in engineering, others had big car companies as clients while working in the media. There are a lot of car manufacturers in the region we come from, and we find the processes and logistics behind such companies very interesting.
Ready to get to business? Good Company is scheduled for an Early Access launch on Steam in early 2020, but you can learn more in the meantime over here.
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