Studio Profile
How a taste for independence and innovation cooked up the UK’s next dev sensation
How a taste for independence and innovation cooked up a UK dev sensation in Flavourworks
There’s a cosy co-working cafe in the Shoreditch area, all exposed brick walls and Polaroids, hiding a corridor of offices at the back. At the end is Flavourworks’ tiny, windowless headquarters: somehow, it contains eight people at desks, a whippet named Layla and a sofa. The sofa, in front of a television that feels entirely too big for the space it’s in, is surrounded by an assortment of props from the studio’s first game, Erica. The vibe is distinctly that of a young studio with more potential – and cool junk – than can reasonably fit in one room.
They’re moving soon – just down the road, as staff are keen to stay in the area but also crave some natural light and more space. It’s all thanks to Erica, a bold live-action experiment that has ensured the studio’s security for a good while yet. For now, we have the pleasure of seeing the scale of Jack Attridge and Pavle Mihajlovic’s ambition made manifest, spilling out of the poky office in which it’s grown ever larger.
Before Flavourworks, Attridge and Mihajlovic were working at 22Cans, the Guildford-based studio founded by Peter Molyneux. Attridge was very much Molyneux’s protégé and co-designer – sort of – on god sim Godus. “For me, that was years on Peter’s shoulder,” Attridge says. “It was very much his game and his say. And I thought, ‘What would happen if I was responsible for the decisions, for better or worse?’” Meanwhile, Miha was working on an extra-curricular project of his own, and film graduate Attridge ended up doing sound for it “just for fun”, Mihajlovic says.
One day, Attridge came to him with his own idea. He’d been discussing a scene from Django Unchained with friends in the pub: the one where an undercover Django is sitting at a table witnessing his wife being mistreated, one hand on the gun in his holster under the table. “He’s slowly raising the revolver and putting it back in,” Attridge says, according to the changes in his emotions. “That felt like it could be a really tactile mechanic, where your actions speak louder than words.” This, combined with a desire to make a game that Attridge’s family would easily be able to play, with characters they’d see as “real” and not rendered, prompted the idea of merging film and game in a new way. “I was like, he helped me out with the sound on my thing,” Mihajlovic says. “So I helped out with some programming. Five years later, here we are.”
Five years, and several leaps of faith. The biggest push came when Attridge and Mihajlovic attended one of Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre productions. The Drowned Man took place across four floors of a building; everyone in the audience wore white masks and roamed among the actors. “It literally changed our lives,” Attridge says. “We were inspired by how ridiculously innovative it was, and contrary to what people say you can and can’t do.” 22Cans was wrapping up work on its latest project. It felt like time for them to start something of their own.
“WE PUT TOGETHER ALL THE MONEY WE HAD IN THE WORLD AND SOLD PEOPLE ON THIS IDEA THAT DIDN’T EXIST YET”
It was 2015. “I was so scared about telling Peter I was leaving,” Attridge says. He’d been talking to his fellow Guildford devs: Mark Healey, who’d left Molyneux to help found Media Molecule, and Hello Games founder Sean Murray. “I forgot to tell Sean that I hadn’t told Peter yet,” Attridge says. “And it got back to Peter – he wasn’t happy at first.” But he changed his tune soon enough, offering advice as the two prepared to make a prototype. “We put together all the money we had in the world, which was like, £300 each,” Attridge says, “and sold people on this idea that didn’t exist yet.”
The technology to get that ‘Django Unchained revolver scene’ effect simply wasn’t available; Mihajlovic would have to build an engine – Flavourworks’ Touch Video – from scratch. Attridge filmed himself on his iPhone “in my pyjamas playing all these different roles” to convince a group of his former film school classmates to help them make a five-minute demo. Incredibly, this worked: they rented an
AirBnB on Shaftesbury Avenue, plus a van to lug heavy props from Guildford to London. (“We crashed the van within the first four hours,” Mihajlovic admits, “and I was like, ‘Well, I have no money, so this is going to be interesting to deal with.’”) Then there was the matter of getting the props up flights of stairs: “People were throwing up in their mouths almost,” Attridge says. Miha laughs: “I was like, I didn’t expect this to turn into heavy manual labour!”
During the last days of 22Cans (Mihajlovic was emotional handing in his six-month notice; Molyneux was the person who’d flown him into the UK for his first job) they spent evenings sewing together Attridge’s video edits and
Mihajlovic’s code. Mihajlovic would work out how to simulate forces such as gravity and inertia, using motion blur and depth of field to turn video clips into interactions that felt real under the fingertips. At this point, Flavourworks was two people on Skype to each other.
Eventually, they had their prototype. It got attention; Molyneux phoned Attridge one night, having heard the buzz, and called a meeting. After five minutes of play, he and another industry legend, Ian Livingstone decided they wanted to invest. And then Sony called. The very first demo interaction, where you used two fingers to pull apart an origami crane, would end up funding their studio. “You could open it backwards and forwards, slow and fast,” Attridge says. “And that was the moment where people would close it, stop playing, and say, ‘Okay’. That’s literally how we even got staff.”
Good hires were critical. “It had to feel like people were marinating in the secret sauce,” Attridge grins. “Games and film would never work together before because people would just
throw it over the fence to a film crew, and they’ll just shoot whatever they want.” Faye WindsorSmith was brought in to structure the game: she shows us a scene, made up of blocks representing film clips connected by threads for different choices – and also inputs. If a player pushes open a door quickly instead of slowly, for instance, that has to lead to a shot in which the door flies open, rather than creaks. As a result, we’re told, this scene contains more branches than the whole of Bandersnatch.
These needs would impact on the shoot, which took place over the course of six weeks in 2018. Attridge unrolls a paper scroll of a scene, on which pieces of script have been taped. Lines of coloured marker run through certain branches and shots: this document would be passed between the two teams to ensure continuity. The script supervisor would cross-reference the linear script with the editor on a laptop to check the branching; the director of photography had to know how to frame a shot to ensure interactive areas were obvious without looking unnatural. Director Jamie Magnus Stone’s understanding of games helped form a new kind of workflow between the eight-person studio and the 75-person set. It took a long time to find the right people: Flavourworks couldn’t compete with the salaries offered by giant companies, “but we could offer an innovative environment and creative ownership of things,” Attridge says.
The pair’s determination to build immersive-theatre concepts into a new kind of videogame meant they hadn’t just built a game: they’d built an entire business. “We didn’t get into it to make a company,” Attridge says. “We just wanted to make something – but as a result, we had to learn all that stuff. Before you know it, it’s a company, and a technology platform, and bigger than we ever thought it would be.”
Mihajlovic adds: “I was more used to: ‘I have work to do, and then I do it’. But now, it was more about, ‘Are we making the right decisions? Is this the right work?’”
It seems their instincts were correct: Erica has been successful enough to net everyone a pay rise, rent a new office, bring on a managing director, and attract further investor interest in the studio and its next game – “something way more ambitious, and way more effective,” Attridge says, showing us the gorgeous, pastel mood boards currently doing the investment rounds. “With Erica, we were in this dark, moody story for a few years. And so what we’re doing next is kind of, ‘What would be my dream holiday version of a project, in response to that world?’”
They’re thinking bigger, too: about how this could be an IP with the potential for multiple stories across media other than games. “Erica was this proof of concept, and stress-test of all the processes – not just Touch Video, but also the workflow pipeline,” Attridge explains. It’s also unlocked potential alternative revenue streams for Flavourworks: it owns Touch Video and the narrative design tech that plugs into it, the Cookbook Editor, and these are tools the studio hopes to offer to other studios, and help them to create more of these kinds of filmed games.
“It was a long process learning to trust people, that their passion for the game was as strong as ours,” Mihajlovic says. “Once we had that realisation that everyone was in this and pushing the same way, it didn’t feel hard any more.” Attridge agrees: “The most valuable asset in all of this has been our team. Embracing the talent of this team of diverse mindsets, allowing it to be an open culture in terms of people being able to argue against decisions, and to not belittle ideas before they’ve been able to form into something really powerful – this is only possible because we have a bunch of talented, forward-thinking people who were able to persevere through a lot of uncertainty, risks, and evolving leadership skills.”
Attridge and Mihajlovic’s venture has given them a new appreciation for their one-time boss: they’ve found themselves in a similar situation running Flavourworks, convincing talented people
“IT WAS A LONG PROCESS LEARNING TO TRUST PEOPLE, THAT THEIR PASSION FOR THE GAME WAS AS STRONG AS OURS”
to stick by them through uncertain times, and help enact a boundary-pushing vision. “The relentless energy Peter has is unbelievable – he’s like an alien,” Attridge laughs. “It can frustrate people, because it’s not always the most effortless way of working. But it’s because he’s trying to get a result that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to get with that traditional approach. The challenge is, how do you find the people that can adapt to that?
“I think maybe at first, I actually started out a little bit too much like Peter, because that’s the voice I’d been hearing for three years,” he continues. “And then I slowly found my own. Actually, on my first day [at 22Cans], Peter said, ‘You’re going to start here a designer, and you’re going to leave here a director’.” He laughs. “You know, that might just be Peter being whimsical, but it does have a little bit of poetry about it.”