Post Script

Alex Hutchinson, creative director

He may have quit his Edge column after selling Typhoon to Google, but we managed to persuade Alex Hutchinson to talk to us one last time before he disappears into the motherbrain to help drive Stadia’s firstparty efforts. Here, Typhoon’s co-founder and creative director talks about how a group of gamedevs go about making something funny.

Comedy is subjective. Could a game like this get made in the approval system of, say, Ubisoft or EA?

I really don’t think so. Even with 505 Games we had discussions about, you know, is it funny? ‘I don’t find this funny. I ran it past the French team, they didn’t find it funny, but the Germans did.’ It’s the death of comedy, to overwork it. Trying to keep that sense of spontaneity was something we worked hard on; the process of reviewing, a lot of cooks in the kitchen, would make it very difficult.

Did you ever even try to do it?

Well, often you work within a brand, and there’s a tone that’s been established. Far Cry 4 is a black comedy to me: we spend time mocking the tropes of games where you’re sent on some very earnest mission. But really, you know that pretty much the entire audience who buys your game is just there to shoot everything that moves. There was a comedy accent to the game, but you had to disguise it behind a veneer of seriousness so that a chunk of your audience wouldn’t notice it.

The script was written in-house, almost entirely by you. With respect, you’re not a writer by trade. How did 505 react when you said you’d be writing it? Well, I wrote big chunks of Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed III. I didn’t feel terrified of telling them but yes, I don’t know that they were necessarily enamoured with the idea coming in. At a certain point they asked, can we get someone in to punch it up, in Hollywood tradition?

I said yes sir, of course. You don’t ever fight this stuff. You go limp, like it’s a bear attack. You lie on the ground. For me it’s like, if they write funnier jokes, I’ll take them; my name is still in the credits. It’s not like I’m going to be shuffled off the project.

Game developers don’t tend to have writers’ rooms. What was the scriptwriting process like?

It’s a bit like a writers’ room in a sense – the idea of bouncing ideas off people, seeing how they react and incorporating them. For us it’s more of a developers’ room: we’d come up with a feature, then throw it to the animator, say, ‘Make the melee a backhand slap’ or whatever. We trial it in front of everyone; if people laugh you know you’re onto something. So I don’t think the process would have been radically different to a writers’ room: it’s about putting ideas and trying them. If you get an early laugh then it’s a process of clinging to that idea long enough to see it to fruition.

It must have helped that you were working with people you’ve known for years. Put friends in a room together, they’ll just try to make each other laugh. Exactly. I’d read out chunks of the script as I was writing it and they’d laugh or they wouldn’t. Also, the script is only one part of the comedy: I talked about this in the column, but the mechanical humour is as interesting to me as the textual humour. The idea that the world itself could be funny, that what was happening with the creatures could be surprising – the actual engineering of the scene was as important as the script.

So do you take a design idea, and work out how to make it funny? Or do you have a funny idea then design it into the game?

It’s a bit of both. Take the melee: we were like, it should be unusual, like a slap. And then our art director, Erick Bilodeau, said, “They should just burst. There should be goo everywhere.” Then he pushes our graphics engineer to come up with a solution for goo splatter. You know, you try features, you embrace them, and then you polish them, and you keep going. Humour is important to such an extent that being funny was more important than being mechanically tight. So therefore if it was funny – even if, like the bounce pads, it’s only marginally useful – it’s a feature worth keeping, as opposed to saying, ‘There’s only three puzzles you can solve with it before you get the double jump, what’s the point’.

“Most comedy movies are disposable. It’s very hard to write something that’s funny and has any sort of weight to it”

Of all the elements you put into the game in service of its humour, what was the hardest to implement? Probably the script. It’s all one-shots, it doesn’t persist. That it is still a game with a meaningful ending, with some sort of structure and shape, was the hardest thing to get right. There’s a reason why most comedy movies are disposable. It’s very hard to write something that’s funny and has any sort of weight to it.

So, is comedy now Typhoon’s calling card? Or was this a one-off, just to prove it could be done?

I would love it to be. That’s the goal, to maintain some sense of identity within Stadia, the idea of being jokey and fun and upbeat and sort of positive. I think those are great things to persist with: whether we make a romance game or a horror game or whatever, keeping the player as an agent of humour is a really strong principle. I think we did well enough on this first one to persist with it. Who knows where we could end up?