The Making Of…
How ten years of pub chats spawned an emotional comic adventure
How ten years of pub chats spawned comic adventure Lair Of The Clockwork God
Format PC
Developer/publisher Size Five Games
Origin UK
Release 2020
When Dan Marshall started talking about the third Dan And Ben game, the second was only three months old. Time Gentlemen, Please had launched in June 2009; by September he’d announced the first in a series of new episodic adventures starring the digital alter-egos of Marshall and writing partner and co-designer Ben Ward. “Right then,” he tweeted the following January, “The ‘ The Revenge Of The Balloon-Headed Mexican’ Hype-Machine starts here!” Needless to say, that machine ground to a halt; likewise when Marshall revealed that Son Of Ben And Dan would be the next entry in the series. Eventually, after 2017’s intensely silly football parody Behold The Kickmen, he decided it was finally time to make the game he and Ward had been discussing for the better part of a decade. “We’d done so much prep work and put so much effort into designing something we thought would be really cool that we felt it would be stupid not to make it,” he says. And so, at last, Lair Of The Clockwork God was born.
The likes of Thimbleweed Park, Night In The Woods and Owlboy convinced Marshall that it was the right time to revisit his idea of a narrativeled game that combined point-and-click adventuring with puzzle-platforming. “Zeitgeists come and go,” he says, “but all these games were out and I thought, ‘Well, this is only going to take me a year and a half to make.’” He laughs at the memory, though his optimism wasn’t entirely misplaced; the groundwork, after all, had already long been laid. A look at the 2009 press release for his first abortive attempt could be copy-pasted into one for the finished game: ‘Dan and Ben can now be split up, allowing the player to flip between the two as and when they choose,’ it reads. “Yeah, it’s not like it had ever gone away,” Marshall says. “It was this omnipresent force in my life that was just sitting there like a big lump waiting to be dealt with.”
That the lump remained was partly thanks to Marshall’s desire to avoid making a straight sequel. He and Ward had already written two point-and-click pastiches – a third, he reckoned, would be overkill. The pair continued to meet in pubs to thrash out ideas; Marshall can’t remember exactly when the move into platforming came about, though he recalls the idea that sparked it. “You know when that first Goomba-type enemy rocks up? You’ve got this relatively safe baddie where you can just jump on its head and move away – it’s something everyone innately understands. Well, I had this scene in my head of Dan jumping on some creature, and it just explodes into blood and guts. Then he slips on all the entrails and tries to stand up and ends up falling over again.”
This delightfully grisly image ultimately didn’t survive – though there’s a similarly gruesome replacement – but it stuck with Marshall, convincing him there were plenty of ways the two writers could joke about platformers. For a while, the game featured an amusing riff on Jonathan Blow’s Braid, where Marshall’s in-game self would be convinced he had the ability to manipulate time, “but all it really did was just make him walk backwards and make stupid rewind-y noises with his mouth.” The code was in place, but in a game that already had two characters with very different abilities and gravitational changes, there were too many ways such a mechanic could break the puzzles.
That alone might not have been enough to make them abandon the idea, but Marshall was also keen not to make the humour too specific. Lair Of The Clockwork God might mock certain genre clichés, but both Marshall and Ward were conscious that the jokes should never feel nasty, or target individual games. “Our mantra has always been to be Scream and not Scary Movie,” he explains. “Scream is a pitch-perfect pisstake of all those slasher films, but it’s also its own thing. And then Scary Movie did what Scream did but worse, because it was basically just making dumb jokes at the expense of a load of properties.” The game does feature a sequence railing against maudlin walking simulators, but the pair took great care to ensure its jabs didn’t come across as vindictive. “That’s the closest we get, but it’s never actually going, ‘Oh, look at Dear Esther’ or ‘Look at Gone Home’. We’re taking the motifs from those genres and amalgamating them into something we can make fun of without being unpleasant.”
This sequence is called Hope, one of a range of constructs designed by an AI to harvest data from Dan and Ben so it can learn about human emotions. This particular concept, Marshall says, goes back some 15 years, and to a pub conversation with ex-game journalists Jon Blyth and Steve Hogarty (both of whom are acknowledged in the end credits). “You play a little USB drive trying to teach a computer about human emotions. But they weren’t big emotions. They were smaller things like what it’s like to trip over in the street and pretend that you haven’t, just these weird things that would have been impossible to make a level for.” But the idea stuck, and felt thematically fitting: Ben There, Dan That had involved visiting different dimensions to solve puzzles, while Time Gentlemen, Please had Dan and Ben travelling between time zones. Putting the pair through a range of emotional experiments seemed to make perfect sense.
So how did he and Ward choose which emotions to feature? “Ben and I basically spent a lot of time in pubs looking at a Wikipedia list of emotions – obviously we hardly know any, because we’re dead inside,” Marshall laughs. “Everything that we could think of an actionable idea for went in the game.” In the end, there were very few that didn’t make the cut. Obsession, Marshall says, was an N++- inspired platforming sequence where Dan had 100 trinkets to collect that were either difficult or impossible to get; Ben, meanwhile, would have to struggle past a series of guards to find out the secret inside a large box in the middle of a room. What was once Anger became Frustration in the finished game – a deliberately difficult platformer, but it was originally
“WE WERE VERY FASTIDIOUS ABOUT MAKING SURE WHAT WE WERE SAYING WAS RECEIVED THE RIGHT WAY”
followed by Relief, which would be the same level albeit spikes would retract on approach while bridges would pop into existence over every gap.
Other chapters stayed, but with significant changes. Marshall conceived a puzzle at the end of Grief that would punch home the idea of life being more difficult when a friend or loved one isn’t around. “We had this really convoluted sequence where you needed three batteries, but you could only get two,” he explains. “So you’d have to keep on taking them out of things and putting them in other things and moving this robot around to get the door open. It was an amazing metaphor for life being harder after someone else has died, but it was just a really boring, laborious puzzle.” He and Ward instead asked themselves what the polar opposite of that would be, coming up with the hilariously inappropriate alternative that features in the finished game. “We were sitting there in floods of tears laughing, and I said, ‘Well, we’ve got to do this now because it’s made us laugh just talking about it.’”
It’s a shockingly funny moment in a sequence that treads a very fine line; Grief tackles tough subject matter with a degree of levity that feels unusually daring. Even Marshall had his doubts about it at times, asking himself whether was he pushing things a little too far. Then again, he says, all of this was surely in keeping with one great tradition of adventure game characters: “Whether it’s Guybrush Threepwood, George Stobbart or Sam and Max, they all just walk around stealing objects if they need them and doing things that are completely amoral. Ben’s character just sees that through.”
“I can’t tell you how much we worried about everything,” he continues. “Anything that was slightly contentious, we were very fastidious about making sure what we were saying was received the right way.” That’s understandable in an adventure with a running gag about a flower that can cure cancer; those who’ve played the game will be well aware it’s joking about games that treat serious subject matter flippantly by doing precisely that. But when he told a friend at Brighton’s Develop conference, the horrorstruck response let him know he needed to tread carefully. “It was absolutely not done lightly – all of that stuff was worked really, really carefully. And then we finish it all off with a farting corpse.” He laughs. “I think that’s one of the things we do quite well in this country. The British sense of humour has always been quite dark. We
get through stuff with comedy, and I think that’s a healthy attitude to have.”
Marshall and Ward’s affinity for comedy meant the script was the easiest part of the equation: almost all the dialogue was written during a fourday period, with both holed up in a log cabin “in the middle of nowhere”. Realising some of the bolder ideas, however, was more time-consuming: Insecurity was the first emotional construct to be completed simply because the challenge presented by its perspective shift meant Marshall was keen to get it out of the way as early as possible. Similarly, accompanying visual novel Devil’s Kiss was all but finished 18 months ago. It was, Marshall says, a stressful game to develop, though he acknowledges the biggest problems were of his own making. “In practical terms, it’s really stupid making games in pubs,” he says. “You come up with these amazing ideas when you’re half-drunk, and then the next day you have to sit in front of a computer and you’re like ‘Oh my god, what did I agree to?’” And yet those inebriated ideas that give the finished game a sense of anything-goes spontaneity wouldn’t work without an awful lot of careful planning and refinement, for which Marshall entirely credits his co-designer. “Ben is like a driving force for quality,” he says. “He’s always the one nagging me to make stuff better. I can’t undervalue that.”
That quality control almost certainly influenced Clockwork God’s glowing critical reception, though the review process introduced its own problems. One deliberate piece of misdirection has since come back to bite Marshall, though to reveal how would give away one of the game’s most satisfying epiphanies. Elsewhere, an F2P-style in-game store isn’t all it seems; when one critic took it at face value, Marshall decided to keep up the charade. “He emailed two days later saying, ‘Oh, thank fuck!’” he grins. “It’s really nice when those jokes land, because we worked so hard on them. Some of it is a massive gamble, so the fact that all this stuff seems to be landing is a huge relief.”
He sighs, but not with relief. Financially, the game has done better than he feared – some of its big gambles can be partly attributed to Marshall’s concern before release that this could be the last game he makes – but worse than he’d hoped, though he reveals he’s already starting work on his next project. The critical landscape, he suggests, is very different from five years ago when he released The Swindle. Then, the reaction was less positive, though the game got plenty of coverage; this time “it’s been like pulling teeth”, he says. “I mean, of the Punnett square of all possibilities, ‘made a good game and it didn’t sell’ is not the worst one. I could have made a shit game and it didn’t sell.” He pauses for thought. “Maybe that’s people doing what I would do – hand on heart, if I saw Clockwork God and I hadn’t made it, I would be looking at it, going, ‘Man, that looks really good. I’ll buy that when it comes out on the Switch.’” It’s fair to assume, then, that the game won’t be PC-exclusive for much longer – and that ten years on, Ben and Dan’s emotional odyssey isn’t over just yet. We’ll raise a glass to that.