I had the immense pleasure of attending the fabulous GameCity festival in Nottingham last week, and have play of a bunch of games, and a good old natter with some devs whilst I was there. Here’s the first bit of coverage from the event, a chat with Mike Bithell, creator of the minimalistic puzzle platformer Thomas Was Alone. Read on for the inside scoop on the game.

DIYgamer: The first impression of Thomas Was Alone I got was that you don’t like drawing, you like jumping and platforming and puzzling, and those kind of things.

Bithell: Absolutely, absolutely. I think gamers look at the world in a much more simplified way. I think we look at the world as blocks, as the interactions we see between character collisions and the world, and Tetris basically. So I wanted to make a game which focused on that.

DIYgamer: It seems like you’re celebrating it almost.

Bithell: I love it, and it’s fun. I tried to do it in a way that looks good, not just like I hadn’t bothered. I had some cool colour in there, some amazing music a guy called David Housden, who is just this amazing composer who has done a procedural score for the game. It looks lovely.

DIYgamer: It is definitely a stylish game even through it’s got simple elements to it. From what I’ve seen so far, the unique mechanic seems to be switching between different characters to solve puzzles. How did that come about?

Bithell: It’s an interesting one. It’s an idea I was playing with a little while ago. The idea of a game almost like a buddy cop platformer, where you had these two different characters with two different abilities. I made two of them, then I came up with another mechanic, and I thought “OK, I’ll have three”, another mechanic, so four, then five, and then I just kind of scaled it up. I made a prototype, which I think your site very kindly covered [he's not wrong, we totally did], which went up a while ago. I got a really good response for it, but there was lots of bugs, the controls were appalling, but I took it forward, and developed it into a full Unity based games.

DIYgamer: So it’s running in Unity, what are your platform plans at the moment?

Bithell: Initially Windows and Mac, then if those go well maybe iOS as well, maybe even consoles down the line. I’m going to take it and see how much people want to play it. If people want to play it enough that I can take it to other platforms, then why not?

DIYgamer: Is this the first game you’ve worked on by yourself?

Bithell: It’s my first indie game. I’ve been working in the industry for about four years now. I used to work as a level designer and pitch designer at Blitz Studios, who do a lot of license games. Recently I moved down to London, now I’m lead designer at Bossa Studios, which is a social games company, and there’s lots of very cool games we’re working on there. Yeah, this is my kind of hobby project I’ve done on my own: it’s an evenings and weekends deal, and obviously I’m here at GameCity talking to people about it, but yeah, it’s going well.

DIYgamer: Are Bossa fine with you working on side projects? Not all studios are happy for their staff to work on things on the side.

Bithell: Bossa are amazingly supportive, they’ve been absolutely fantastic. They like the game, so they want to see the game go forward.

DIYgamer: It must be really nice to have that support

Bithell: It’s amazing, they’re a really great bunch of guys, they’ve been massively supporting.

DIYgamer: So how close to completion are we at the minute?

Bithell: We’ll see. I’m currently hoping for March/April for a release date next year, for the PC/Mac version. It’s going to be a downloadable game for a relatively low price, it’s a small game, it’s not massive. I’m going to be starting talking to places like Steam and all the digital distributors to see if I can get onto those services.

DIYgamer: Thanks a lot!

Here’s a trailer for your to wrap your eyes around:

[Thomas Was Alone]