Leave Home was a bit of a pleasant surprise when we reviewed it recently and got us all excited with its wonderful pick up and play nature. VideogameUK caught up with the game’s creator Matt James to ask him about his modernistic throwback to the good old days of gaming and just what made him throw in some Spectrum cameos.
Billy Withers: Matt, welcome.
Matt James: Ello.
BW: What was your inspiration in making Leave Home?
MJ: Growing up in Cornwall and leaving home, moving away. The game has a list of inspiration and references in the notes too.
BW: Are you a big fan of the side scrolling shooter and if so, what would be your favourite of the genre?
MJ: Not really. R-Type, Gradius5 and Axelay is about it.
BW: It took you twelve months to make Leave Home. Were there times when you thought to yourself that it was getting a bit too much, or did the love for the project keep you going?
MJ: Yeah, about May 2008, I had the game pretty much finished and just had to do the graphics, it was going to take ages to finish and I almost started the rendering stuff again with a faster more generic approach. It took about five more months to finish so maybe I should have restarted the gfx.
BW: Being a Commodore man, I can see how you can stay loyal to a certain computer from the 8-bit days. Was there always a love for the Spectrum there and was it essential for this to be a part of the game?
MJ: It was essential for me to put the Speccy stuff in to make Leave Home the game it is.
BW: We’ve discussed briefly the lack of any leaderboard system in Leave Home and the reason behind it. Do you wish that you had had the chance to include this in Leave Home?
MJ: Yes if MS gave us an XNA leaderboard system I’d go back and implement it in Leave Home, even something like a 100 records per indie title would be good enough. I played with the distributed p2p scoreboard stuff but it wasn’t really very good.
BW: Hermit Games have made some other games besides Leave Home. Can we expect to see any of these getting the Xbox treatment soon?
MJ: None of the finished back catalog stuff. I have loads of unfinished projects though which might happen, the next indie game is an unfinished thing I started in 2005ish.
BW: Having played Leave Home quite a few times now I still haven’t gotten anywhere near the unlockables or targets at the end of the game. Have you managed to get any of them quite easily, having coder‘s advantage?
MJ: I can do them all reasonably easily. The highest theoretical score is probably about 250k but I’m not good enough for that, someone out there probably is though.
BW: Is there a chance we could see a game with just a hint of the C64, such as a SID chip induced music track or something like that?
MJ: My cousin had a C64, he had this Terminator 2 game on a cartridge that was shit but you didn’t have to wait for it to load so we played it quite a bit. Apart from that C64 doesn’t really mean much to me so I doubt it’ll influence my stuff.
BW: Have you already started work on your next project and can you tell us anything about it?
MJ: I’m porting Leave Home to PC at the moment as an experiment. I’d like to just do XBLIG stuff because it’s such a nice platform but the visibility and so download numbers are quite luck based. If MS feature your game on the main dash you’ll get tons of downloads but they tend to prefer avatar featuring games or stuff based around holidays. I’ve found most of the press LH has got hasn’t seemed to make much difference to numbers of people trying the game, it’ll be interesting to see how a PC version does.
The next actual new game is going to be this old project I started in 2005 and never finished. I want to push it as far as possible in a difficult abstract direction and make it as insane as possible, so yeah I expect that’ll be a deliberate commercial flop.
BW: Have you been pleased with the amount of positive feedback you’ve received from the gamers of the world who have played Leave Home?
MJ: Yeah I suppose so. It’s great when people I know appreciate the game, like I’m really pleased when RobF (retroremakes, bagfullofwrong) gets it. It feels quite detached when x number of people I don’t know on the internet have played it. It is good though overall, means I can carry on making games.
BW: Finally, we like to leave the floor open to the interviewee to say whatever they wish to, so Matt, the floor is yours.
MJ: Here’s the link to download Leave Home to your Xbox:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-GB/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585503b0/
Look out for the next game on http://twitter.com/hermitgames and http://hermitgames.com.
Cheers.
BW: Matt James, thank you very much indeed for talking to us.
If you want to know just how good this game is, check it out for yourself in the Indie Games section of Xbox LIVE. It’s only 240 points, so there’s no excuse, especially when we slapped a hearty 9 out of 10 on it.
For more info on the game, and the rest of the selection from Hermit Games, visit www.hermitgames.com
