Hello! I’m Tony and Ant Workshop, the developers of Dead End Job, is my company. So I guess I’m probably the best person to tell you all about us and how this crazy ghost-filled shooter came to exist. Which I will do, over the coming weeks. It’ll be exciting, waiting for the next instalment. Like TV in the old days!
Ant Workshop’s based in Edinburgh, Scotland (which is a lovely city that is exactly the right size and that has a brilliant fringe festival every year), and was a one-person indie company.
“One person,” you might be thinking, “one person made Dead End Job?” Blimey. Well, reader dear, I have been in the games industry for quite a while. I graduated university in 2000 and went straight in to my first games dev job, based off the back of a whole load of Half-Life and Counter-Strike (1.6 - old school!) levels I’d been making in my spare time, and sometimes instead of doing my actual university work.
From there I got jobs working for Rockstar (on all of the handheld GTA games, as well as Red Dead Redemption) and later Activision (we made a fun Call of Duty that was half first person, and half top-down tactics). I’ve worked at a bunch of other places as well, and eventually decided to go indie in 2015.
But no, obviously a game as brillo as Dead End Job needs more than one person to make it. And I was lucky enough to be able to find a whole bunch of amazing freelancers who have the same Saturday-morning-cartoon-infused sense of humour as me. So ultimately a core team of five people (3 artists, a designer, and me) brought the game to life:
Joe was the first, and is the lead artist. I knew early on that the art style would be key to the game’s vibe, and when I saw that his website had a banner image that was basically a little cartoon version of himself dancing away, butt naked, I had to get him on-board. Joe’s own art style is squishy and stretchy and brilliantly cartoony, and was a perfect fit for what I had in mind.
Searra was the next to join, and has done all of the game’s UI and enemy introductions (so any time you see Hector’s hand close up and it makes you feel a bit queasy, that’s her!)
Ewan did all of the graphics of the locations you get called to, to bust up some ghosts and rescue some fools. He also made the Ghoul-B-Gone office, which is probably quite close to how our own office would look if we had one (because the team are all freelance, everyone works from their own homes - which is very nice and convenient and also means that I know what all of their bedrooms look like, which I guess is slightly weird).
The last to join was Val, who brought Ewan’s environments and Joe’s ghosts to life and made it so that enemies were fun to fight against and didn’t all just do the same thing, and that “accidentally” shooting stuff would often make it explode and sometimes give you money, which is the hallmark of a great game in my humble opinion.
But that’s just the core team! There were so many other talented wonderful people involved as well. Will who did the audio (including singing the theme tune), Xalavier who wrote the script (including writing the theme tune), Korina who did the marketing (and was not involved in the theme tune), Steve who came up with the game’s ghostly logo, a handful of coders who each popped on to do little bits and bobs that I am not clever enough to write myself, and a bunch of artists who gave our milk cap collection the variety of styles it needed.
And then there are all the ace people at our publisher, Headup, who laugh at all our dumb jokes and gave us lots of support and amazing advice about bits to tweak and add based on their frankly scary amount of Binding of Isaac knowledge (Tony’s note: I did write this, they didn’t edit it in after I sent them the text. Honest.)
Anyway, that’s a lot of words about the wonderful people (and me) that are behind Dead End Job, so I think we’ll wrap it up there. Thanks for reading, and hopefully you’ll come back next week when I write about how the idea for the game came about in the first place.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/827610