Suddenly we had a way we could respond to the fans, giving them the new content they wanted and adding online multiplayer for all the players who couldn’t play the game locally with friends. We spoke for hours, tossing around ideas and scribbling down suggestions for new mechanics and new levels, talking about the art, the audio, the animation, it was a really exciting time and we came away feeling really energised. We were hesitant at first, but we decided to meet with the developers and talk through how we would envisage the potential sequel. Team 17 aren’t just a publisher of course, they’ve been developing games for over 25 years and it just so happened they had a group of developers free, would we consider meeting with them to discuss a potential sequel? We were talking with Team 17 about this dilemma around the time were working on the release of our second DLC for the game, when they made an interesting suggestion. We’d always maintained that Overcooked was a local multiplayer game, but when you had messages from gamers wanting to play the game with their siblings living overseas it was hard for us to ignore…. There was another issue: On Twitter, Facebook, on forums, even on YouTube we were constantly being messaged by players who wanted to play the game online. We have always maintained that one of our greatest strengths as a studio was our small team size and the freedom it gives us to take risks, make mistakes and change our minds, but as a two-person studio there was no denying we were going to struggle to keep up with demand for new content. We suddenly found ourselves being inundated with messages from players all around the world, people playing the game with their friends, hoovering up each new content drop and clamouring for more.īut while the number of players was increasing, the number of people working on the game… wasn’t. Nothing could have prepared us for the success of the game after launch. We were delighted when Team 17 agreed to help us promote the game, but our main goal at that stage was to recover the cost of our development, so we could… pay next month’s rent! It’s safe to say that our expectations for the initial release were fairly low, we’d had a great response from anyone who would play the game with us, but every time we tried to pitch the game to publishers it had more or less fallen on deaf ears. It’s the first game we’ve released from our two-person studio Ghost Town Games, and it was developed entirely in my front room on a shoe-string budget (You can still see Oli’s dent in the sofa!). First a little background: my name is Phil, 2 years ago me and my friend Oli released a co-operative cooking game called Overcooked.