We were asked for this class to create a short presentation on an Indy Developer. This is my presentation on Mike Bithell of Bithell Games and Thomas Was Alone fame.

Bithell started his career at Blitz Games in 2007 as a designer. In 2010, he created the first build of a game he had made in 24 hours called Thomas Was Alone. He released it online for free and the game racked up almost 100,000 downloads in the first week alone.  In early 2011, Bithell left Blitz Games for Bossa Studios to develop his game. The full game was released in 2012 for PC and Mac. As of 2014, the game was available on 10 platforms and had sold over a million copies.

Thomas Was Alone is one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. The mechanics are simple, the game play is intuitive, the levels are well designed and the difficult curve is challenging while always feeling fair - but most of all the narrative is incredible.

(Video by Mike Bithell)

From the video, you might start to get an idea of how the audio story telling impacts the players experience. The blocks are no longer just tools, they are characters with personalities, with motivations and flaws and imperfections. The VO work was supplied by British writer and comedian Danny Wallace who in fact won a BAFTA award for his performance. The writing and narration worked so well together that it inspired many fans to create anthropomorphized versions of the characters (a quick google search will show you some of the amazing artwork)

Bithell left his role at Bossa Studios in 2013 to focus on indie development and has subsequently released 2 more narrative focused games.

Volume is a 3rd person stealth game heavily inspired by the Metal Gear franchise. The narrative is based on a re-imagining of the Robin Hood story, set in a dystopic England which is run by an unscrupulous corporation. You play as Robin, who has hacked one of the corporations AI to help him conduct virtual heists which he broadcasts - the inspiration being a sort of ‘Let’s Play’ robbery.  Again, Bithell produced a mechanically solid game - I’m very bad a stealth games, but I very much enjoyed playing Volume. The stealth mechanics feel more like puzzles to be solved rather than a focus on quick reactions. This is on-top of another very engaging narrative. Subsurface Circular is a game I have not had a chance to play yet, however the text-based adventure see’s Bithell focusing his development on shorter narrative based projects. I’m very much a fan of his work and I’m very interested to see what kind of stories he can tell focusing on small projects.