If you’ve spent any time in gaming circles lately, you’ve likely heard the enthusiastic cries of “Thank goodness you’re here!” echoing from the fictional Northern English town of Barnsworth. What began as a passion project by two childhood friends from Barnsley has unexpectedly become one of 2024’s most celebrated indie darlings, winning a BAFTA for Best British Game and being hailed by critics as one of the funniest games ever made.
The journey of creators Will Todd and James Carbutt, the duo behind development studio Coal Supper, is a story of embracing creative limitations, trusting unconventional instincts, and accidentally creating what players are calling “the most Northern game ever made“. This is the story of how a weekend project turned into a multi-award-winning comedy masterpiece.
The Creative Origins: Two Friends and a “Stupid Idea”
Will Todd and James Carbutt have known each other since they were about 12 years old, meeting in secondary school and maintaining their friendship through university and separate career paths. Todd studied game technology while Carbutt pursued graphic design and animation, but neither had professional game development experience when they began their collaboration .
Their first foray into game development was 2019’s The Good Time Garden, a free, surreal interactive experience they created around their day jobs. As Todd recalls, “We just got together one weekend and decided to make something fun. It has been the longest weekend of our lives”. The positive reception to this initial project gave them the confidence to attempt something more ambitious, though their approach remained decidedly unorthodox.
The original concept for Thank Goodness You’re Here! was vastly different from the final product. Initially codenamed “mealworm” and intended to have a “slightly unsettling vibe,” the game began as a series of “sketch comedy” vignettes without a central character or specific setting. As Carbutt explains, “The inspiration at the start was just ‘how can we do stupid little goofs in this tone of voice we’ve got?’ and figure out what the tone of voice is saying later. And we never really did.”
The Comedy-First Philosophy: “We’re Sh*t at Video Game Design”
In a revealing moment at the 2025 Game Developers Conference, the duo openly admitted their unconventional approach to game design. “So why put funny first? What does that mean? Well, it’s all we knew how to do. Full disclosure, we’re shit at video game design,” they told the audience.
This admission wasn’t self-deprecation but rather a statement of design philosophy. The pair found that traditional game development approaches didn’t work for them. “Our attempts to enforce any structure top-down by shoehorning in narrative arcs, creating flow charts of abstract beats, and trying to derive a lock-and-key Metroidvania-y thing did little to remedy this because we’d already made our bed,” Todd explained.
Instead, they developed what they call a “comedy-first” approach. Their process was remarkably straightforward: “Our approach to development is comedy first, and then tease out ‘gameplay’ from those bits. So, it usually involves us both drinking 4 tins of Stella a piece and screaming obscenities in a room until one of us says something funny (usually Will). We write good stuff in the pub“.
This method resulted in the game’s most distinctive mechanic: the slap. Originally a hangover from their first game The Good Time Garden, the slap became the universal interact button. “We knew we wanted quite a ‘pure’ gameplay experience (no UI, no dialogue boxes, no complicated control scheme), and, as we knew there wouldn’t be any gameplay in the traditional sense, it made sense to find a non-diegetic interactive button. Slap was the simplest and funniest,” says Carbutt.
The Accidental Authenticity: How Yorkshire Took Over
Interestingly, the game’s distinctly Northern English setting wasn’t part of the original vision. The duo initially envisioned something inspired by Americana, but found their natural accents and humor kept creeping in. “The more we worked on it, the more we started drawing out characters that just sounded more and more like us, because we’re doing it in our voices,” Will Todd told the BBC.
As they developed characters using their own vocal mannerisms, the setting naturally shifted toward what they knew firsthand. “It was a slow journey to get to making it based on our hometown,” Carbutt notes. “It started with vignettes in a town and then because we were using our accents we thought it’d be a Northern town. At some point Will just said ‘Then the bus drives past the welcome to Barnsworth sign’ and it was incidental that it was Barnsley-inspired.”
The town of Barnsworth became what they jokingly call “Banter Town Hall,” a loving parody of their hometown filled with Yorkshire dialect and cultural references. The game includes two subtitle options: “English” and “Dialect,” essentially providing translations for those unfamiliar with Northern English colloquialisms. “There’s subtitles for people from Yorkshire and subtitles for proper English – translation options for Southerners,” James jokes.
The Development Journey: From 80 Rejections to Matt Berry
The path to publication wasn’t smooth. The duo pitched to approximately 80 publishers before finding their home with Panic, the publisher behind Untitled Goose Game. “I think part of that was we were obviously trying to shirk traditional game design,” Will suggests. “Tropes and genres and stuff. And it wasn’t necessarily super-clear what the game was going to be”.
When they finally signed with Panic, the publisher asked if they had any special requests. Off the cuff, they mentioned Matt Berry, the British comedy icon known for What We Do in the Shadows and The IT Crowd. To their astonishment, Berry agreed, though with one catch: he could only record the following Monday. The pair spent a feverish weekend rewriting and expanding dialogue to create a substantial role for him.
The recording session became legendary, with Carbutt having to do “an impression of Matt Berry doing a Yorkshire accent for him to say the lines back”. Berry surprisingly nailed the accent except for one word: “alright,” which has a very specific pronunciation in South Yorkshire. “It’s a very nuanced diphthong,” Carbutt explains. Those lines ultimately had to be cut.
Structural Growing Pains: From Open World to Guided Chaos
One of the most significant changes during development was the game’s structure. Originally envisioned as an open-world experience with branching paths, the team found this approach caused players to miss crucial jokes and interactions.
“It caused so many headaches because there’s only so much you can do in the game because there’s only so much you can animate at that fidelity with the small team that we have,” Carbutt explains. “We found that players ended up doing a constant loop to find the one thing they needed to do and if they missed the plant pot they were supposed to jump in then the whole thing fell on its arse.”
They ultimately settled on a more guided structure that kept the experience focused while maintaining the feeling of exploration. This decision exemplified their development philosophy: whenever comedy conflicted with traditional game design, comedy won.
A Personal Love Letter to Northern Life
What makes Thank Goodness You’re Here! truly special is how it captures the essence of small-town Northern life while embracing surreal absurdity. The game features mundane tasks, like getting milk for tea or helping with someone’s blocked hose, elevated to ridiculous extremes, such as entering the mind of a hallucinating cow or swimming through beer pipes.
The humor walks a delicate line between lighthearted whimsy and what Carbutt describes as “unnecessarily horny seaside postcard” humor. Their influences range from classic British comics like Viz and Beano to modern cartoons like Adventure Time, with a comedic sensibility inspired by Vic Reeves Big Night Out and The Mighty Boosh.
Despite the international appeal, the game remains unapologetically authentic to its Northern roots. “It really is a love letter to the north and specifically our hometown,” Will Todd tells the BBC. “And we will be reaching as many of those people as possible. And then also an audience of 100,000 Americans.”
Thank Goodness You’re Here! stands as a testament to what can happen when creators embrace their unique voice rather than following conventional wisdom. The game’s success, both critically and commercially, proves that there’s room in the gaming landscape for highly specific, personally authentic experiences.
For Todd and Carbutt, the journey from weekend project to BAFTA-winning success story hasn’t changed their fundamental approach. As James Carbutt reflects on their partnership: “I’m making a game with my best friend. What can be better than that?”.
In an industry often dominated by massive budgets and safe sequels, Thank Goodness You’re Here! serves as a welcome reminder that the most memorable gaming experiences often come from unexpected places, even if that place is a fictional Northern town where the primary interaction is slapping things and the mayor might just need help with his errands.
