What do you get if you cross a SpaceX engineer, a TV writer, and a former professor?
Give up?
The answer is Mad Herons, a new Los Angeles-based indie studio working on their comedy-focused debut title, Send In The Clown.
Technical and game design lead Nick Park was formerly an engineer at SpaceX and Nvidia, while creative and audio lead Jacques Mouledoux was a writer on the Paramount+ TV show iCarly, as well as a contributor to the satirical news site Hard Drive. Rounding out the co-founders is operations and strategic lead Karen Park, a veteran of the LA improv comedy scene who was previously a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
The trio are aiming to draw on their diverse experiences and shared love of comedy to make a game about a clown saving a 12-year-old’s disastrous birthday party – a game that makes a selling point of only being an hour long. GamesIndustry.biz asked the three studio founders what makes for a good comedy game, and how they’re finding funding on America’s expensive West Coast.
Relatively few games companies target comedy, which can be notoriously hard to do – what do you see as some of the most successful examples of comedy games, and why do they work?
Jacques Mouledoux: Comedy is certainly hard, but there are so many hilarious games. My favourite game of all time is Portal, which is so funny, but I also love Untitled Goose Game, Disco Elysium, Earthbound, and so many more.
I think comedy games work best when they allow the players themselves to be funny. Disco Elysium, for instance, has the sort of hilarious situations and hilarious characters (shoutout Cuno) you might find in a comedy film or TV show, but the game goes further and allows you to make completely unhinged decisions; you feel like you are funny. And then you have something like Untitled Goose Game where you truly feel like an extremely obnoxious goose, because that’s what you have to be in order to succeed at the game. What I’m saying is that I want to be unhinged and/or a goose.
Nick Park: I’ll echo Jacques in loving the Portal series and Untitled Goose Game, and will add Psychonauts as a personal favorite. I think one thing these games share is that their comedy isn’t just a thin layer of one-liners on top of the gameplay or plot, but is woven throughout every element of the game. You can tell the creators thought about comedy first, and made sure their mechanics, level design, art, audio, and characters all worked together to make absurd situations and jokes land and feel like a natural part of the experience.
Why do you think games are well suited to comedy?
JM:I think the whole “choose your own adventure” element that makes video game storytelling so satisfying is what makes them uniquely well suited for comedy as well. I just played the first Divinity: Original Sin game, and there’s an optional quest where you’re trying to reconnect a disembodied head with its body. Carrying the head around was funny, but there was nothing like the feeling of coming across a headless body and being like, “Oh yes, this is it!”
To share an example from Send In The Clown, the birthday girl’s brother Tad tells you that their dad paid him $20 to stay in the garage during the party; however, if you had explored before that conversation and seen that the dad’s most recent web search was “how much money to pay boy to behave,” Tad will also say, “I don’t know how my dad knew it, but $20 was exactly the right amount.” It’s that sort of customised-per-player writing that you just can’t get in any other medium.
What’s your reasoning for making a short game?
JM:It’s all about respecting the player’s time. I love meaty JRPGs but simply don’t have the time to play many of them. Part of the challenge and fun of making Send In The Clown was taking all of the elements of those JRPGs, like levelling up and building a party and making meaningful choices, and condensing them into a single, one-hour-ish comedy experience. It’s basically the game we wish existed.
NP:We wanted to give players the best version of all of our stupid ideas and gags, and then let them go enjoy something else. Not everything has to be an epic. Bring back the 90-minute action blockbuster.
You talked about bootstrapping the studio – have you tried to raise funding? If so, how did it go? And how do you plan to pay for the development of the game?
NP:As a studio we’re focused on sustainability. We want to be able to keep working as a small team making games we’re proud of, sharing profits with our collaborators, and not chasing rapid growth or betting the business on a single title. That pretty much ruled out the idea of venture capital or angel investors.
We did spend some time reaching out to publishers for Send In The Clown, but we were primarily looking for help with marketing expertise and promotional budgets, not funding development of the game itself. We got some really useful feedback during that process, but ultimately we didn’t find a good match. Being first-time devs without an existing audience makes us a risky investment, and we were close enough to our release date when we started these conversations that we didn’t line up with the standard contracts and schedules publishers operate on. That meant some folks who might have been willing to take those risks didn’t have the bandwidth to jump in with us.
Luckily we’re in a good position to self-fund development, and have been doing our best to learn how to market a game at the same time. Coming to game development after decades in other careers puts us in a fortunate position to be able to draw from savings and other investments to back ourselves for at least a game or two. That does mean our budgets have to stay small, but it also means freedom from the pressures of outside investors while we build our foundations.
LA is often cited as the most expensive place in the world to make games, and we’ve seen a huge number of layoffs there as games companies relocate development to cheaper locations. It seems a daunting place to launch a new indie studio – how will you make the numbers add up, and have you considered a different location?
JM:Los Angeles is outrageously expensive; the age of the dollar taco is sadly long gone. However, LA is filled with incredibly talented, creative people who want to make amazing art, including video games. We all met by doing improv comedy here, and while there are plenty of amazing cities in America, I can’t think of another that brings together such a unique combination of writers, musicians, game designers, etc.
As for making the numbers add up, that is a challenge for sure. Our practically begging personal social media accounts can attest to how badly we want Send In The Clown to succeed. Having said that, we have not considered leaving Los Angeles and frankly don’t want to.
NP:I don’t think we can overstate how valuable it is to be surrounded by a community of friends who are pursuing creative work across so many disciplines. LA attracts people who are eager to collaborate and make cool things, and Send In The Clown wouldn’t exist without the comedians, voice actors, musicians, programmers, and artists we’ve met and get to hang out with here.
It helps that we’re such a small studio, so the higher cost of living doesn’t multiply across hundreds of people. And being in LA doesn’t stop us from working with folks from all over. Our co-founder and head artist Karen is based in Scotland, and we’ve worked with contractors from Washington, Illinois, and the UK over the course of development.
Karen Park:Won’t lie, I’m hoping the team decides to up sticks and move the whole LA scene to Scotland. Loads of brilliant creatives here, too.
The games industry is going through a difficult period right now, but the TV industry is probably in an even greater period of flux. Is your motivation to move into games partly down to the difficulties in TV? Do you think games offer more opportunities?
JM:My decision to move from TV writing into game development was less me making a career decision and more me “following the fun”, as they say in improv. I had always wanted to make video games, so when the 2023 Writers Guild Strike kept me from doing TV work, I decided to teach myself programming and game dev. I ended up loving it.
As far as games offering more opportunities than TV, I think both industries are extremely challenging. I think any real advantage that the video game industry has over TV lies in a more reasonable point of entry. It’s still extremely hard to break through, but at least you don’t need a TV studio with a hundred million dollars to make a video game.
How will your various backgrounds in engineering, TV, and comedy translate to the video game space? What advantages and disadvantages do you foresee?
NP:I think the fact that our experience comes from a variety of backgrounds outside of game development is a huge asset. It lets us bring hard-earned experience to bear in each of our crafts, while still having a unique approach and perspective that can give us a distinct voice compared to developers who built their chops solely in the games industry.
JM: I certainly feel that my previous career writing jokes has been enormously helpful in my new career writing jokes.
NP: We’re also very lucky to have friends who have worked at various indie and AAA studios to nudge us in the right direction when we do need the experience of seasoned game devs. Looking forward, I’m incredibly excited about the potential this team has to make games that stand out from the norm. We’re drawing from so many different life experiences that come together in this artform, and when we aren’t just trying to make each other laugh with stupid pitches, we’re busy making the mistake of following through on them. I think the results are going to be delightful.
