Flock's Developers Talk David Attenborough & Next Game's Progress

Just landing this summer, Flock is a completely unique kind of creature collecting adventure, taking players soaring through the sky on birdback as they discover strange animals across an open world. The new release comes from developer Hollow Ponds, which is led in part by Ricky Haggett and Richard Hogg, in conjunction with indie darling publisher Annapurna Interactive, known for games like Stray and What Remains of Edith Finch. Available in both single player and co-op, the title offers a fantastical approach to zoology where players can amass a colorful, ever-changing flock.

Both Haggett and Hogg have a long history in games, much of it working as a team. The pair previously released the experiential art title Hohokum, organizational puzzler Wilmot’s Warehouse, and narrative-driven I Am Dead, all of which vary in their mechanics and style but hold true to one constant: a lack of combat and overly stressful gameplay. This has perhaps never been more true than with their latest critically-acclaimed release Flock, which has been met with glowing reviews praising its serene nature and immersive, detailed environments.

Screen Rant interviewed Ricky Haggett and Dick Hogg to discuss crafting a world filled with creative creatures, their biggest inspirations, and what’s next for the developer duo.

Crafting The World Of Flock

Designing Quirky Creatures & A Fantasical – Yet Grounded – Environment

Screen Rant: I’ve gotten to experience more of how every animal has these really specific quirks and their calls and their general behaviors and that sort of thing, and they’re so varied and creative. I’m curious if you guys found yourself watching a lot of nature shows or anything like that to get inspired for strange creature behaviors, or was it all just sort of organic creation in that regard?

Ricky Haggett: I think we probably watch a bunch of that stuff anyway. I know that I do, pretty sure you do as well, Dick.

Richard “Dick” Hogg: Well, kind of. Ever since I was a small child, I’ve always been really into nature stuff. I do watch some stuff, but I don’t really watch the big ticket like David Attenborough-narrated kind of stuff. I am not a huge fan of that, if I’m honest.

That high production stuff, I’m not a huge fan of, but I watch lots of stuff like Springwatch. Do you have an equivalent of Springwatch in America? It’s a thing we have here that happens, and it’s like every night for three weeks. It’s all live footage of birds on their nests and stuff like that.

Oh, that sounds awesome.

Dick Hogg: It’s almost like the broadcast style is closer to sport than it is to –

Ricky Haggett: Or like reality TV.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, it’s like nature with pundits and live cameras and stuff. That’s what I love. Stuff like that is what I watch a lot of.

Ricky Haggett: You’re not so into the contrived narratives that those layer over the top of nature documentary.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I love David Attenborough, think he’s amazing, but I find those contrived narratives a bit – they’re constantly trying to inject more emotional storytelling into nature than there actually is in real [life].

I don’t want to be too down on it, but yeah, I don’t watch much of that stuff. And Becky, my wife, won’t watch it at all. Anything where there’s animals being ripped apart by tigers or something, she just won’t watch that. In terms of the game, I love bird watching and I love going out into the real world and trying to spot creatures, and
I get really excited about animals – birds particularly – that I’ve seen in the real world, and I guess that’s a massive influence on this game
.

Ricky Haggett: Yeah, it was rooted in real experiences from real life. I think, also, there was a meeting point. It was like: what’s fun? What can we achieve in this video game where we want people to have different experiences of the creatures and different ways they find them that both works as a video game mechanic, but you could have people try and figure out, “Oh, there’s a new thing to do here,” but that doesn’t feel too contrived in video gaming?”

Dick Hogg: I never say never, but me and Ricky together have never made a game with violence in it. We’re always looking for things that are like –
we don’t have combat mechanics or battling mechanics to fall back on, so we have to find other things that the player does, other ways for the player to find affordances with these creatures and interact with them
.

Instead of either killing them or making them fight each other [Laughs], we have to find other things, and an obvious one is to identify them and find out what they are and sort of catalog them and then maybe try and get them to join you. These are the sorts of things you end up having to explore when you can’t have violence.

Ricky Haggett: We didn’t want the idea that you’re catching them like you are some sort of zookeeper. That was partly the language we used, but also just the vibe of that experience. and just the whole sense that there are a bunch of wild creatures that you’re charming them by singing to them. They’ll hang out with you for a bit, but then they’ll drift off and you can call them back later, but it’s not quite the same as you achieving ownership over them.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, I now love that they just drift off. I’ve read a few things where people are talking about the game, and I’ve heard a few people mention the fact that the creatures just leave eventually in a way that is quite accepting of that. When we were designing the game, that’s the thing we worried about a lot: would people understand that the creatures just leave, and would they feel okay about that?

We had earlier versions of the game where the player had some kind of control over which ones you lose and which ones you don’t, but we were overthinking it. Part of the vibe is that these creatures join you of their own volition and you charm them. I really like the word charm, because you’re kind of convincing them to join you, and they join you for a bit, and I think it feels natural that they just eventually go, “I’m off now.”

I think one thing that we probably didn’t know when we spoke to you two years ago was the identification thing, that was something that I don’t think we’d fully nailed down at that point.
The whole, when you first come across a creature, doing that kind of multiple choice finding out which one it is, that’s the thing that surprised me
– that seems to have become a really popular part of this game is doing that. Am I right in saying this, Ricky, that that was quite a late idea, wasn’t it?

Ricky Haggett: Yeah, it was. I don’t remember when we spoke to Deven last or what state the game was in. I haven’t gone back and read it, but yeah, it definitely was relatively late. We had a fully working version of the game, which wasn’t like that, and then we just decided, “Yeah, let’s do this.”

The last time that we spoke, we talked about favorite creatures in the game. Ricky, you had said yours was the Gormless Skyfish, and Dick, you said yours was the Balsamic Droop. Have those answers changed at all since then?

Dick Hogg: Well, they must have, because somebody, the other day in another interview, somebody asked us our favorite creature, and my answer was not that. I can’t remember what it was now. I still really like the Balsamic Droop, so I’d happily still go with that. Ricky, can you remember what I said was my favorite creature?

Ricky Haggett: No, I remember what I said. I said the Mushroom Sprugs. I think I like the Sprugs and the Thrips in terms of just being silly, charming creatures, slightly cheeky. I like the ones you pull out the ground. I like the Sprugs, I think best, as a family, and I think my favorite is the little one with the mushroom on its head that sort of flaps up into the air when you go near it.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, I think that I remember what I said now, it was the Pied Sprug, the one that disguises itself – this is a big spoiler – because that was one of the last things that I did on the game, and so that creature was one of the last creatures. We squeezed it in at the end. But I love all my babies, there’s not many that I don’t like. I’m broadly happy with them all.

You mentioned that one of the biggest ways that it’s changed since a couple of years ago is the actual identifying minigame type thing. What would you say in general are the biggest ways the game changed or evolved as it went on?

Ricky Haggett: Well, another late addition was how you get the songs. We went through a long, long period of trying things. Right now in the game, the way the game ended up being was you have your sheep and you put them in meadows, and by eating the grass, the sheep expose these little creatures, the Burgling Bewls, who have nicked all the stuff from the camp that you’re trying to retrieve, including the song whistles that let you charm creatures. Once the sheep have eaten the meadow, then you can see their little noses poking up out of a hole and you yank them out, and then you get to see what they’ve squirreled away in the hole.

That was a thing we came up with relatively late, and
there were much more convoluted ways that we were trying to tie sheep to progress or whatever, to acquisition of the whistles and the things that you need to progress
, like you can make your flock bigger and stuff. Earlier on it was like a thing where you would have sheep and you put them on meadows so that they would get wooly and you’d sheer them to get wool, and then you’d have to use the wool to buy various songs, which you also had to learn from song stones around the world.

It was just too many different steps and too complicated. Generally, I think early on the game was a bit overwhelming with how many different kinds of things were happening, and it was a case of taking things away and then adding some new things in to find a configuration which was much more straightforward.

Dick Hogg:
It is the hardest game I’ve ever made in terms of that kind of thing
, like having all these different overlapping systems that are interdependent with each other, and they have to be as streamlined as you can make it, but they have to feel functionally satisfying and useful.

They have to make sense to the player both in terms of the player knowing what’s going on, but also in terms of them fitting into the fiction of the world and being plausible within – it’s so many things to ask, really. The main thing is we’re trying to make the game feel fun, and interesting, and nice to play, but also you’ve got all these other considerations that are also, “Why? Why is the player trying to do this? How do they find out these things?”

It’s really hard and lots of very difficult meetings, and we had some quite tough times trying to figure this stuff out. We had some quite emotional times, I think. I remember getting very emotional about this particular issue and being really frustrated, because you’re trying to make it make sense from all different angles. I think what we came up with the end is about as robust and as simple as we could have got it, and as far as I can tell, feels good to play. We straight away knew it was the right direction when people just understood it in play tests.

Ricky Haggett: We ended up having to make a bunch of cutscenes to sort of sell that as well, the idea.

Dick Hogg: Yeah. Then at the same time, the other thing that we’re trying to maneuver into position in amongst all this mess of different systems is the ending. We’re trying to think, “What happens at the end of this game? Is there a big satisfying thing that happens at the end? How big is it? How big of an amazing moment is it? Is it more of a low-key thing? How does it fit in with the progression of all these other systems and whatever that’s happening in the game?” I think that was a real relief when we figured out what that was and what the flavor of that was going to be.

Ricky Haggett: We were really going to not make it a game where you’re like, “This is a place that you are saving.”
It’s not, “You are the hero that’s going to save this dying land, or kill the bad wizard.”
It’s much more straightforward and believable than that.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, for the same reason that I don’t like David Attenborough documentaries because of the kind of false narratives. I’ll happily play a video game where you’re trying to kill the bad wizard, but I don’t want to make one. [Laughs] I want to make something that, even though our games are quite weird, I want to make something that feels a bit more plausible and a bit more relatable.

Ricky Haggett: I think another thing as well on making this game, if you go back and look at really early prototypes, generally things were a bit more fantastical, and over time they became more prosaic and more like the real world. That’s true of the landscape and the art, and it’s true of the story, and just trying to make a place that feels a bit believable somehow.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, I think if we’d have kept going making this game, it would’ve ended up being set on a housing estate in the 1970s. [Laughs]

Ricky Haggett: [Laughs] Just a load of sparrows.

Remind me what part of the UK you guys are in?

Ricky Haggett: Different bits. I’m in East London, in Walthamstow.

Dick Hogg: I’m in Hastings, which is on the south coast. You can see France from here, so really on the south coast.

I remember you guys mentioning taking some inspiration from UK places in nature from near where you both are.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, so the game we made before, I Am Dead, was very inspired by this place where I am now. It’s a fishing village kind of vibe, and that game, we borrowed lots of things from here. Flock isn’t so much inspired by anywhere specific.

Ricky Haggett: There’s lots of reference photos from places which definitely either are in England or could be in England.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, actually this morning, I was walking my dog in the place that inspired the grasslands in Flock. Specifically this time of year, there’s an area where they don’t mow the grass and they allow it to all go to seed and flower. You think grass is all the same, but then when you let it all grow out and flower, you realize there’s like five or six different types of grass, and they’ve all got very different sort of flowering.

They’re not big exciting flowers – they’re quite low-key flowers, but the overall effect is really nice, and you get slight different colors, you get purple patches and then patches that are more yellowy.
The grassland area in Flock is based on me noticing that and trying to recreate it in a game
, and it’s exactly what it’s like now at the moment, so that’s probably three years of me noticing that and every year it comes around.

What was that process like narrowing down the biomes when you were designing the uplands? How did you decide how varied you wanted those to be?

Dick Hogg: I felt strongly that they should be semi-naturalistic in terms of feeling plausible places, plausible different areas without being too delineated.

Ricky Haggett: There was a process at the start, where you drew lots of different things without thinking too much about how it would all fit together. Then there was a process of trying to rationalize what the whole map would be like, which went hand in hand with figuring out how many different areas should there even be, and how many cloud levels, because as the cloud level falls, obviously, it reveals more and more.

There was a real hard wrangling process of thinking, “Well, we really like these different areas that Dick’s drawn, and they need to be somewhere on this map, and that means they have to be next to each other.” Then there was a sort of post-rationalization process of figuring out what that meant in terms of what interim places we might need, and you ended up making lots of treatments for like, “This place isn’t exactly the grasslands, and it isn’t exactly the mushroom forest, it’s this halfway sort of thing.”

Dick Hogg: Yeah, in between.
A pet hate of mine is games where you go from one area to the other, and it feels like even though you’re supposed to be in an outdoor place, a natural place, it feels like you’ve gone from one room to the next
. The most extreme example is games where there’s like the ice world and the desert world or whatever, but even games that are supposedly more naturalistic, quite often they delineate regions in a way that doesn’t feel very natural to me.

Ecologists talk a lot about things like mosaic ecologies, where on the edge of some woodlands, you get a kind of area where the woodland is slowly on its way growing further into the region that’s not got woodland.You get this kind of patchy place where it’s a bit like the woodland and a bit like the meadow, but maybe there’s other plants that only exist in those border areas because they’re like early colonizing plants that then get overtaken by other stuff later on.

You get these regions that are a special area between two big areas, you get a zone that’s slightly different. There’s a few places in the game where we did that, and I think that hopefully makes the game feel a bit more naturalistic. There’s lots of places where one biome pops up in a few random places within another – which is, again deliberate – because that happens in the real world. If you have a bit of shelter from the wind, you might get an area where a different type of plant is doing well even though it’s surrounded by something else.

It wasn’t all me. Dan, who was the other artist working on the game, he had some input into this, and there’s one particular area of the game where it’s really got his fingerprints all over it.

Ricky Haggett: Dan Emerson and Sam Wong, who did level design, spent lots of time using the stuff that – so Dick would do drawings, and then there’d be a process of making stuff, and then they would lay it all out and there’d be a conversation about the places and the neighboring places, but also about the creatures that were there, and there was just a long process of juggling that stuff around.

Dick Hogg: It’s not particularly natural. The end result isn’t particularly naturalistic, it’s still quite fantastical, but hopefully it has a sort of authenticity to it as well on its own terms.

The Biggest Challenges Of Flock

Day/Night Cycles, Dynamic Lighting, & Gameplay Balances

I know this game marked a lot of firsts for you in terms of design, like a day night cycle and having natural lighting. Did you find that to be the biggest challenge, design wise, outside of the narrative that you were just talking about?

Dick Hogg:
Specifically those two things, making a big open world game with a day night cycle and naturalistic lighting, was a huge headache for me
, until we found a good technical artist, and then it ceased to be a headache and became a pleasure.

Ricky Haggett: Yeah, our tech artist, Richard Whitelock, was amazing at coming in and being reassuring and talking to us in a sort of technical way about what he was going to do, but not really exposing us to any of the real realities of it, and looking at a lot of Dick’s work and listening to feedback and just getting on with making the game look the way it did. Which wasn’t him just grabbing the reins and leading off in a completely different direction, it was very much –

Dick Hogg: It was very sensitive. Me and another artist, Lilly Devon, had done initial work on trying to figure out how the art style works in relation to what things are made out of, what materials look like, how textures work, but also things like lighting and atmospherics and stuff like that. We were trying to find a technical artist for a long time. I came into this project not knowing what a technical artist even was. I’d never heard of the job title and didn’t really understand that that’s a role. Even though we are using Unreal, we are using an engine that does a lot of this stuff for you, but without someone like Richard, we wouldn’t have had a clue how to make this game look nice, really. It is just totally outside of my expertise at all, and he was absolutely great.

It’s like with movies – I think a lot of movie directors are very dependent on a director of photography in order for the movie to look the way it looks, and I think it’s a similar relationship with a tech artist on a game like this. Me and Richard worked quite closely on it, I think, in terms of me scribbling over screenshots and him trying to figure out what I wanted and looking at references and stuff like that. But in terms of the art style of this game, that was a huge headache until we had the person come along who knew how to solve that problem, and I’ve got a huge amount of respect for people that do that job, and there’s not enough of them. It’s really hard to find one.

I don’t know if you know Nelson, the famous admiral in this country, he famously, back in the day when ships were made out of wood, everywhere he went in England, he’d have a pocketful of acorns, and he would plant them everywhere so that in the future there’d be more oak trees to make ships out of. I kind of want to do that, but with technical artists. I want to, wherever I go now, if I talk to young people either at college or whatever, I’m like, “Become a f***ing technical artist,” [Laughs] because it’s a well-paid job. It’s a well-paid, interesting job that the game industry is just crying out for them.

That’s my advice to all young people. I used to get loads of emails from people who wanted to make music for video games, and
there seems to be a lot of people who want to be musicians in video games, and at one point I was almost tempted to reply back going, “Have you considered becoming a technical artist?”
If you want to break into games, put away the musical instruments and learn about shaders. If I was in my 20s and starting off in games, I think that’s probably a route that I’d be looking to go down myself, because I think it is a really, really interesting part of game development.

In terms of specific mechanics for when it comes to the weird or very specific things you have to do to discover some creatures, do you have one of those you’re particularly proud of? I loved having to listen for the yelling of the one little guys that are pulled out of the ground.

Dick Hogg: Oh yeah, the little turnip guys, a Ground Winnow. That’s actually a favorite of mine.

Ricky Haggett: I really like just how the singing stuff works. It’s quite a simple system, but the way that they sing in relation to – they know how rare they are. They sing in a rhythmic way. The game doesn’t let a load of noisy creatures overwhelm the quiet ones. There’s a little system that’s figuring all that stuff out that works really well.

Dick Hogg: That’s a cop out answer, Ricky. What’s your favorite creature in terms of how you find it, the mechanic? You’ve got to like the one that’s sort of invisible, the Rustic that you get to name, the elusive Rustic.

Ricky Haggett: I do like that one a lot.

Dick Hogg: I think that one’s f***ing awesome. I love that.

Ricky Haggett: That’s great. I also just like camouflage ones. I like the ones that just take you a while to spot, ones that are just blending in.

Dick Hogg: I think earlier in development we had lots of more complicated ideas of creatures, where you have to maybe find the egg and then put it somewhere where it gets incubated and then it hatches. We realized that a lot of those ideas are the sort of ideas that they’re good ideas when you’re sat thinking about a game in the abstracts,
but then when you start play testing it, you realize that they’re too complicated, and you can’t just do things like that as little one-off clever things, because you’re asking too much of the player, really.

Ricky Haggett: Yeah, we did it for the special creatures, for the sort of big progress creatures, but generally the other creatures are generally simpler, I would say. I’m sort of deliberately avoiding some spoilers here.

I feel like it was a really good balance that you guys struck of the ones that are more out in the open are obvious, having to find a more long form one in between the ones that are maybe a little more straightforward.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, I think we all felt really strongly that we wanted some creatures that are just ubiquitous and are really easy to get and just everywhere, because that’s what nature’s like – seagulls or sparrows or whatever, you just get these creatures that you see them everywhere and they’re just part of the fabric of the world.

Like the Basking Bewls that are probably the first creature you see in the game, they’re just everywhere and you sort of get used to them. There is an Easter egg in that there are rare variations. I don’t know if you realized that that creature has marking variations. Some of them are really rare, and the game doesn’t reward you for finding them, does it, Ricky?

Ricky Haggett: No, it doesn’t acknowledge it at all. Because we realized that as soon as you acknowledge it in any way, there are going to be certain types of players who will then grind away until they get the thing that the game’s going to say, “Well done,” pat you on the head for finding the rare thing.
It’s just better to just put that stuff in the game and not tell anyone, and if people figure it out, cool; if they don’t figure it out, cool.

That’s something else I really liked about this game, is it wasn’t so much the explicit rewards system all the time that a lot of games have. It was more like, “I am motivated to find these creatures because they’re interesting and neat,” not because I’m actively like, “I’m going to reach the next tier and I’m going to unlock stuff.”

Dick Hogg: Yeah, I hope you’re right. That’s exactly what we were aiming for. I think you’re maybe flattering us a little bit too much.

I mean, I gave it a 4.5 out of five.

Dick Hogg: [Laughs] Yeah, okay, fine, on a really well-known website. I hope you’re right. I hope that the kind of intrinsic goals of just wanting to find these things because they’re interesting, not because you get points for it, I hope this game does achieve that.

In terms of it being gamey and giving you rewards for doing the thing, it’s actually the most like that game we’ve made, I think. I think when we spoke to you two years ago, we talked about how this game is a kind of a spiritual successor to Hohokam. We wanted to make a game that felt a lot like Hohokam, but we didn’t want it to be as obtuse and kind of cryptic as Hohokam is, because a lot of people played Hohokam and just bounced off it because they didn’t know what they were doing, or they found it frustrating and they wanted a bit more game-iness.

They wanted the game to kind of tell them what they were supposed to be doing, “What are my objectives?”
We made a conscious effort to make this game feel a bit more like that and be a bit more like there’s an NPC telling you to go and check a thing out over here or there’s a map.
There’s little UI things that tell you, that almost feel like health bars or something that tell you how successful you are at charming the creatures. We did put a lot of effort into making this game feel more like other games in that respect, have familiar systems.

Ricky Haggett: But we didn’t tie progression, for example, to finding a certain number of creatures. That was a decision I think we made midway through, where if people just want to get to the end and have an ending, then it’s relatively straightforward to do that, but if you want to spend time finding all the rest of the creatures, that’s an intrinsic thing that you just decide you want to do. If you want to fill your sticker book of getting them all, then cool, but we’re not going to gate you seeing the ending behind that.

Dick Hogg: I really like games that really communicate well like, “Here’s the point of feeling like you’ve completed the game if you are a dirty casual.” [Laughs] A game I felt did that quite well was Tunic. I played Tunic enough to feel like, “This was a nice game. I didn’t devote my life to it. I enjoyed this game, I enjoyed being in this world.”

At the point at which I decided to finish Tunic, I knew there was loads more I could have delved into and I could have gone down rabbit holes. The game communicated that quite obviously to me, but the game also told me, “Yeah, this is kind of the end if you’re a person that wants to get on with their life.”

Ricky Haggett: Yes, it’s generous to build in multiple off-ramps rather than just a big, long path and only one off-ramp at the end when you feel like you can stop.

Dick Hogg: That’s something I’d definitely think about more in the future with games:
how do you give those people coming into your game with different time constraints and different levels of ideas of what their sense of completing a game is, how do you satisfy all those people as much as you can?
I don’t know.

Looking To The Future

Taking Lessons From Flock & A Slew Of Potential Projects

What do you think the biggest lessons you guys might be taking from this into whatever your next project might be?

Ricky Haggett: I’m super happy with a lot of things about Flock. I think that it feels lovely to play. I’m still working on a patch for some little bugs and whatnot, and it still feels nice just to pick the game up and fly that bird around in the world.

I think that making games which just feel intrinsically nice in your hands to move the thing around gives you so much. It’s obviously really nice for players as well, but it just gives you so much morale, I think, throughout development. We put so much work and time into the experience of just being this bird that flies around with this flock, but it was totally worth it, I think.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, game feel is super important. I think for this project, definitely, it was really, really important, and
I can think of another game that we want to make, or I definitely want to make, where I think that is something that I’ll be thinking about more.

Obviously this just released, so you’re fully justified in just enjoying the present moment of that and sitting with that for a minute, but do you have any sort of future visions of where you’d like to go next?

Ricky Haggett: We’ve got a bunch of different ideas in the pipe. We don’t have a solid one yet. We don’t have a like, “This is definitely the next big game.”

Dick Hogg: Well, we do in the sense that we have a game we’re already working on – we can’t say what that is. Me and Ricky have always got loads of ideas for games, we are always pitching ideas at each other. When we meet up, there’s always two or three game ideas that we’re mulling, and then we meet up and we talk about them and think about how they might work. This game was one of those – Flock existed as an idea for years before we started working on it as a thing where we’d be like, “Oh, what about a game about flying? What about a game where you are a kind of bird?” That kind of thing.
We have probably five or six Google Docs where each one is an idea for a game.

I think not everyone’s like that. I’ve got a friend who’s a game developer, and he was saying to me that the people he works with, they can’t think about anything else until they finish a game. Then they finish, they publish the game and then they allow themselves to start thinking about what the next one might be, but we are very overlapping in the way we think about stuff.

Ricky Haggett: Yeah, I think it’s good for morale as well to have next projects formulating in your brain before you get to the end of the current one, because there’s just an inevitable process at the end of finishing a video game where it just becomes like drudge. You’re just doing all the last bits, and it’s not fun, and you’ve just got to spend months to months fixing bugs and tuning things and doing all that stuff that you have to do to ship a game, and
it’s nice to have a thing to be thinking about that’s the other fun thing you’re going to do next
.

Dick Hogg: Would you say it’s not fun for you, that last stretch?

Ricky Haggett: I would say it’s like 90% not fun with 10% of – you’re definitely spending some time just doing nice things that make the game nicer and more polished, and in a game like Flock, you’re obviously spending a lot of time just flying around going, “Wow, look how great this game is.” But the tasks you’re doing are mostly just like, “Oh, this tutorial breaks if you do this and then this, so we have to fix that.” You’re just doing that for months. It’s not fun.

Dick Hogg: One of the last jobs I did on Flock was like that, was not much fun. It was making the map work properly. But nearly the very last thing I did on Flock was one of the funnest jobs on the whole thing, which was drawing all the knitting patterns.

Ricky Haggett: You saved the graffiti until quite near the end.

Dick Hogg: Yeah, all the graffiti happened quite near the end, but all the covers of the knitting patterns that you get, I left that until quite late, and I just spent a couple of weeks just drawing all those, that was really fun. I guess if you’re the art guy, you get to do fun things sometimes.

Ricky Haggett: Yeah, there’s not a lot of risk in swapping out a lot of knitting pattern graphics [Laughs], whereas you can’t save yourself those kinds of fun jobs doing network programming.

Flock

4.5

Released

July 16, 2024

Developer

Hollow Ponds, Richard Hogg

Publisher(s)

Annapurna Interactive

Multiplayer

Online Multiplayer

ESRB

Everyone

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