Thomas Was Alone on iPad: "I'm still very proud of the game"

Thomas Was Alone has just launched onto iPad and the Mac App Store, and earlier this week we caught up with the game's creator, Mike Bithell, and picked his brains about what it's like to go back and work on an old game.

How'd it feel returning to the game again?

Very odd. I've not played it about two years. Obviously after you've finished a game you really, really don't play it any more, you go off and do other things because who wants to play their own game?! But going back to this and working on it, yeah it was interesting. It was quite fun to go back with enough time having passed to actually enjoy it again, and actually go "wow, I can see what I was doing here, this actually works".

How involved with the port were you?

So I didn't code the port, what I did was, I kind of worked as a designer on it, and provided lots and lots of very boring bullet point lists of things I wanted to fiddle with and change, and we worked together to pull it out. I also redid some new graphical design stuff for it, to make the interface work on the iPad, that kind of thing. So I was pretty involved. I was involved as I could be without being in the code basically, and I had lots of opinions.

What's the iteration process with the touch-screen input?

So really it's just a case of getting something working, and I mean that just on a technical level: can I press the screen and stuff happens?! That's kind of step one, and after that it really is just finesse. It's just playing that and saying "should we move that button two millimetres to the left so the player's thumb feels a bit more comfortable?" or "should we move that to the side?"

Things like the character selection: [do] we have on a bar at the bottom of the screen or the top of the screen like on the Vita and PC versions? [We] very quickly realised that you had to move, literally, take your hand off the iPad and reach around in order to press the button, which is obviously not a very comfortable way to play a game. So things like that, kind of slowly but surely just bringing that experience out and making inputs work in the player's favour and not against them.

Did looking back allow you to revaluate how far you'd come and did it change your perspective on Volume?

It certainly showed me how far I'd come from like a graphical perspective, I mean obviously it's a very simple game, which is what Thomas Was Alone does really well. It does, hopefully it does, a lot with very little. But it was certainly very interesting going back to a game that didn't have all the bells and whistles that I've become accustomed to now with Volume.

Gameplay-wise I'm still very proud of the game, I think it's exactly what it needs to be, and it does what it needs to do, so actually I kind of find it inspiring for Volume, to play something that focussed was really fun, because with Volume we're still playing with mechanics, and sometimes things maybe become a bit too complex and you have to pull them back. It was fun to have, to go and have a design conversation with the me of a few years ago.

Did you ever expect Thomas to have the level of success it has?

Of course not, no I'd be a pretty horrible person... No, I never dreamt of it. I thought it would find an audience, I hoped it would find a large enough audience that I could go "indie". But I had no idea it would hit the scale it has, and I'm very grateful to everyone who's bought a copy. It seems a lot of people have bought three of four copies, I'm even more grateful to them. And yeah, it's been really, really cool to see it find that kind of space and finding room to breathe. So yeah, it's been an amazing experience.