Go To Hell Dave is a comedic point and click adventure which, as the title suggests, follows a character named Dave who goes to Hell but does not find exactly what he expects there… Dave must navigate and explore the different levels of this unusual domain, passing through controversial areas such as strip clubs and bars which stand in place of the grander features that the tales of time have described. At Rezzed we spoke to Alex Byrom from the Go To Hell Dave team about the game, its development so far, and what is still to come. Sadly our recording device died during the interview, but there were still some exciting details to reflect on from our talk.
So, what is Go To Hell Dave about?
“Well, it’s an old school point and click game, similar to things like Broken Sword or Monkey Island… Or you could really stretch it and say it’s a bit like Professor Layton, but not really… That’s what I say to the mums when I try to explain what I’ve done! So yeah, old school point and click game, and you control Dave, an average Joe who died in a car crash, got sent to hell, and he’s trying to find his girlfriend, but hell isn’t really hell how you’d expect it… Hell kinda has the British twist on it, so the theory goes that when you get to hell there are giant iron gates that say ‘Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter’, uh, we just turned that into a strip club called Abandon All Hope! And so your first goal is to try and get into the strip club, so you’ve got to kinda butter up the bouncer… A lot of it routes from how point and click games used to be; he’s kinda a sane character in an insane world, but he takes it in his stride, so he’s very sarcastic and he’s quite arrogant…”
Who is the team made up of?
“We’re a very small team, there are only two of us in house in the UK, and I have freelance artists all over the country. We have one in America and one in Australia, and then a key artist at the moment. We have been working on it for 12 months… The plan is to get a really high-class demo, really polished. It works, its worked since day 1 and we’ve shown people and people have played it. It’s just we want to get full voice acting all the way through it, which because it’s an adventure game is an awful lot of text and most of them don’t do full voice acting, they’ll do bits and bobs, where we want all of it just to add that little bit of extra…”
Have you considered going down the Kickstarter route?
“Well yeah, that’s part of the plan really, we hope to get a really nice demo out, give it to anyone who wants it, so any journalists, any you tubers, anyone; all our perspective customers because we like the thought that you can ‘try before you buy’. So we will put that on our Kickstarter, people can try it, if they like it maybe they will want to buy it. If they don’t then it’s no loss to us, it’s no loss to them; they might have enjoyed it but they might not want to warrant an investment, its fine… We have a load of ideas for Kickstarter, we have of course you get the game, then we have another one where you get the soundtrack and the game, another one you get a tshirt, but then we have two more expensive ones like where you can be a character in the game. So we will take your license and turn you into a character, who won’t have that much to do with the plot but you will be able to interact with them and stuff. And then for a bit more than that we will design a level for the game based off an idea that you have, as long as it keeps in with British and it keeps in with hell. So it could be anything; you could say ‘oh I want a burning school bus’ or something like that and we would put that in, we would find a way of incorporating it into the current levels.”
At this point our recording came to an untimely end when our batteries decided this was a good time to die. Alex did however manage to tell us a lot about Go To Hell Dave and gave us a lot to look forward to in the coming days of its development. We certainly look forward to having a play of the demo when it is unleashed upon the community, and hope to stay in contact with Alex as development goes on to see how things are going along the way.
For more information about Goto Hell Dave check out our feature Here
