@Chris - @Aalasteir (Q) - Index

Q: When and how did your interest in games begin?

I’ve been into games since I was about 3 or 4 years old and as far back as I can remember I always wanted to make my own. Back then I’d make up my own games by drawing a fake screenshot on a piece of paper or I’d draw like a world map or something. Most of the games I’d play outside with my friends would have some kind of videogame structure to them in that we’d split up whatever we were doing into Levels. Our parents absolutely hated it and said we were obsessed lol.

Then later when I was about 12 I got my hands on The Games Factory, which was an old drag and drop game development program from the 90s. Once I got that I’d be making like a game a week and distributing them amongst my friends at school on floppy discs. The games were all pretty horrible but we didn’t give a fuck because we were just excited at the concept of making our own games. Eventually I got Flash and started making stuff for the web.

Q: What media inspired you?

I consume a lot of different media including games, films and books and I like to think about what works and doesn’t work in them. Whenever I start thinking about a game project I do a bit of a mood board where I put things down that I want the end product to be like.

I’m currently working on a sequel to Stay Indoors and I’ve got Soft and Cuddly (1987), Saw (2004), Les Chambres Rogues (2023) and Mad God (2021) down as things that I want to inform the feel of that game.

I also take a lot from my own life too, for example the map in Stay Indoors 1 is loosely based on what I remember of the neighbourhood I grew up in.

Q: What are some of your older games, and what was your process behind creating them?

One of my earliest games was a top down shooter called "The Arnold Schwarzenegger Tree Game" that I made with the stock sprites that came with Games Factory. Quite frankly, the game was terrible. In it you played as a generic action hero who just happened to look a little "Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque" battling an oak tree which would fly all around the room firing bullets at the player. If you got hit you died, if you shot the tree yourself it would lose health and eventually be defeated. 

Noone that I know of ever defeated the tree, but me and my brother still had a great laugh trying. The game was broken, I doubt it would even pass the judgement process on here, and yet over 20 years later I still remember it and the great time we had playing the ridiculous thing. My games eventually became bigger and better (but no less broken), especially as I moved on to Flash.

Some of my old Flash games still exist on this site but its pretty much only the Gravoor ones I left up for whatever reason. Somewhere there is an early version of RoboNips from about 15 years ago and when I started my company we made a couple of games for iOS. On PS Vita we released a game called Jail Break which was an endless runner.

This is the old RoboNips, with different gameplay

Title screen of Jail Break

Jail Break gameplay

Q: How did you become interested in filmmaking?

It was another avenue to be creative and I’m also a big fan of movies. I think around ages 16-18 I might have been bigger into films than gaming which is where I decided I might like to try my hand at it. I did a few music videos and was a crew member on some short films.

I’m still a big fan of films and watch a huge variety of stuff. I’ve started making a note of everything I watch and in 2024 I watched 225 movies. In 2025 so far I’ve watched 13. I’ve started posting a lot of what I watch on my BlueSky account if you’re looking for recommendations.

Q: Why is horror your favorite movie genre?

Horror is probably my favourite genre just because I’ve had a fascination with it since I was a kid. I like horror across all mediums including books, gaming and film. Some of my favourite horror movies are Suspiria (1977), Phenomena (1985), The Fog (1980), Ghostwatch (1992), Noroi (2005), Terrifier 2 (2022), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

I will watch movies of all genres though. There isn’t really anything I don’t bother with.

- Company and Conference

I briefly went professional and had a company developing and putting out games. We released a couple of iOS titles (Gravoor and Paper Skies) and one game for PS Vita (Jail Break). This was going on 12 years ago now though so those games haven't been maintained and are therefore delisted sadly. But these opportunities led to some contract work for us and allowed me to make a lot of industry contacts. In 2014 I was a guest speaker at the BFI National Media Conference as well through this, where I led an industry talk with my old business partner about the current state of the games industry. This was at the tail end of our time working together professionally but we have since collaborated again on the Politics series and are now planning a big project that will end up taking us a couple of years work.

Q: What was it like being a speaker, how did you get ready for the event, what did you learn about yourself?

I’ll be honest I have no idea why we were asked as there were so many people more qualified than us to speak about this subject but there we were. It was good, we talked about our experiences making games and what challenges we faced as a small dev team.

This was that year where Ubisoft were in hot water for not offering the ability to choose a female character in Assassins Creed Unity and so some Guardian writer decided they might try putting us on the spot by asking why we didn’t have any female character representation in Gravoor lol. Its like well thats because Gravoor is just a circle. The next day she tried asking the Fable 3 devs the same question thus proving my suspicions that she’d done no research before trying to start a problem with us.

Q: What are the biggest lessons you've learned from developing games?

Project management skills. If you can’t do that its pretty much impossible to make a game.

Q: What are the games that you like, and why?

I’m a big fan of RPGs. Recently I’ve been playing Metaphor ReFantazio which I’ve finally gotten stuck into. I’d like to make an RPG myself some day.

Q: What was it like working on music videos?

I worked on about 3 sets where I was just a crew member and directed one myself. The one I directed was for “A Night Out by Jay Betts feat. MC DEVVO” . We did two days filming on this in Sheffield, England. We did one day filming around the city for the first half of the video and then for the second half we filmed at a night club we had booked out.

The nightclub was a pain in the ass to shoot in because the main artist was basically paying the extras in free alcohol so a lot of the extras were pissed up and hard to wrangle. The actor playing MC DEVVO, who Newgrounds viewers will know from David Firth’s work, wasn’t drinking and was a bit of a life saver at times because the crowd were treating him as some kind of celebrity. Whenever he told the crowd to calm the fuck down and do what they were told they’d immediately start behaving. Great guy and super professional.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTdHlwlz06A

I'm the guy in the blue t-shirt.

In this one I'm the guy in the stripped hoodie. We were making something else here.

Q: What do you think about the Internet?

I have some issues with the internet but and I really don’t like how sanitised its become over the past decade. I think we’ve lost a lot of individual personality in many corners of the web.

Ultimately though I think the good outweighs the bad. I certainly wouldn’t be able to reach such a wide audience with my work without the internet, wouldn’t have discovered many of the things that I enjoy and wouldn’t have met the people in this community or some of my friends. One of my oldest friends Stu ( @Sjhillustration on Newgrounds) is someone I originally met on a forum for example.

Q: Why did you join NG in 2004?

I’d been a fan few a years prior and when I got Flash I joined up to share my work. I originally tried making cartoons but they were really bad so couldn’t get through judgement (Which was a whole lot stricter back in the day). Once I started learning ActionScript I started shifting over to games full time.

Screenshot from an old cartoon I made

Q: What was NG like in 2004, and how has it changed over the years?

We didn’t have the Art portal back then so it was just movies and games. I think Newgrounds is still very similar to the way I remember it which is great that we’ve been able to maintain our personality over the years with reasonably little change. I would say we’re a lot more chilled out and nice to each other these days but thats obviously a good thing.

Back then we had a lot of people who’ve either moved on with their lives now and don’t make stuff anymore or make stuff for places like Youtube instead. I wish those people would come back even if its just to post in the forums and be a part of the community.

Q: What is NG about?

I think Newgrounds is all about creativity. I find that the community is more passionate about their work than in other places where I feel almost as if they see making stuff as just an avenue to make some money.

In games especially I’ve seen a lot of people off site that are getting into it because they think they might be able to make a game, put it on Steam and live off it passively. Which is an extremely difficult thing to achieve that only about 0.1% of devs will pull off. If you want to make a lot of money you should be doing pretty much anything other than games. You stand to get more return on investment begging on the street than you would through making games.

I stopped making games professionally because I realised it wasn’t fun anymore and we weren’t making nearly enough money to justify it. When I got back into it a couple of years ago I tried to approach it from the mind set I had when I was 12 where I was just making whatever I wanted whether it was a safe idea or not because its fun to do. By thinking about it like that I’ve been having a huge amount of fun again and ironically its probably led to me doing my best work.

Q: What is Mazza based on?

Mazza is a parody of the Mario games if Mario was set in my home town of Rotherham. Its also based a lot on the Newgrounds I remember from 2004, where we’d have lots of videogame parodies with extremely juvenile plots. With Mazza I find that the more juvenile the humour the better it is and then when you juxtapose it with professional looking graphics and a big orchestral soundtrack the end result ends up being very funny to me.

Q: What game development education resources would you recommend? 

I would recommend not doing a University course for game development because I don’t think what they teach you is worth the money. I say that as someone who has both studied on one of these courses and served three years as an Associate Lecturer in the subject at University level. You’re much better off just making things yourself and building a portfolio.

Q: Your favorite food and drinks

I’ve gotten really into tea in the past few years so I drink a lot of Pu’erh these days. I got into that as a means to try to curb my alcohol and coffee in-take. I still like a pint of course but I can’t put it away anymore like I used to haha.

Q: What are some of your favourite aspects of Game Dev?

I like the creativity of it, both in my own projects and ones that my friends and other indie devs on this site are making. I like seeing people play my games and enjoy them, and I like coming back to my games after a couple of years when I've forgotten them a little to play them myself.

Q: How did you get the username: Chris

Years ago Tom was clearing out old accounts that never interacted with the site or logged in. I asked him if I could have the username Chris since it was just being sat on and he gave it to me.

Q: How does sleep impact the creative process?

When I'm really stuck into a project I don't sleep much. I'll be going to bed at 2:30am after working on my game and then getting up again at 7am to go to start my day job. I really need to get more sleep.

Q: What's a joke that makes you laugh?

I was walking past the cemetery this morning when I saw a man crouched behind a grave.

"Morning!" I said.

He responded, "No, I'm having a shit!"