It’s odd that, despite how amusing games can be, rarely are they designed with comedy in mind. Multiplayer sessions with a group of friends will, no doubt, frequently offer opportunities to pull off your very own Leeroy Jenkins disaster-move, but a singleplayer experience that genuinely amuses is something of a rarity.

Andrew Smith and Geoff Gunning of Proper Games want their newest title, Flock, to be part of that select group of intentionally funny games. Flock – officially titled with an exclamation point – is a sandbox puzzle game that tasks the UFO-bound player with herding various farmyard animals to a mothership.

It’s all very silly, of course, but rarely does it look stupid. Behind Flock’s Looney Tunes sensibilities is a title wanting to invoke creativity and lateral thinking from the player. Smith says he hopes the game will stand out like a “really awesome sore thumb”, we’ll have a chance to see if it does next month, when the game is released on XBLA, PSN and Steam.


Edge: How much of a challenge is it to try and make a game intentionally funny?
Smith: [Pauses] Maybe this is overstating our importance, but being British helps us, I think. We kind of naturally look at things in a funny way, I think, and so it sort of....

Gunning: It’s even got toilet humour in it.

Smith: It’s even got toilet humour in it, exactly! I mean, the cows in the game crap and make cow patties and then pigs role in it. That seems logical to me, and of course it’s funny. But I don’t think there was any point where we felt we had to force the jokes.

Gunning: Not really. One of the first things we had developed was a mechanic, just the control mechanism where you were herding things along. Once you've got a kind of idea of the game design, it was obvious to us that it needed to be cartoony.

Smith: It's also important to start pretty strong. One of the first things the player does in the game, with the sheep and the UFO, is pretty much guaranteed to bring a smile to the face.

Gunning: I think the humour stems from that initial concept. A good example would be the way these little animals move. They were never going to walk, they were always going to hop with a little squeaky sounds. They had to. It just kind of ballooned from there.


Is that how Flock wants to be funny?
Smith: I guess so, yeah. We definitely wanted it to be funny but like I don’t think there’s any, you know, there was no sort of focus test meetings where we had to inject anything funny. It just kind of fell out of it.

Gunning: “Ten percent funnier”.

Smith: Yeah, "ten percent funnier, now!”