You were involved in the creation of Gloom of Kilforth so could you tell us a little bit about what that involved and what were the biggest challenges you faced?

Well, no one had really heard of it. We had no marketing, so it came from nowhere. People didn’t know who I was, and we had this high target of £48,000 so people weren’t really sure if we could deliver. But the word of mouth was incredible and the momentum just kept going. I think it helped that I’d contributed a lot of fanmade material as I mentioned above, and people who had enjoyed those threw in their support for our campaign.

Funny thing about Kickstarter is that people are less likely to support a project if it hasn’t already funded - even though no money exchanges hands if it doesn’t reach its goal. So you see a lot of projects with artificially low funding goals so that they can quickly get over that ‘100% funded’ hump, which is okay as long as you over-fund enough to cover your costs I suppose. We didn’t have that though, so it was a 27-day slog up to that 100% mark, but once we hit it, we suddenly shot up to 150% funded in the final 48 hours when people realised it was actually going to go into production and they could start getting stretch goals unlocked. It was a real underdog story and I think the backers really connected with that, so it went a bit crazy at the end as people started doubling or tripling their pledges just to get us over the next stretch goal!

I think there was some genuine disappointment when our second campaign for 1066, Tears to Many Mothers funded so quickly...

What was the inspiration or core idea that drove your work on Gloom of Kilforth?

I wanted to play a beautiful classical RPG adventure game that recaptured the feeling of playing Dungeons and Dragons in one evening, which meant epic adventures, meeting strange people, going on quests, exploring ancient places, enlisting allies and overcoming enemies and obstacles and finding great treasures, and no game I’ve played before or since Gloom of Kilforth does that with simplistic mechanics and gorgeous art. Fantasy adventure games are all about combat and leveling up, and whilst we have elements of that, the key focus of the game is to have a great narrative adventure experience. It is interesting to witness the sea change in the industry now though, as companies like Fantasy Flight are evidently starting to release fantasy adventure games more focused on the stories rather than the fighting, and I really like what Ryan Laukat has done with Near and Far. I think this is a fantastic direction for gaming.