Two Point Campus is set for release on 9 August this year, and in the run-up to the game’s release, we were lucky enough to talk play a sneak peek of the game, and even speak to two game developers.
We spoke to Jo Koehler, the Senior Producer, and Ben Huskins, the Lead Designer, to see why they wanted to focus on university life this time round, and which aspects of the new game they’re most proud of.
Why is there more emphasis on students in this game?
“We started talking about Campus as an idea as we were still working on Two Point Hospital, and that that kind of partly came from the fact that we’ve always thought about our games as being these little people games, and the people and their work personalities are really key to the games that we make,” Huskins said.
“And so as we were working on Hospital, and we were playing around with things like personality traits for your doctors and nurses, we just thought, you know, we could really, like lean into this more in a different setting.
“Because obviously, in a hospital, your patients are in and they’re diagnosed, they’re treated, they’re out, they get help. Whereas we latched on to this idea of the education setting because it felt like it’s relatable. You know, everyone’s got memories from school, and potentially college and university, with teachers and classmates, that kind of thing.
“And there’s a lot of films and TV shows, that have that setting in high school and so it just felt like there’s a great opportunity here to get to know your little people a bit better and, and flesh them out as characters.
It’s also an opportunity as well to have 20 character personalities and, you know, funny character appearances as well. Chef students looking around with their chef hats on, your Knight students all in plate armour or something like that.
“I think one thing for me I just remember really, really early on thinking I just want to see a student dressed as a Knight with plate amour on, on the dance floor in the student union having a proper boogie – the absurdity of that is what we wanted to do.”
Which aspects of the game are you most proud of?
“I’m very proud of the relationship side of things and how I think we’ve achieved being able to care for students and caring for your little people, which is exactly what we kind of set out to do,” Jo Koehler said.
In Two Point Campus, there is a bigger emphasis on student satisfaction, with individual students having their own personalities and metres for fun and education that the player needs to keep an eye on.
“We spent a lot of time trying to flesh out a student compared to say, a patient in Two Point Hospital,” Ben Huskins went on to say. “[We gave] them more individuality and more depth to how they feel about the world and your campus, and what they’ll ask for you to put on your campus.”
“That’s another thing that I’d say I’m quite proud of is just how we’ve been able to flesh out these students and make them feel quite interesting over the three or so years that they can be doing that course. I think we’ve been able to add lots of new interesting features around student life,” Huskins concluded.
