At GDC 2025, James Carbutt and Will Todd of Coal Supper explored their unorthodox approach to designing Thank Goodness You’re Here!.
The session, titled Teabag in First: How Thank Goodness You’re Here! Does Comedy, explored how humour – and a distinctly British sense of humour at that – wasn’t just a feature but the entire foundation of the game’s development.
“One day we decided to do a fun weekend project,” says Todd. “That weekend has lasted the past six years and counting.”
After releasing The Good Time Garden in 2019, Carbutt and Todd expanded their absurdist vision into Thank Goodness You’re Here!, a love letter to the north of England filtered through the lens of comedic chaos. For British players, the game’s art, surrealist concepts, and scatological humour show the influence of everything from Monty Python and The League of Gentlemen to comics like The Beano and Viz.
Unlike most game developers, they didn’t start with mechanics, level progression, or even a clear structure. Instead, they improvised sketches, throwing ideas back and forth in what they describe as a worse version of a TV writers’ room, mainly due to the fact they are “shit at video game design.”
Instead of relying on combat loops or puzzle design, Thank Goodness You’re Here! unfolds through a series of absurd contrivances. Each moment is determined by what Carbutt and Todd found funny rather than what made structural sense.
“What happens next in the game is never given by a mechanical convention. The player never just goes into the next room and fights some more bad guys,” explains Todd.
“Instead, it comes out of comprising a series of contrivances that thread things together from one big joke to the next. In place of the next room of bad guys, we saw a constant novelty, and so the answer to that question could be something fun to do every single time.”
Todd uses an early sequence in the game as an example. The unnamed protagonist, informally referred to as Little Guy, transitions from standing on a bar counter to swimming through a surreal void inside a barrel of lager, before ultimately being poured back into a pint glass.
“This was a process largely guided by intuition,” he says, explaining that attempts to impose structure from the top down – by shoehorning in narrative arcs, mapping out abstract beats, or introducing a lock-and-key Metroidvania-style design – didn’t work with the approach they had taken.
Despite – or more likely because of – this unconventional approach to game design, Thank Goodness You’re Here! has been praised as one of the very few authentically funny video games and has found global appeal despite the regional specificity of its characters and humour.
To make some sense of this unstructured development process, Coal Supper developed a set of guiding principles that allowed comedy to be woven seamlessly into gameplay.
Let the comedy sit in the background
The first principle, Todd explains, is called Humble Pie. This idea is that dialogue, animations, or any other game elements should fit naturally within the game world, rather than being forced to dominate the player’s attention. Traditional game design often urges players to focus on set pieces, cinematic moments, or dramatic cutscenes. Thank Goodness You’re Here! does the opposite, allowing humour to be woven into the world so that jokes happen naturally around the player.
“In doing so, these things remain integrated into the natural texture of the world, instead of becoming spikes in content that the player is told to enjoy,” Todd explains. “In most cases, this just feels better kinaesthetically, and it serves the jokes by allowing them to be situated in the world, and not within the framework of passing a conversation, or worse still, being told a joke.”
Farce as an Engine
To sustain humour, Thank Goodness You’re Here! builds on absurd premises, pushing them to a logical yet ridiculous extreme. The guiding mantra, recited by Todd and Carbutt in unison, was “Increasingly absurd but semiotically coherent narrative beats!”.
Todd cites the character of Sickly Simon as a prime example. At first, he seems relatively normal, aside from his comically long arm. But then, the arm guides the player on a shopping expedition to buy a tin cutter. Then, the hand forms a face with its fingers and starts speaking. And finally, the hand checks a watch on its own wrist.
“We one-up the premise of Simon and his odd job as a whole by taking our tin cutter to the till to reveal that the cashier is, in fact, his other hand. The pacing at which you inject these conceits naturally gives you different results. The proverbial engine runs hotter the quicker you throw things in.”
By layering each joke on top of the last, the game escalates the absurdity while maintaining its own internal logic.
The pace of delivery is also important. If jokes come too quickly, they can overwhelm the player and lose their impact. Likewise, if they arrive too slowly, the player risks losing momentum. This issue became apparent early in development when the game featured an open-world structure. With the entire world of Barnsworth available for exploration, players could exhaust the jokes in one area before moving on to the next. The solution was to shift the game to a linear format, ensuring that every moment featured just enough comedy to keep players engaged but not exhausted.
“Only when we’d killed that last and dearest of our darlings, the open world, could we see for the first time a manageable shape to this problem,” Todd reveals. “We folded down this unwieldy flowchart of branching story and put the whole thing on rails into a neat linear structure.”
Don’t Milk It
One common comedic pitfall is over-explaining a joke, repeating it too often, or hanging onto a premise for too long. Coal Supper made a rule to introduce a gag and then drop it before it outstays its welcome. One example is the ‘bird milk’ joke, which is simply a poster that says “From Bird to Bottle”. There might have been a temptation to draw attention to the joke by having characters respond to it. However, Todd says the best approach was to let the joke exist on its own.
“We don’t need to see a bird,” he says. “We definitely don’t need someone to take a big old gulp and be like, hang on, is this milk from a bird?”
And if having a character draw attention to a gag is a mistake, preempting it is even worse.
“If the first we hear of bird milk is this guy saying, wait a minute, is that a bird being milked? Then our concept has basically become, what if there’s a funny thing? We’ve started from outside of the core premise and had someone point in at it, whereas we want to start from within, and thus the poster already presumes that the bird’s being milked.”
Todd explains that if you’re not sure a joke is working, try chopping off the beginning and the end. If it still makes sense, there’s a good chance it’s funnier: “without the guff!”
This approach puts an element of trust in the audience, as there’s always a chance the player will miss the joke. Nonetheless, Todd says it’s better to let the humour emerge naturally rather than hammering it home.
Luckily, Thank Goodness You’re Here! is packed with so many jokes that even if some are missed, there are always more to find. This density was another guiding principle, an intent to fill the game space with small, lighthearted visual gags that come together to create a larger experience.
“We find that there’s a sweet spot for visual information, wherein it’s just about too much to process, leaving you to spot things in the noise,” says Todd. “When you’re throwing a lot of stuff out at play in rapid succession, then the individual bits can be fairly low stakes and throwaway, and it’s the density that makes it all work. The idea of more being less is, in fact, more.”
This density of visual humour ensures that players are always discovering something funny, even on repeat playthroughs.
Carbutt and Todd frequently downplay their expertise, attributing much of the game’s success to luck rather than talent. It’s British self-deprecation at its finest. While they may claim to not to know what they are talking about, there’s a clear discipline to their design philosophy. By prioritising farce, trusting their instincts, and embracing absurdity, Thank Goodness You’re Here! was one of the most distinctive games of last year.
The game also proved, if proof were needed, that poo is always funny.
Thank Goodness You’re Here! is available on Mac, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and Xbox. Read more from GDC 2025.
