Every voice matters at Two Point Studios, according to creative director Gary Carr. Every person is important. Every idea is valuable. The studio sits at around 50 developers, boasting veterans who have worked there since the days of bedroom coders – and now they’re back there, thanks to COVID – as well as fresh-faced devs who are taking their first steps in the industry.
“In the early days, I was lucky because the teams I used to work with were extrovert characters, but I’ve worked with people who are quite introverted, but really talented,” Carr says.
According to Carr, you have to really cultivate some personality types to bring out the best in them – to make space so they feel like their voices can be heard.
“It used to bug me in companies I’ve worked at where the more senior you become, the more you decide what gets done and doesn’t,” Carr explains. “It becomes almost a private club of development. I’ve probably been guilty of that in the past, but we learned from our mistakes, and we just want to listen to everybody and let everybody percolate these ideas. These are great people so why would you listen to them? Why wouldn’t you put them at the forefront of ideas and decision-making?”
The next title from the team behind Two Point Hospital is Two Point Campus, a strategy game about managing a series of universities. But it’s also a game that reflects Two Point Studios’ own approach to management. Rather than an illness factory where you farm ailments for profit, Two Point Campus is all about nurturing people and paying attention to their needs.
“Our aim is to try and make you care a bit more,” Carr says. “So we wanted more empathic systems in the game. The students need to be nurtured, they’re going to get lonely, they’re gonna want to make friends. They don’t just want to be educated. They want to learn how to become grown-ups. You get revenue because students pay to stay. And if they leave, you lose that revenue flow. So you have to put them before the money. If you don’t look after them, they’re going to leave.”
One of the first things I encountered in Two Point Campus was a student who looked particularly depressed. His arms were lolling by his side and he was dragging his feet. I clicked him and his statistics showed he was happy as can be. He was just a goth. Place down posters of bats and ornamental sarcophagi in the dorm rooms, and this little guy will be in his element. There are many of these character archetypes in Two Point Campus, but each individual still has their own personality and needs on top of it.
It was a system originally developed for Two Point Hospital, but the patients in that game come in, get treatment, and leave. Here you’re learning about these students over in-game years, allowing the system to come into its own.
“We developed for Hospital, but people just thought it was some random animation playing,” Carr says. “These two people, why are they fighting each other? They’ve got the exact opposite makeup that they just don’t get on. In Campus, we wanted to exploit that more by having people live together for longer. You get to see who can work together, who doesn’t work so well together, which courses conflict with each other, which courses complement.”
You’re also able to actively fight against students’ worst tendencies. Perhaps a student is lazy. Well, you could always have them sign up for a running club. Or, you know, you could embrace their personality and let them join the sleeping club instead.
“You’re with them for three game years, which is around about an hour if you don’t pause the game, so lots of things can happen to them,” Carr says. “What societies, what friends groups they form, how social they become, how to balance the education process. Initially, you want to start quite social with them, you want to train them to go out and meet people, join societies, and form friends groups. In the intermediate year, it’s a battle of getting into the workflow and making sure they’re okay in the grades. But in the final year, it’s about hitting the grades.”
The fact it takes place on campus alone makes this game feel distinct from Two Point Hospital. Not only does the calendar actually matter this time around, but there’s also summer break, which allows you to focus on building new campus grounds, making things prettier, and setting the agenda for the next term. It’s almost a zen-like state where the game is paused without being paused, allowing you to focus on preparing for the students to return. It’s also more customizable than the studio’s previous game, allowing you to expand and reshape the starting buildings as you see fit.
As with Two Point Hospital, it might be a simulation about a real thing, but it’s full of little quirks. Cooking class sees students gather around a giant cooking apparatus, while other classes might focus on mastery of virtual reality. It’s grounded in the mundane, but it’s a caricature of the campus experience.
“I wouldn’t start with something like witchcraft and wizardry, because that’s already kind of supernatural and interesting,” Carr says on the reasoning behind choosing this setting. “We’d rather start with the base subject matter to be quite an ordinary thing, and then pervert it. But in this case, we’re trying to see if people can make more decisions for the students as the main driver, rather than financial decisions.”
Nurture your students and they will stay on campus, earning you money as a byproduct of their happiness. If Prison Architect is a critique of prisons for profit, Two Point Campus is a management lesson about staff retention.
“It’s nice to think people can actually just be nice,” Carr says. “There’s a lot of people playing at it. A lot of people use that as their mantra, but you dig into it, and you think that’s just words, really.”
If that hippy stuff doesn’t appeal to you, you could always make a campus for the privileged elite and lock out the poorer students from higher education. I’d judge you for it, but you could do that.
However you decide to play it, Two Point Campus is shaping up to be a brilliant management sim, and it’s refreshing to play one with such an appropriate message for our time. God knows the world could do with some more empathy.
Two Point Campus has been delayed slightly to August 9 to ensure it runs well on all platforms. It’s planned for release on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
