Once we’d designed the characters of Push Me Pull You, we had to find places for them to play. As far as we were concerned, these were normal people, just like you and me - they just happened to be joined together at the waist by a long flesh-tube (you know, like normal).

So when it came to designing the environments for our characters to play in, I wanted to create spaces that reflected our own experiences of playing sport. Most sports games present professional-level play, using the familiar visual language of TV broadcast to put the player in a role that’s part-passive-spectator, part-active-player. There’s a power-fantasy element to this I think - “It’s like I’m watching my favourite sport on TV, but I’m also in control.”

We weren’t (and aren’t) really interested in that side of sports. None of us follow professional sports in any meaningful way, so when it came to giving a context to the invented sport in Push Me Pull You, we were far more interested in presenting the kind of sports we play, not the ones we watch.

This is sport played with friends and family, the people from down the street, the other kids at the campsite on a summer holiday. The stakes are low, and although competition can be fierce, you’re ultimately just playing to have fun with the people around you (this is also one of the big reasons why we love local-multiplayer videogames).

There’s a reason why there are no fictional spectators in PMPY. Early on we toyed with the idea of animated spectators or crowd sounds, but in the finished game, if you stop playing, all you’ll hear is the rustling of wind in trees, birdsong, or the hum of a lawnmower. I like to think of each match in PMPY as a private moment between the players as they play for no-one but themselves.

The settings for this kind of sport are often mundane, and overlooked by videogames, so I wanted the environments of Push Me Pull You to quietly celebrate this mundanity. I wanted to make them feel specific and personal, but also wholly unexceptional, in the way that the special places in our lives often are.

I also wanted to capture a certain Australian-ness in the environments, while avoiding the obvious signifiers and caricature. I was inspired by another game from Melbourne - Movement Study 1 - “a New Realist movement simulator and short adventure game about youth in Melbourne”. The environment art is just so specifically, unflinchingly Melbourne. It felt so special to see such a familiar place in a videogame, that I wanted to try to capture a similar kind of specific sense of place.

Each of the playfields in Push Me Pull You - a suburban street, a beach, a park, a gym, a backyard, and a local club - were all inspired by real locations from my life. Using mostly memory, and a bit of help from Google Earth, I tried to capture some truth from my life in these places. I even went out and field-recorded the atmospheric tracks, replacing the technically-much-nicer sound library recordings we were using as placeholders. To  hear familiar, local birdsong in the game made the whole thing feel a little like a love letter to home.

I took the same personal approach when drawing the environments in PMPY. There’s the dead-end street that my childhood best friend grew up on, the park across the road from my parents’ house, my aunt and uncle’s backyard, the clay tennis courts in a beachtown outside Melbourne, and the beach of that same town. The blue-matted gym in PMPY was where I was briefly enrolled in a gymnastics class as a tiny kid, and only found out last week that Stuart had done a gymnastics class at that same gym. We wouldn’t become friends for another decade, and had no idea of this earlier connection, so it felt very special to realise that he associated the environment art with the same remembered place as me!

I associate all these places with the kind of informal sport mentioned above. Some are linked to childhood memories and others more recent, but they all hold memories of playfulness. I don’t expect the specifics of these places to be meaningful to players, but I hope the specificity itself has some power, and that players might, for a moment, remember these playful, mundane, special places in their own lives.

- jake