Zombie Cow's Dan Marshall

There is a definite sense of community, especially around London. If you look around the country there's various different people doing various different things. Rob Fearon and Cas Prince (Puppy Games) and all these sorts of people doing all these things. The people I've met in London, there is this amazing sense of community - I know that if I have a problem in some capacity, if I don't know how to do a bit of code, I can ring up Beatnik or Hello Games and say 'can you explain this to me' and they will. If they said to me 'can you help us write this, this isn't funny' or could I recommend them an actor, that's something I can do because of my TV producer days, it's sort of second nature to me now. It's kind of nice, it's a pleasant sharing of information. Can you imagine if I went to some big, huge behemoth of a games company and said 'excuse me, can I just borrow one of your programmers for half an hour so they can explain this to me?'

Though do you know what, I don't think it's as bad as all that. Indies tend to paint a very negative picture of large companies, but when I worked on a TV show I had to go around EA's office for one reason or another, and I basically turned up grumpy and cynical. And they were just lovely and charming and pleasant, and everything was bright and colourful and charming – everyone was walking around smiling. It was just basically the complete opposite of what I've read in various magazines over the years, the bone-crunching machine of doom that is the mainstream games industry. I didn't see much of that.

As far as I'm concerned Channel 4 was a one-off for now. I loved working for them – they were amazing, I can't fault a thing about them. I pitched the game and they pretty much left us to our own devices. Anything remotely contentious I had to get signed off on, so it was "can we do this, can we do this?" Which was great, a great way of getting some money in and taught me an awful lot very quickly. I think for now, though, I've got an itch to go back to doing our own stuff. Doing Privates was fun and exciting, but at the end of the day it had to fit into a mould in a way, because it had to have that educational content and do x, y and z. I'm quite looking forwards to getting back to something that's just a completely blank page, and I can just say 'dinosaurs' or whatever and have no pre-formed rules and regulations I had to adhere to. Like if I want to have swearing – with Privates, I just knew that there was no point in even trying because someone up the line would have said "no swearing."

So I'd do Channel 4 again at the drop of the hat, further down the line, but for now I'm interested in doing something else. What's interesting is when I started doing this, when I released my first game in 2006, where we are now, just a few years later, is so wildly different. Then you basically had two options – first of all everyone setup their own website, through Plimus and those sorts of things, to sell the game and if it was the right sort of game, like Cake Mania or the equivalent of Angry Birds of whatever you'd sell it through portals like BigFish, and that was basically it.

No-one really cared then about indie games, that some new game had come out because it was obviously going to be sub-par compared to a mainstream thing. And now, five years later, you've got Steam and you've got Direct2Drive, and people can make the game and get on the Xbox indie games channel in the space of a month. Anyone in the world can get hold of it and play your game, which is just phenomenal in terms of how these things have changed over that time. It's beautiful for the boring business part of my brain, which realises that this is the beginning of something that's going to get quite big, is going to get exponentially more viable as a business.

Well, it depends. I can't really speak for any other Channel 4 projects, but Privates is very low budget. It was my first go at doing anything like that, I didn't really have any concept of a) how much it was going to cost and b) how much money they had to give away. So I went in with what I thought was a reasonable pitch based on quite low salaries, and that was that. So I think if I did again I'd try and squeeze more money out of them...

Yeah, I think it's a perfectly valid way to do it. I think with Privates, it's still a Zombie Cow game – it doesn't feel like we've made something completely separate to the company ethos. It fits in quite nicely with the others: madcap humoury sort of stuff. I'd do it again, it's just purely a simply a case of wanting to stretch my legs and do something... mental. [laughs]