Zombie Cow's Dan Marshall

I don't see why not. Jo Twist who's taken over Alice's job is lovely, she's very good at it and she's very much like Alice – sort of old-school geek sensibilities. I don't know what's going on at Channel 4, but the content they produce, The Curfew and Covergirl and stuff, are extremely valid for their purposes, as educational projects. The reach that those three games have had alone is probably a lot more than their previous content would ever have reached. As long as Channel 4's got the cash to spend I think it's a perfectly sensible thing for them to be doing.

I would love to see Channel 4 branch out of education and say "well, we can make entertainment games as well" and have exactly the same sort of setup – approaching young, fledgling indie companies as saying "here's some money, go and do this, that or the other." But it's entirely up to them how they spend all their money.

It's something we can think about further down the line – as long as you keep your options open you don't have to think that far ahead. What you do have to do is be quite sensible about what you make. We were talking earlier about these big, evil corporations producing Generic Shooter #2 because they know that's what will bring in all the money. It would be a completely lie to suggest I'm not thinking along exactly the same lines. At some point, I've got to think "it will be nice to make a certain game, but..." It'd be lovely to make another adventure game, but that's probably not going to bring in enough cash to keep me doing what I'm doing. So looking at other influences, looking at other games and other people's projects, where the trends are, what people are enjoying playing. If you look at the big games from the last couple of years or so, it's been Super Meat Boy and Limbo and Braid and that sort of stuff. Should I be making things along those lines, because there's obviously a market for those? Then suddenly you start to sound very boring, but it's the reality of it.

It's one of those weird things about being an indie. You've got to walk a tightrope between what you want to do and what you have to. You've got to make stuff that people want, and you've got to make stuff that you want to make. As Revenge Of The Balloon-Headed Mexican showed. I wasn't enjoying making Balloon-Head and that's one of the main reasons that it ground to a halt. If I wasn't inspired by it, how could I expect anyone else to be? It would have been a really good game, I just don't think it would have as good as Time Gentlemen, Please! and that's the core of why it was cancelled. It's nice to have the ability to do that, quite late in the day. The whole game had a whole structure, it was playable from start to finish – there wasn't any music or sound effects or dialogue in it and half the graphics weren't there, but it was playable.

So that's the main reason. Because I wasn't inspired by it, because I wasn't interested in it enough. As an indie you've got that tightrope. You've got to make stuff that you want to make because you're the one sitting there typing for 12 hours a day making it, but you've got to make something that other people want as well in some capacity.

I mean, Time Gentlemen, Please! did alright, especially when it got on Steam. It did a lot better than I expected, put it that way. It got great reviews and that really helped; they helped get it on Steam, and Steam helped get it to make more money than I was ever expecting it to make. But would another one do the same? I don't know. After doing Privates and having a fully-voiced game, it just lifted it. It's really weird having a game without voices today. People like me can appreciate it because we played The Secret Of Monkey Island all that time ago, and when Sam & Max came out the very notion of having voices was completely bizarre at first. These days, people don't see that. Costume Quest – amazing game, beautiful, charming, didn't have any voice acting in it. It didn't need it, and you forget that it isn't there after 20 minutes of playing it, but the first time it happens it's really weird, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

I don't think there's really that sense of luxury. Most places are very reasonable, there's a sort of standard cut that's existed since I started really. The cut doesn't really factor into it for me. I can't imagine it does for a lot of people – it's a case of what does the game suit primarily, I guess. If you're coding in XNA, I guess that's completely locked you to Xbox.

It's never really more than 30 per cent anyway, and if you look at XBLA or PSN or Steam or whoever, alright they're taking 30 per cent but they're also introducing your game to millions more people than you could possibly reach on your own. Someone described the charts screen on the App Store as "oh, I see Apple have turned their money hose onto" whatever game it was. The money hose – it's just a beautiful phrase. If you get that on XBLA or PSN, I can't even think how much of a difference that's going to make.