Interview with creator of Bernard and Hank

[Chroelle]

Here is the CWF-descriptions of the games:

“Bernard and Hank”:
Bernard & Hank is about the farmer Bernard Buffalo and his retired friend Hank Hoedown. The evil businessman NationalLiberal wants his farmland, to build a factory farm on it. He sends out his minions to steal the deeds to the farm. Bernard and Hank will have to get this back, and they have to get rid of all the liberalminions. They will have to go through 40 normal platform levels, 3 driving levels and meet 15 different enemies to do so. The game is a bone-headed platformer with moving platforms, collecting coins, jumping on fat people and getting shot by cowliberals. The game also contains some minigames, to be unlocked by finishing levels.

”Bernard and Hank: Springtime again:”
I don't think there were many original ideas in the "Jump'n Run" genre during the last few years. But making a law firm and its evil minions the opponents in the independent game "Bernard & Hank" definitely was one...

"Hank Hoedown makes some pocket money by selling eggs, and plans to win the yearly egg contest with a huge egg. NationalLiberal, on the prowl for revenge, steals the big eggs and sends out his minions to paint and hide the rest of the eggs. Hank, along with his old pal Bernard Buffalo, has to go through 27 levels, meet around 20 different enemies and search for hidden bonuslevels to defeat NationalLiberal once again and get his egg back. Just like the first Bernard & Hank this is a straightforward platform game. The graphics are as simple as in the first game, but the gameplay, sound effects and music tracks are more advanced. Also included is the minigame Liberball (which was an unlockable in the first game) and a jukebox to listen to all music tracks." (taken from official homepage)

The game is very easy and you can simply rush through some levels, but the graphics are cute again and there is nice music as well. So all the people who liked the first game will like this one too.

I will leave the last words to one of our Game Hunters: "I think I went to Secondary school with Bernard and Hank...they sure do look familiar!"


You can find the Bernard & Hank games on our site, Bernard and Hank and Bernard & Hank: Springtime again. The game developers site is here.


Interview with a Redneck creator.

We contacted Hayo Van Reek on mail some time ago (ed: over a year) and asked him if he wanted to do an interview with us – or more precisely if we could do an interview with him. He agreed and we never really got around to it, UNTIL NOW….

Hayo was nice enough to answer some questions that we wanted to know about him, Bernard & Hank, NationalLiberal and gamemaking in general.
Chroelle:
Tell us more about yourself - how old are you, where do you live, what do you do for a living? (one of these basic interview questions)

Hayo:
I am 25 years old, I live near a little town called Oostvoorne (which is near the coast in the Netherlands) in my little barn-studio. Right now I am an art student and freelance pixel artist. I also have a teaching degree in history and have been a teacher at times, but there doesn’t seem to be any work for me at the moment.

Chroelle:
Bernard and Hank are true rednecks – a phenomenon mostly seen in the southern states of USA. You are from Holland (The Netherlands) yourself, so how did you come up with that?

Hayo:
I am from the countryside of the Netherlands, a place where a lotta people kinda ape rednecks. This means they drive around in American pickup trucks and wear plaid shirts. When I went to the city to study I kinda built up this reputation among the city folks of being a redneck farmer. Secondly the idea for the game came from Farm aid, which is an organisation that helps family farmers, who are being pushed away by the factory farms. As this is an American organisation it seemed right to have a real American setting in the game.

Chroelle:
Bernard and Hank are loveable characters though somewhat archetypes of antiheroes. Do antiheroes just make better heroes than…in lack of a better word “real” heroes?

Hayo:
I always liked the antihero better somehow, I guess they are more interesting than real heroes. Real heroes never miss, are always pretty and never make mistakes. What can be more boring than that?

Chroelle:
Will we ever see another instalment to Bernard and Hank?

Hayo:
I really want to do that. At the moment all I have is a script for Bernard and Hank 3. It’s a long story that starts with Bernard’s grandpa starting the farm around 1890, all the struggle to get it running, people getting older, problems with the government and lawyers, up to the modern times in which Bernard and his friends are fighting the factory farms. It is too big of a project for now and I am still trying to find the right graphical style for it.
Apart from that I have a little side project called Bernard & Hank racing, which is a little racing game in the style of the original Mario kart. But that’s still pretty buggy.

Chroelle:
What exactly is it with NationalLiberal? Did he not get breastfed or did he get adopted by a bank or what is it with him?

Hayo:
Nobody really knows where he comes from, or where he got his name. He did get breastfeeding as he has stocks in that.

Chroelle:
Can you tell me anything I don’t know about Bernard and Hank or the production of the game. Simple trivia/fun facts.

Hayo:
The first Bernard & Hank started with a pretty large team of fairly inexperienced people. We kind of looked at each other and went “we can’t do shit but we like it” and called ourselves “the Peasants”. Most of those people sadly left the team during the production and the game was mostly done by 3 people.

The second Bernard & Hank started as an Easter version of Bernard & Hank for a competition, but we took it a bit further and did a new engine and new enemies for it.

Chroelle:
The game is about farmers – Is this because you have a special love for farmers and their fight against the banks and moneymen trying to break them? Did you ever want to be a farmer? I know the Netherlands (Holland in particular) are somewhat agricultural – tulips and all. J

Hayo:
When I was born all you could see here was fields, trees and little houses. Now all I can see is greenhouses, villa’s and a skyline of factories. That kind of does something to you. When you take a look at what farming is like these days with all the factory farms and greenhouses, it doesn’t have anything to do with nature. I would like to be a farmer someday, but it should be primitive, organic farming. The way we do it now is just totally wrong and we are wasting this planet. This country as it is now is far from agricultural now, the tulips made place for flats and parking lots and I keep running into people who are convinced you can choose between “nature” and “human”. Chances are I will move to another country one of these days.

Chroelle:
Can you tell us about the other games you worked on? Which is your own personal favourite(s) and why?

Hayo:
I started with the Fishhead games. I started the first one in 1997 and finished the last one in 2003. Fishhead 3 is the game I got the most praise for and made it to a lot of gaming mags, but I am not too crazy about it myself. My favourite game right now is the last one I made, Santaman 2. It’s not that I am a fan of themed games or puzzle platformers, but I think it has the best graphics and music I did to date and it is the first time I coded something this solid.
I would love to find time to do a BnH or Fishhead this way.

Chroelle:
And are you still involved in game creation? Freeware or commercial?

Hayo:
I am still involved, just not as much as I used to. I have more hobbies now like music and mountaineering, and just got through my quarter-life crisis. Right now I am about to finish the graphics for Steve Harris’ Turning the tide, a commercial WW2 sidescrolling arcade shooter that will be released soon. Apart from that I would like to get into using games for educational purposes, but I am still waiting for the time to be right.

Chroelle:
When did you start playing games? Do you have any fond memories of those times and did you decide to make a game of your own because of some of them? Is Bernard and Hank based on some of them?

Hayo:
I started pretty late with videogames, I was always playing outside. The first game I owned was Donkey kong land on the gameboy in late 1995. I see videogames as a nice form of art in which I can combine three things I love: animations, music and storytelling. My graphical style is heavily influenced by the 8-bit and 16-bit games of the early and mid-90’s. Lately I got more into actually playing games which made me realise how boring my own sometimes are. I built up a big collection of Super Nintendo games over the last 3 years, to study them I guess.

Chroelle:
Did more people work on the game, and if so was it difficult leading the progress with volunteers/paid workers working for you.

Hayo:
I worked on the Bernard and Hank games with a team, and that was hard. The nice thing about having a team of people is that you can let everyone do what they are good at. Which means I can focus on the graphics and another guy does the coding. The downside is you have to have a bunch of people that all go for it, or you have to be a real strong leader. I am not a strong leader, or at least I don’t want to be one, and didn’t always have people around me who were interested enough to really work hard on the game. Just being there “for the fun of it” is not enough to finish a project that takes up months. That’s why my last game was a solo game again.

Chroelle:
How do people react to the game when they talk to you about it?

Hayo:
People my age or older generally don’t really get it and ask me why I don’t just use that time working on my album or comic book. Or worse, they look at it and call it retro or vintage or oldschool. As a teacher tho it is really nice to get reactions from my students who somehow always find out about my games and then think I am the coolest teacher of the school.

Chroelle:
Have you thought about making it into a multi-part series, since you gotta love the characters in the game? Have you considered crossing over to other genres with the same characters?
Simfarm Feat. Bernard and Hank.
FPS – Chasing away the Minions.
Etc.

Hayo:
Yeah, I did think of that. Of course there is the Bernard & Hank racing project. Something I would love to do is a strategy game with these characters, but it’s really hard to code.

Chroelle:
Do you remember any ideas you had for the game that didn’t make it?

Hayo:
NationalLiberal getting liposuction.

Chroelle:
Were the games ever in danger of not being published? Why? And at what state?

Hayo:
We had a bit of a crisis in the development of the first Bernard & Hank. The team was largely built on longstanding friendships, and something pretty ugly went down between two friends who then couldn’t face each other for a while. But we made it.

Chroelle:
Which freeware games do you remember playing that made you take on freeware game development?

Hayo:
I don’t think I even knew what a freeware game was when I started making my own games. I didn’t have the internet back then. I just saw something about a program to make games with in a magazine in 1996 called Klik&play, went to a shop and bought it.

Chroelle:
Were there any games that inspired you for Bernard and Hank? Maybe something other than games?

Hayo:
The graphics were a direct result of playing some Adventure island games on the NES. I just loved how they did a lot with less. So I took a real low colour palette and tried to make something with that.

Chroelle:
What part of Bernard and Hank was the hardest part getting done?

Hayo:
Once you get through making the first set of levels you run out of the glow that you get when you start a new game. Then having to make 30 more levels is hard. Making them interesting is even harder, and I think we even failed at that, especially in the first game.

Chroelle:
What kind of game you would love to make if you had the resources needed and open boundaries?

Hayo:
An RTS with farmers and liberalminions for sure.

Chroelle:
What do you think was the coolest feature in the game?

Hayo:
It’s hard to find anything that I think is really cool, as it’s all so standard. I might go for the fat sleeping dudes you can jump on.

Chroelle:
Where do you see yourself 5 years from now regarding game making?

I hope I can get a bit better at graphics as that is my main focus. Apart from that I would like to become a better coder. I do not intend to go commercial or find a job in game making anytime soon.
Chroelle:
Do you have any favourite games from the freeware scene?

Hayo:
First game that springs to mind is Shima Bros by JohnsProgram/Acoders. This game is just so nice and simple. Another game I really liked was A game with a Kitty by Bernie. It’s the cute, simple platformers I go for.

Chroelle:
Any other freeware games you think we should know about for our site?

Chroelle:
Which leads up to the next question.
If you were to mention a GOD of freeware, who would that be?

Hayo:
Bernie (Ed: Author of A Game with a Kitty, Stargirl and the thief from the exploding moon etc. These games can be found on CWF). Maybe Arthur Lee but I think he’s the devil.

Chroelle:
What are your views on giving away commercial games as freeware when they have been commercial for some amount (you decide) of years?

Hayo:
I’m not bothered by it, but I prefer to give them away for free in the first place as I see this as a hobby.

Chroelle:
If you could choose to do a freeware game with any game developer or publisher(freeware or commercial) who would it be?

I’d prefer to stay solo for now J

Chroelle:
Ok. To finish off the interview. The classic question:
Any words for enthusiastic independent game developers?

Be sure to eat organic food.