Hollow Ponds talk about their journey from stocking shelves to launching Wilmot Works It Out

The well-loved indie game Wilmot’s Warehouse, featuring an affable white square called Wilmot, is being joined on the Epic Games Store by its sibling game, Wilmot Works It Out. We spoke to the two-man team behind both hugely different Wilmot titles to find out how a job stocking shelves in a grocery store led to an indie hit and how the pair ensures they’re always hands-on with all their projects.

In 2019, the two main people behind developer Hollow Ponds—Rickey Haggett and Richard Hogg—were noodling with ideas between projects. Hogg, an illustrator, had been doodling hundreds of icons for a different project, and, without making the connection in his own mind, had told Haggett about a longtime idea he’d had for a game based on arranging stock in a warehouse.

The result, of course, was indie hit Wilmot’s Warehouse, a logistical puzzle game in which Wilmot—a 2D white square with a face—supplies customers with orders from an ever-growing number of items in his warehouse.

“I’d worked in two warehouses,” Hogg told me over a call. “My job was getting things out, putting things away. And because of the sort of person that I am, I would never get bored of trying to optimize that.”

Working at the UK supermarket chain Asda, Hogg said he would challenge himself every day. “How quickly can I get all the dog and cat food onto the shop floor? I really enjoyed the jobs, especially in the subtly game-like way they feel. I can go find those things, know the quickest route, and get it done more quickly, and have a longer lunch.”

Haggett, recalling this, thought he’d put together a little prototype idea. Also on the call, Haggett interjected, “I saw your PDF with all your symbols, and I remembered that warehouse thing. There was no Wilmot, it was just a cursor—these symbols would pour into this room, and then you’d have this cursor that could pick them up, sort them, and optimize them. Then you took them to a hopper at the other end and deposited groups of them together.”

Hogg, who until this point had envisaged the game as a first-person 3D deal, was immediately on board. And then, extraordinarily, five months later Wilmot’s Warehouse was finished.

It’s a game, I had to confess to its developers, that I find unbearably stressful. As one of Earth’s most disorganized people, the threat of constantly having to refine my organizational skills to optimize the delivery of stock to customers was too much to bear. Yet, as was obvious to me as I played such an exquisitely well-made game, this was clearly going to be an incredibly cathartic experience for others.

“I’ve got two friends who are playing it at the moment,” Hogg said. “They’re a couple. One is really organized and really, really anal, and really enjoying it. Whereas the other, like you, says it’s super stressful. But he’s enjoying being rubbish at it.”

The reality is that many people describe the game as therapeutic. Hollow Ponds has never made games with violence or peril, and it doesn’t intend to, so this contradiction in responses has been very interesting for them.

However, my reaction was the opposite when it came to the second Wilmot game, Wilmot Works It Out.

“I guessed that was coming,” laughed Hogg. “Everything you hate about the first game is solved for you in the second!”

Wilmot Works It Out is not technically a sequel, in that they’re two very different games. However, both feature the charming anthropomorphized square and use the same mechanic of picking up a number of blocks and rearranging them on the screen. It’s just that in Works It Out, Wilmot’s at home and calmly solving jigsaw puzzles.

“It didn’t occur to us that we had to make it, gameplay-wise, relate to the first game in any other way than just how Wilmot moves and carries things,” explained Hogg. “It felt like making a sibling to the first game, and it just happened naturally.”

“It took just a week to make a prototype, which had a whole bunch of jigsaws that you could solve with Wilmot,” added Haggett. “The biggest worry was is it going to be fun moving these pieces around [with Wilmot]? Or is that just going to be annoying?”

The answer, it turned out, was to keep the puzzles small. Made of tiles, the game rarely features a jigsaw puzzle that’s bigger than eight by eight, and most are smaller than that. The trick, instead, is that the pieces for multiple puzzles arrive at the same time, with many missing until the next delivery. The game’s core mechanic becomes about sorting those pieces into the correct groups and working out which one can be completed that “day” to cause a new delivery to arrive.

I wondered how fans of the original game reacted when the next Wilmot game was such a departure from the original. “There are definitely people who are fans of both games!” Haggett said. “I don’t know if we’ve had anybody being like, ‘Oh, this is a weird sequel thing to do.’ I think people are just like, ‘Oh, cool! It’s another Wilmot game! Excellent.’”

This speaks incredibly well of the games’ audience, of course. It seems the genteel square and his diligent logistical approach wins over the right sort of players, those more interested in having a fun experience than starting a fight on Discord.

The pair also works on larger projects with teams of up to 15. Their policy is to begin making a game, and then see which people it might need, hiring the best freelancers for the project. That’s how you get their games like Flock and I Am Dead without the studio beginning to bloat. After a game is finished, it’s back to the two of them, and then they see what resources the next game will need. Both are determined to be directly involved in coding and illustrating the games as well as avoiding entering the role of managers. Hogg recalled the words a friend used to describe the pair: the “paintbrush analogy.”

“Say your job is painting houses, and you get good at it, and you employ some young guys to come and paint, and before long you put the paintbrush down. You’re just the guy that goes and meets the client, then sends some kids in to paint the house. You put the paintbrush down. I never want to do that.”