In the age of Steam, so many games get released that even substantive, interesting titles get short shrift. Most of them are reviewed and end up in a ‘Let’s Play’ of some kind and then fall off a cliff for the rest of the game’s viable lifespan.

Well, to combat that in some small way, we’ve decided to publish an occasional series, consisting of candid chats with or features about developers about how they made their most popular games. First up is Krillbite Studios, the Norwegian developer responsible for a charming game about a toddler with a furry little sidekick and some pretty big nightmares.

Among the Sleep turned out to be one of the most surprising and terrifying games of 2014. With a unique premise and compelling visual style, it arrived to great acclaim from gamers and reviewers interested in all genres, including the horror sect.

The team at Krillbite was kind enough to answer a whole battery of questions about the successes, difficulties, failures, and joys of working on Among the Sleep.

The Idea and Early Work

The idea for Among the Sleep originated with the game’s designer back in 2011. One night, he was struck by a particular dream, about a toddler running down a pair of stairs and hiding from a monster. A fairly simple yet evocative image, this was the game’s initial creative spark. Shortly thereafter, while still pursuing undergraduate degrees, the relatively inexperienced team began work on the prototype.

Even early on, the visual style was pretty well developed, at least philosophically. They wanted it to be somewhat stylistic and painted — “to make fit with the colorful perception a child can have of the world,” they said — but also retain the distinctly horrific feel throughout. That created pretty specific guiding parameters for how they would design and create the world the toddler and Teddy would inhabit. Whatever changes occurred, the initial focus remained clear: to project something rooted in reality and yet also be indicative of a child’s imagination.

Because of their collective inexperience, however, character designs and the overall art style went through several iterations before the final product emerged. For instance, the game began its life with an extremely bright color palette, but those early blueprints had to be balanced out to accommodate the overall, horror-based tone. As a result, the visuals became more realistic, featuring deeper and darker colors to fit the mood. They used hand-painted textures with more realistic-looking shaders to reach their desired art style.

With regard to tone, the team wanted something dark but also something fantastical that encompassed the core conceit, which revolves around a very young child. The team is convinced they achieved a consistent balance, navigating the murky waters of a somewhat dark tone with something makes players feel safe navigating the world as a toddler.

Too light, and the game doesn’t feel substantive. Too dark, and it comes across as abusive or morbid. What Among the Sleep managed to do was give life to a dark and forbidding world and give it a sense of danger without stepping too far into something repulsive.

Production

The realistic-sounding toddler work can be credited to a friend’s baby. Martin Kvale, the sound engineer, brought a recorder to the studio and let the machine run while he played with the child, gathering a collection of sounds that could be used to enliven the game’s protagonist.

For the mother, the team relied upon Jory Prum, a friend of theirs who owns a recording studio in California. He sent a casting packet (including notes and test dialogue) to different candidates, and the whole team listened to the auditions together. They became enamored with the voice of Cia Court, whose credits include League of Legends and The Wolf Among Us. They said, “There was something that stood out to us about Cia Court’s voice, who we hired, and she ended up nailing the role!”

As for Teddy, Prum had an idea for who should voice the sidekick bear from the very beginning. Roger Jackson, known for his myriad roles in movies, television, and video games — he’s THE phone voice from the Scream movies! — became involved early on, and he worked through several variants of the Teddy character as the team developed his role in the game.

“The Teddy character…[was] a completely different character at different times during the production, but Roger adapted to it every time as the incredibly talented actor he is,” they said. Originally, Teddy was a slightly menacing (to evil) character, but eventually he became the comfort blanket players would see in the final version.

The Development

Since they began Among the Sleep as students, the team at Krillbite virtually had no knowledge of how to make a game or run a company. Everything, for them, was a learning process, from the more organizational aspects of figuring out what tools and routines worked for them, to the more creative and technical aspects of game development.

This inexperience could be traced back to each element of development, even the production schedule itself. The team’s approach to hours at the office varied from strict to unstructured. Right out of school, they had no set schedule, but after finding a lack of structure didn’t quite work, it moved to something a little more standard. After release, the schedule modulated to something in between, so they could achieve a modicum of work-life balance.

They started out the development process by making their own engine, before transitioning to Unity — version 3.5. That simple but now obvious switch proved to streamline production. Through updating the game and iterating tirelessly — Among the Sleep now runs on the latest version of Unity — they learned a lot about how to be creative on demand and to understand what will work and what won’t before actually making it. Once they had a workable prototype, they started the QA process.

Krillbite did most of the game testing and QA internally for the first few years. Of the more basic bugs, the ones that kept bringing them back, of particular difficulty was the AI, which provided plenty of consistent problems. There was a problem “where the monster would never spawn, or just stop in the middle of something.”

The technical issues weren’t limited to AI. They said, “Another one would be the endless drawer in ‘Chapter 4 — Into the Closet.’ The drawer was implemented with physics, and physics aren’t always easy to play with. So this drawer had a lot of episodes where it wouldn’t come out or it came out and got blocked somewhere else. Damn that drawer!”

Overall, they found the testing process to be entirely useful and suggest any aspiring game makers do it early and often. External testers were able to see the game with fresh eyes and provide the team with invaluable feedback. In many instances, the dev’s perspective became irrelevant pretty quickly. “We’ve both removed things, added things, and even changed the story countless times because of feedback,” they said.

For the design team at Krillbite, the puzzles provided an interesting challenge. The key to each lay in the interaction between the toddler protagonist and the physical environment. It had to feel believable, and the child character believable within this world.

To make a believable, childlike world, there had to be quite a few physical limitations imposed on the character and character movement. The depth of experience, then, would come from those limitations, which would increase the game’s tension and horror. There were were lots of discussions about the balance that needed to be stuck between realism and fantasy. In the end, they went with a middle ground solution.

“If we had gone with making baby simulator levels of realism, it would have been too boring. If we had gone with a too far out fantastical solution like abilities or magic, it would have drastically distanced the players from the character,” they said.

As with all games, some elements and ideas had to be excised, but the team insists it had everything to do with how it fit into the game. Ideas would be cut if they didn’t work, were difficult to understand, or they weren’t fun. But nothing in the game was pulled because it placed the child in too much jeopardy or didn’t fit with the themes or tone of Among the Sleep.

Of the tiptoeing they did around the subject of a small child in a dangerous situation, they said, “There’s definitely been things that have been taken out of the game, but rarely was the sole reason that it felt too creepy for a game with a child protagonist.”

The Ending

Without providing spoilers here, the game’s third act helped Among the Sleep transcend being a neat little horror game to being something more substantive. The third act “twist” came to be out of a combination of iteration, concerted effort, and a need to tie things together.

“At that time there was less connection between the internal story of the [third] chapter and the main story,” says Krillbite. “Late in the production we saw it necessary to cut a few major plot points as it was too messy and confusing.” Afterwards, they smoothed out the other chapters to make all three coalesce in a more or less intertwined way.

Production — The Successes

One thing that the team did not expect at all was the near-viral attention Among the Sleep received throughout production. The first gameplay teaser, for example, caught on without much advertising. It provided a necessary and much-needed motivational boost for the team, since they knew that what they were doing was exciting people. That momentum surrounding the game’s early hype helped Krillbite launch their eventually-successful Kickstarter.

Krillbite’s Kickstarter campaign proved to be hugely important for developing and completing Among the Sleep. Launched on April 18, 2013, the campaign eventually went on to top its $200,000 goal by nearly fifty thousand dollars, making it an immensely successful method for getting the word out about their adventure horror game.

“It gave us the opportunity to be free of the restraints of a publisher and we were able to work less on part time jobs that had nothing to do with game development and focus more time and effort into the development of Among the Sleep,” they said.

Through doing the Kickstarter, they learned that all facets of game development take a lot longer than anticipated, from the development of the game to the DLC to getting out the physical rewards. In fact, they’re still getting the physical rewards to Kickstarter backers, and the DLC took a lot longer than they thought.

Production — The Struggles

The game was not without its struggles, however. Krillbite slowly came to realize that it’s quite difficult to get players to see what they wanted them to see, through the eyes of the player. “We expected people to understand and pick up on all of the small hints that we put in as the main story of the game, and [we] didn’t test this with external people until very late,” they said, adding, “At this point, it became clear that we had been too vague all along, and that the story was too confusing for most people to pick up on.”

It was through normal production and testing that they were able to close those missing connections between what they wanted to convey and what the audience was receiving.

When discussing what they might modify, change, or take out, they were pretty blunt. “The monsters,” they said. “Like mentioned earlier, Among the Sleep was our first game and led us to unintentionally underestimate the monster or AI aspect of the game.” They originally wanted a very flexible AI that could navigate most areas so that they could add monster sequences wherever they found fitting, but that proved to be much more difficult than first proposed.

In fact, the monster sequences were meant to be a much bigger part of the game than what they ended up being. It wasn’t until late in production that they realized it was not going to pan out that way, and they had to compromise with their original vision. Hence, the monster sequences became much more sporadic.

They believe it worked out nicely, and they’re not unhappy about the number of monster appearaances. “We wouldn’t have added a ton more monster events, because we think that subtlety in horror is crucial,” they said. And yet, they would have preferred a more flexible system, one they could have toyed around with, than it ended up being.

Beyond the diminished monster events, the team ended up making other cuts and major changes for the sake of the game’s integrity. “For instance, we went through an ‘adventure phase,’ where your Teddy had active abilities that you had to use to overcome enemies,” Krillbite said. One ability made holes in the ground, while another created a protective bubble around the toddler, but eventually they were scrapped. In the end, the game comprised only a fraction of their overall ideas.

Release, Response, and Reflection

“Thinking back,” they said, “it all feels like a blur.” The game’s release schedule was really tight ramping up to launch, which gave them very limited time to feel prepared. They were pressed for time, uploading assets for [Steam] trading cards, achievements, and the final build no more than 10 minutes before the launch.

As soon as they hit “Publish,” the realization hit them that they had launched. “In the next nerve wracking moments of release,” they said, “we constantly hit the ‘refresh’ button to see if any reviews had been posted.” Since the majority of the reviews were positive, they were able to relax a little and consider the launch itself a success.

Upon reflection, the team has settled on a few major lessons they gained from making Among the Sleep. One of the clear ones is that making games takes time. A lot of time. “We extended the production schedule for Among the Sleep a gazillion times.”

The second is that communication is hard. “Both inside the game, with communicating to the player what the next step is, how to do it, where to go, but also internally within the team: getting everybody on the same page on what we’re creating, how we are creating it, and why,” they said. The third has all to do with their philosophical approach to making games. “How much do we base in reality, how much can be imagination, and where do we draw the line, ethically?”

The Future

The big question a lot of people have is, will the team at Krillbite Studios continue to create and develop games? The answer is, most definitely, and it has a lot to do with the overwhelmingly positive response to Among the Sleep. They said, “To see people respond by sending us personal e-mails about how touched they were, or how incredibly frightening the experience was, is an injection of motivation and inspiration to carry on. We hope to be able to continue to touch people in games to come.”

The next steps for Krillbite include tying up all the Kickstarter business and getting Among the Sleep on the Playstation 4. However, they’ve already got an idea for their next game, which is going to be way different from Among the Sleep. They said, “It’s called Mosaic, and we again want to focus on difficult topics but this time not in a horror setting!” They plan on revealing more information after initial testing.

Among the Sleep is available now on Steam. The studio can be found at krillbite.com.