Below you’ll find the post-mortem for Midnight Hub’s first game “Lake Ridden“. Midnight Hub is a Swedish indie studio, founded in December of 2015, by Johan Bernhardsson (formerly at Minecraft), Erik Nilsson (formerly at Massive) and Sara Casén (formerly at Paradox). Lake Ridden was released on Steam/GOG/Humble on May the 10th in 2018. The game is a first-person puzzler, filled with story and beautiful nature. It takes roughly 7-9 hours to play, depending on how much of the extra story the player wants to explore.
The game sits on Steam’s extremely high rating; “Very Positive” and has a 90% positive score. Lake Ridden is all in all made by two game artists, two programmers/designers, one producer, and two musicians. It took us roughly two years to make, at the same time setting up a new studio from scratch. The game itself is made with Unity.
This post-mortem is compiled by the team in August of 2018, and put together by me (Sara – the producer). It’s important to know that much of what is written in this piece is from the perspective of a producer. We’ve also done all our own marketing, community management and sales (with the help of two PR firms around launch). If you’re looking for technical specifications from the development please feel free to reach out to our art director Erik Nilsson or our lead coder Johan Bernhardsson.
Lake Ridden is made by two coders/designers, two game artists, and one producer. On top of this we hired two composers to take care of all our voice and sound needs!
Running an indie studio and making your first game as a team is two different challenges, but since they very often overlap we’ll sometimes mention things in this post that addresses both the development of Lake Ridden but also touches on the challenges of creating and operating a games studio in 2018. Our goal with publishing this text is to contribute to the larger body of knowledge about games development out there, as well as take a moment ourselves to reflect on the enormous accomplishment that is creating something from nothing. At the end of this post, I’ll talk about the fact that our game, despite all love it has gotten from its fantastic players and the meticulous marketing effort we did, still four months post-release hasn’t sold close to what we anticipated. This will be a long read, so buckle up!
Background
The development of Lake Ridden started in early 2016, at the same time we founded the studio. To minimize risk and increase success we co-founders created the studio around the skillset we have. We did not start the studio to fulfill one game idea, we quit our day jobs because we want to build a games studio. The game idea that lead to Lake Ridden was one of several pitches presented and the agreed upon by the team. Back in 2016, it was a small scoped horror game, where the player stepped into the shoes of young Marie, searching for her sister inside an abandoned house. This concept would change a lot as development went forward and we got feedback from other games developers on the state of the horror genre. Originally we wanted to make a horror game without gore and blood, with a lot of puzzles and story. But after visiting GDC17 it became very clear that many horror fans wanted gore in their games, and the people who really liked puzzles absolutely hated horror and gore. So one year after production began we decided to pivot the game and went full on with the mystery feeling, the puzzles, and the narrative, targeting the same audience that likes Myst, Ether One and (a much less bloody) The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
The Swedish indie studio was co-founded in late 2015 by game developers who’ve worked at Minecraft, Massive and Paradox. Lake Ridden is the first game from Midnight Hub.
Our team grew from three founders to recruiting an additional amazing junior 3D artist (Anton Sander) and an excellent junior coder/designer (Malin Sandgren). We also signed on a duo of talented musicians; Solid Sounds.Along the way, we secured a big investment, nominations in business awards and front page coverage on big sites like Polygon. Got admitted to one of Europe’s best business incubator. We exhibited demos of Lake Ridden at EGX and Nordic Game Conference, where we had lines of people waiting to play. The game’s visual style got a lot of attention and we had tweets that went viral. Let’s start things off by having a look on what we think went really well in creating Lake Ridden!
What Went Well
1. Excellent User Ratings. The game had an amazing 96% positive rating one month past release and still has the excellent Steam rating “Very Positive”. The game resonates really, really well with its target audience. Making a game is insanely hard. To push a game out into the wild is an amazing achievement alone, doing so and scoring such an awesome reception is absolutely fantastic! Even harder when it’s the first game by a new team. What makes this even more remarkable is that we chose to pivot the game from horror to puzzle-mystery one year into development. It’s extremely rare that a game that changes genre ever gets released. Of course, the game is not perfect by any means, but people rarely believe it’s made by just four developers in two years.
Lake Ridden sits on the Steam rating; Very Postive, with a 90% positive user score!
2. High Level of Craftsmanship. The game has very solid puzzle design that challenges the player to really think outside of the box. Reading the user reviews on Steam makes it very clear that a lot of players enjoy the puzzles, the music, the art, and the story. We implemented a lot of interesting design choices in the game like a sophisticated hint-system and a chapter system for saving. The art style of the game has proven to be highly marketable and each area of the game really has it’s own distinct feel to it. The voice actors did an amazing job, as well as the composers. Of course, there are some Steam reviews that rightfully point out things we could have done better (always happy to get feedback!). But all in all, it’s an extremely solid first game for a studio.
In the game the player solves puzzles, riddles, and mysteries, trying to find her lost sister. It was made to appeal to the same audience that liked Myst, Ether One and Firewatch.
3. Creating Inclusive Studio Culture. This one is not only tied to the project of Lake Ridden but since the development of our first game naturally shaped how we worked together, how we solved problems, had discussions and interacted on a daily basis in the team, we choose to list it in this post-mortem. We worked very hard on creating a studio culture that should feel inclusive and respectful for all. We want to build an alternative to crunch, elitism and office politics. Here are some examples of what we accomplished:
An environment where it’s OK to be wrong. If you have good intentions anything can be talked about and solved.
Everyone stated their levels of stress each week, so we could keep track of both the individuals and the team’s stress levels. When any team is put under pressure it has a way of ripping the team apart, but we managed to grow even closer during hectic periods since we could lean on each other for help and support.
35h work week. We measured the SCRUM points completed and was able to get the same amount of things done in 35h instead of the usual 40h. All while the stress number was staying the same or dropping. Everybody was actively encouraged to use this extra free time to see family or do exercise.
We deliberately hired people who were very different but shared core values. We wanted to have many different perspectives represented in the team, to better understand our players and complement and challenge each other. This tremendously helped us solve problems and see different perspectives.
We played and analyzed games together each Friday to help give the team a common vocabulary for speaking about games and game design. This greatly improved the understanding between disciplines and gave us the same references to use when talking about games (i.e “Let’s do the shadows the same way we saw they did in Alien: Isolation”).
Feedback was encouraged and expected. We put great focus on the separation between whatever feature was critiqued and the person that made it. If you can separate the thing from its maker it’s much easier for everyone to learn and move the game forward.
One of the goals of founding the studio has been to create an environment where people can respect each other, don’t work overtime and help each other.
4. Game Testing With Real Life Players. We spent a great deal of time and money on testing the game on real people. We did this in two ways; on players at conferences and players that came into the office to play Lake Ridden. We closely watched people while exhibiting it on trade shows like EGX, asking them about things like what they felt about the suggested price (19,99€) to what games they usually played. That was complemented with user testing where we invited around 40 puzzle gamers (most of which we didn’t know personally) to the studio.
There we watched them play and asked them follow-up questions from a prepared protocol. We always had predefined hypotheses that we worked with during these game tests, like how long the ideal playtime for a level was, how many tries a player should make before solving a problem etc. If something deviated too much from the desired outcomes we compiled this feedback in an actionable way to the development team. This testing was absolutely invaluable to make sure Lake Ridden got such a good reception from puzzle gamers. In the late stages of the development, we also worked with the fantastic QA company Testology to find and squash traditional bugs as well.
Early concept art from Lake Ridden, back from 2016. The game was first announced as a horror game but changed direction after one year of development, none the less landing on a 96% positive Steam score during its first month available for purchase on Steam, GOG and Humble.
5. Rapid Reaction To Change. As mentioned before we pivoted the development after one year. One of our core ideas of Midnight Hub has been to be able to react to change if needed since few industries are so unpredictable and volatile as the games industry. Changing from a horror game to a puzzle game was a very difficult move to pull off none the less. Pivoting is a very scary and stressful thing to do, and most game projects or teams do not survive such a move. It forced us to do major reworks to the story, the game design, and the music. We still consider it a successful move since it was necessary and we survived to release a 96% positive game after making the switch.
6. Marketing, PR and Open Development. When founding Midnight Hub in late 2015 we knew that the games market was getting more and more crowded with each month. Between 2004-2015 a total of 7 000 games had been released on Steam, with almost 3 000 alone in 2015! So we knew we needed to work with marketing and visibility from day #1 to even have a chance to break through the noise. The first way we tackled this was to have one co-founder with a background in community management and marketing (me). We then formulated a marketing strategy to follow the development to maximize the chances that Lake Ridden would land a top spot on the Steam front page when released (our best bet to set off a snowball of sales). Here are just some of the marketing efforts we pushed along our two-year development (on an extremely frugal indie budget).
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– Visited and exhibited the game at EGX17 Birmingham, GDC17, NGC17, EGX18 London and GDC18. We hired booths and took advantage of the fact that shows like EGX have PR firms contracted to help indies market their presence to journalist.
– Johan’s Twitter has 360 000 followers after his time at Minecraft. He continuously tweeted ab
