Gustav Edberg with Creaky Stairs Studio is the creator of Notes of Obsession, which recently won the top prize at the Swedish Game Awards 2016 in June, winning them a place in the Indie Prize competition at Casual Connect in Tel Aviv. Gustav considers this a great honor, and sees it as the first step in a path towards making games as a career.
“My dream is to make a living out of game developing. By winning Swedish game awards I felt like I actually had a chance at this,” said Gustav. “I felt like this might actually be my job someday. It was no longer a farfetched dream that will never happen. So by getting recognized by the SGA gave me a lot of confidence that I could be part of creating a much better game. Be part of an indie studio and working full time with it.”
“I am really excited to go to Indie Prize and meet all the wonderful developers and hear their stories and to learn from them,” he added. “I also think that the event is a great thing to show ourselves to the world, we managed to do this game in 10 weeks and we are damn proud of it!”
10 Weeks for Obsession
Winning the Swedish Game Awards was the culmination of a lifelong obsession with video games. Gustav says they’ve been playing games as long as they can remember, noting that they will stay up with their friends to watch the E3 press conferences and be amazed at the new games being shown off.
“It never occurred to me though, that it actually could be something that I would be able to do. Fast forward a couple of years and I’ve just graduated the Swedish version of high school,” detailed Gustav. “I had good grades but did not know what to do with my life, so I started to study at a university to become an engineer. One year in and I hated it. A friend of mine saw an advert for a game development program in the game magazine level. I thought, ‘Games have been the cornerstone of my life, why not give it a go?’ Since that day my dream has been to participate in an indie game development team consisting of around five to seven people.”
“In my game development program we have a course in which we have 10 weeks to create a game. Prior to this course, every student votes for what game idea they want to work with,” they continued. “The ideas are created by students and pitched to all the other students during a ‘pitch day’. Me and four of my friends signed up as a team and created the ground for a game with a dark thematic. This is where Notes started.”
It was something of a crash course in game development, making Notes of Obsession in 10 weeks. Still, Gustav noted that they learned important lessons about having an objective you want to reach while still being adaptable in your approach.
“We created a house, every room was given an ‘importance grade’ so everybody else know in what order they needed to create stuff,” Gustav said. “Take the kids room for example; the game can still be played if we only manage to create the kids room. It won’t be as good of course, but the core of the game will still be given to the player. That is why the kids room had the highest ‘importance grade’ and therefore was created first. This was done with all the rooms in the game. This means that if we won’t have enough time we can just close the door to that room and we can still give the player an experience that hopefully is good.”
Notes of Obsession was one of the myriad of titles that was inspired by the playable teaser for Hideo Kojima’s now canceled Silent Hills, better know as simply PT. “With its great build up and the eerie feeling when the normal stuff maybe isn’t so normal after all. It is also a shorter game that kind of strictly follows a dramatic curve,” said Gustav. “Some personal inspirations for me when the main idea was created were the song Life/Universe by Detektivbyrån. Life/Universe are for me, a very sad song. There are no lyrics but you can feel the pain, the suffering and the loneliness. But you can also feel the hope and will to move on. I really think that this song gives the listener a great journey that the listener self can decide what it is about. This is such a cool thing when the same song means so many different things, depending on the listener and the mood of the listener.”
One of the things that’s really surprised Gustav the most is are the various walkthrough and Let’s Play videos that people have uploaded to YouTube. “We were proud of the product but since it was only a 10 week project there are a lot of stuff that could have been done better with a bit more time on our hands. We uploaded Notes to Itch.io for our friends to play. The first YouTuber that found out about it was a Spanish dude, Caith Sith. All of us were super exited and we watched his video with Google translate turned on since we are not that great with Spanish. It was a fantastic feeling to actually see someone that none of us knew playing our game. I talked to Caith afterward for a bit and thanked him for playing our game. He told me that he would tell some other YouTubers about it. Everything started from here. Whenever someone put up a video on YouTube, someone from our dev group would post it in our chat and we would discuss and cheer while we watched it. Everything kind of exploded when video after video of someone playing Notes was uploaded. At some points there were 6 videos an hour. Then it happened. Markiplier and PewDiePie played Notes of Obsession. It feels so incredible for all of us that there are still daily uploads of our game, close to 5 months after the release.”
Hitting Every Horror Beat
Ten weeks is a very aggressive development schedule, accelerating the more gradual test plan that games will have. Because of that, Gustav had to do most of the testing themselves during the day before bringing in others.
“As soon as the block out is done I test it on local friends and in a small test group of around seven people online. I don’t have so much experience with how to set up big tests since I’m still a student but what I did with Notes was gathering some question marks to two big tests,” Gustav described. “One of them was via my high school and was done during the middle of the project. The other test was a local event that we invited everyone to participate to and was done during the latest stage right before the polish phase, to see what we needed to change when the polish phase began. Since we only had 10 weeks to create Notes we always knew that we did not afford to have more than two big tests, so we had to try to recreate the results of testing by discussing.”
“When we were testing on my old high school, we had one person that played the game who was so afraid that she sat and shivered during the full play through and screamed her heart out,” they added. “There was also a boy who had to pause the play test because he needed to wipe the sweat of the mouse.”
The creation of Notes of Obsession was a team effort, and despite young ages of the creators, they were very organized in their methods. “One of the big things we did in the beginning was to have a big brainstorming session following the 635 method,” described Gustav. “This enabled the full group to be able to give ideas without wasting too much time. We all knew that we had a tight schedule so we all wanted the project to move forward as fast as possible but at the same time, great ideas come from evolving a lesser idea. An idea that is changed slightly from another perspective to an OK idea, changed yet again with a new perspective from another person and so on. Later on the designers and writers planned out the game.”
“During the milestones we had larger meetings discussing the new part so every discipline could give input and say what could be done and what could not be done. If everything could be done we moved on to the next milestone,” they continued. “If something couldn’t be done for some reason we changed it so it would work. For example if the art lead told us that they would not have time to make that many props needed to this trigger, he was completely trusted. We would change the trigger to make it work for everyone without question the art lead unless it was a very important trigger. The same was with all the disciplines. That was the level of trust between us. If someone says they won’t have time, that’s the way it is. Everyone worked as hard as they could and everybody wanted the game to be as good as possible.”
So Young, Such Potential
While Gustav and his friends have already achieved so much, amazingly Notes of Obsession was just a project for school. Gustav hasn’t even graduated from school yet! While it won’t be the exact same members when Gustav forms a new studio, they do know what they want to do.
“We had a discussion if we are going to create a real company and go for this but we felt that 17 people are way too many to be able to do anything real,” Gustav said. “Some of us have started smaller groups to form a company, some of us have started to work at bigger companies and some of us are still trying to figure out what to do next. We are all friends though and we still hang out sometimes and we still post in the Notes chat with fun stuff and cool things that is happening for us.”
Gusav’s new studio will be called Angry Demon. They want to bring elements to Swedish culture to the horror genre with a game called Unforgiving and is set in a Swedish forest. It’s their goal to increase the quality of horror games on the market, and given the reception to Notes of Obsession, they’re well set up to do so.
“Even if I had unlimited resources, I would still develop horror games. I’ve fallen in love with how the workflow of horror games and to be able to create such strong feelings for people is an amazing feeling for me. With unlimited resources though, I would be able put in even more work in the games that we would create since there would be no deadlines about money,” said Gustav, adding, “Notes was the first horror game I ever made and I have really fallen in love with the genre. It is something very special to create a game that focuses so much on the feelings of the player. Everything is built around the players feeling, and if the immersion is broken everything collapses. It is a very unforgiving genre that way.”
“This might sound cheesy, but I do believe that as an indie developer, it is super important to do the things that you love. Not to do the things that will make the most money. To be able to be successful you need to put everything that you have, in to your game. That means working almost 24/7 during different periods and you will need to sacrifice other things that you love doing. That is not possible without doing something that you really love,” Gustav concluded.
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