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Those Who Crawl was the first project I shipped under my company Hush Fin Games. The project was released in December of 2022 after a short closed beta for testing. I wanted to make a short and free experience to open up Hush Fin Games. My intention was to create a polished product that would represent the kind of games I intend to release in the future. I think for this purpose it was very successful.

Ideation

The project began with an idea of a game where the entire world was claustrophobic tunnels, with only a few moments where the player could stand. Over time I became interested in different movement styles. I soon landed on the left/right mouse button controlling the crawling. I found that adding a more complex mechanic created more tense moments when trying to escape monsters.

Story

As the idea developed I started creating loose story elements. I didn't want the story to be well defined, instead being more of a background element. The story that appears follows the idea of delving into ones-self, with the idea of fixing or atoning for something. Instead the end reveals more of a self destructive intent, killing a part of your self that grieves. I think the story was fairly successful, though I have learned many lessons for future storytelling.

Mechanics

Most of my time beyond level design and audio were spent coding the movement system and enemy AI. I went through many iterations to allow the movement to be intuitive, at least as much as I could for such an unusual movement system. The knives were only a small extension made to the same mechanic, but design wise I think they really make the game more interesting. The enemies are coded to keep their distance usually, but will close in on the player if their movement is fast and they are out in the open. If stabbed with the knife they then move to a return position and begin searching again.

Level

The level was first blocked out in a Unity plugin called ProBuilder. I had used this on a previous project "Undelivered" to much success, and found a similar successful use case here. However, once the level geometry had been completed, I moved the meshes into Blender for cleanup. The hand meshes, knife meshes, and enemies were all made in Blender. The title art was provided by my girlfriend.

Release

About a month before the release I began heavily playtesting, though found it hard to get playtesters as I was not in communication with many volunteers at the time. I did not playtest enough, nor did I playtest early enough. All-in-all I had about 8 - 10 play testers many of which were unable to record their play-session and instead offered notes. I knew at this time that that wouldn't cut it, so i spent time reaching out to more people for a closed beta. Finding playtesters was fairly unsuccessful. Many of the playtesters did not have much input to offer, but their feedback was generally positive. I will write more about this in the conclusion however.

The release went very well. Many players only found the game through the steam store at first, then by seeing lets-plays. Alpha Beta Gamer was the first to make a video, which netted many views and new players. Their content style is geared more towards game showcases rather than a full lets play. After that, 8BitRyan, a popular lets-player, had a very positive experience with the game. Most of the reviews were positive, and many of the critical responses gave great input. Many reviews noted the movement mechanic being frustrating. I think much of this response could have been avoided with more playtesting.

Conclusion

I was left with some important lessons from this game - playtest early and often. This is something I had already heard and thought about, but what I hadn't thought about was how difficult it would be to get playtesters. I've since upgraded my lines of communication to local area game developers and will try to inquire about playtesters earlier for my next project, which at the time of writing this will be starting very soon. Also, I have learned much more about testing a player's patience. I always want my games to be slow burners and challenge the player in some way, but there are certain limits that are unnecessary.

In the "knife tutorial" you are taught that knives break after a few uses. This is done by forcing the knife to break, and then the player cannot progress until they turn around to find a knife that was hidden behind them. Many players who are already feeling impatient with the game think that the game has soft-locked here and quit at this point. If I were to redesign this tutorial I would move the knives much closer so the player could see them by only looking around at the end of the tunnel. This segment contributes to many of the negative reviews - if not all of them. This would have been clearly spotted by more play testers.

Overall, I'm very proud of this project. Its the biggest splash that any of my personal projects have made and makes me much more confident about my future Hush Fin endeavors. The plan from here is to release a project about 3 times in scope and sell it on steam for a reasonable price. As a full-time software engineer, I keep my expectations for weekend work small, but nonetheless I really want to keep releasing projects like this.