"The thing Unpacking probably wouldn't have happened if people didn't show interest in it. "Every time we make a new room, people seem to be into it, but will they like a bigger apartment with several rooms? And slowly we saw that, yes, people were interested in what we were doing and they liked the direction we were taking the idea in. "We were also wondering: is it just this kitchen that will be good for people to play, or will they enjoy other rooms too?," she says. We were doing it as a side project" Wren Brier, Witch Beam "Unpacking probably wouldn't have happened if people didn't show interest in it. Wren Brier, Unpacking's creative lead, says that's exactly what the team was worried about: is Unpacking a one-off? Or is this something that will keep people's attention? It doesn't mean everyone wants to see this game." And it always made me worried because it's not that people are interested, it's this one moment that caught fire. "And it was funny because I came back to it a couple of times, I tried to do nicer ones, and no one ever cared about the other ones later on. "I posted it on Twitter and it went off and got really good numbers," he explains. He mentions a GIF he created for Witch Beam's previous game, Assault Android Cactus, which showed a character doing a weapon swap in slow motion. "Those are two sides: keeping people's interest and also making sure that people understood what we were making and still wanted that."ĭawson also mentions that this type of success - going viral - is very difficult to replicate. "Games are these complex beasts and we have all these specific things that, if you looked at that gif, and thought: 'Oh I love the game where I get to arrange my dream house exactly the way I want it', you'd be wrong, because it's actually about exploring someone through their items," Dawson adds. It doesn't mean everyone wants to see this game" Tim Dawson, Witch Beam "It's not that people are interested, it's this one moment that caught fire. Going viral is one thing, Dawson continues, but if your game actually is very different from the snippet that attracted so much attention, then you're in for a challenge. "But the two things that stuck out to me was keeping people interested in it, because it's not ready to go, and being worried that people were connecting to the wrong thing." "When we posted that GIF and people were really interested in it, it really validating, it helped open doors, it made us feel this is the project we should be working on," Unpacking's programmer and co-designer Tim Dawson tells the Academy. But how do you maintain momentum when you go viral three months into the development of a game that will require literal years to finish? The Unpacking GIF that went viral in August 2018 Their game attracting such attention was by all means reassuring this early in development. The game went viral only three months into development and developer Witch Beam ended up in the most curious of situations. Unpacking had already garnered attention by being featured in the Stugan accelerator program, but a GIF featuring the game's kitchen being unpacked was liked over 11,600 times on Twitter and retweeted over 3,500 times in August 2018. In 2018, a kitchen took the games industry by surprise.
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