The Forest might not look like your typical indie game, but it’s perhaps more indie
than a lot of games already covered on this channel.
Initially, the studio only consisted of two people and the game was even self-published,
making it a completely independent development journey.
In 2011, creative director Ben Falcone teamed up with visual effects designer Anna Terekhova
and co-founded SKS Games, an indie development studio based in Vancouver, Canada.
At the time, Ben was mostly known for his work at animation studio Animal Logic on movies
like TRON: legacy, Sweeney Todd, and 300.
Anna had also worked on TRON: legacy, and other movies like Snow White & The Huntsman,
Dragonball Evolution, Sucker Punch and Final Destination.
Together, they developed a mobile horror game called End Night, which was released in February
2012, and eventually renamed the studio to Endnight Games before starting development
on their second game, The Forest.
Ben had a very specific goal in mind when developing The Forest, which was born out
of his frustration with modern video games.
"I've been frustrated with games for the past five or six years constantly telling you what
to do.
It sometimes feels like work playing a game where you have a backlog of missions you have
to do, constantly being bothered by NPCs.
We wanted to create a world where we could drop the player into and give them free range
to do whatever they want, similar to something like Minecraft where a lot of the fun comes
from decisions that you make.
We wanted to capture that but do it in a world that looked realistic.”
The idea of ultimate freedom wasn’t just inspired by Minecraft, but also by Don’t
Starve, another never ending game.
Other inspirations for The Forest were horror films from the seventies, such as The Hills
Have Eyes, and Italian films from the eighties, like Cannibal Holocaust.
Aside from giving players free range in a realistic open world, the developers also
wanted to subvert the expectations of what a horror game should look and play like.
They didn’t want to rely on traditional tools such as jump scares, but instead built
atmospheric settings and played around with the contrast between light forest areas versus
dark cave areas.
Surprisingly, Disney movies served as a source of inspiration for the studio’s lifelike
looking horror game.
“Disney stuff was an inspiration for the daytime in the forest.
There are God-rays from the sky everywhere, butterflies and generally cute looking areas.
One of the things I don't like in horror games is when they're all one tone, when they're
always just dark and depressing.
Our vision was always a game in which half of the time it's a place that you really want
to be and then it's at night that the horror starts.
Our main goal is really just to do something completely different.”
Ben was also inspired by one of his favorite movies, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
where the scariest scenes for him personally took place in broad daylight.
When it comes to the games’ enemies, the team mentioned being heavily influenced by
the I Am Legend book and the movie Cannibal Holocaust, as mentioned before.
They both feature a prominent theme of ‘who’s the real monster?’.
As the player, you’re invading the cannibals’ forest, chopping down their trees, and murdering
them.
Are they the bad guys, or is the player?
Even though the cannibals may consider you as their next meal, the point that the developers
wanted to get across is that they aren’t inherently evil.
Just like the player, they’re just trying to survive and care for their family.
They even have their own set of beliefs and morals, posing an interesting moral dilemma
for players as they’re struggling for survival.
Additionally, the several behavioral patterns the enemies display aren’t just random,
but a reaction to the player’s choices, as a result of The Forest’s intriguing AI.
The developers wanted to try something different with the AI, something that could hopefully
set it apart from other survival games.
From very early on, they wanted to try and make the cannibals feel alive and dynamic
so the player doesn’t know what they’re going to do or how they will respond in different
situations.
Hopefully, this would instill an extra layer of horror and make enemies much more fascinating,
while also increasing replayability.
Needless to say, the cannibals are quite intelligent.
They will react differently to members of their tribe being killed, depending on who
was killed, where and in what manner, and even go as far as displaying emotions.
When one of their comrades dies, they will feel sad or drag an injured friend to safety.
Furthermore, the cannibals have proper day & night routines so they’re always busy
executing their own little quests.
Unlike games that treat all enemies as mindless, the developers wanted players to realize these
enemies aren’t just zombie-like evil creatures.
What’s also interesting is that The Forest doesn’t spawn new enemies to no end and
instead features a set number of creatures to fight.
This makes it possible to slowly take out the cannibals one by one by venturing into
the caves and murdering them in their sleep for example, a viable strategy that’s a
nod to I Am Legend.
The studio came up with the premise that the deeper players venture into the caves, the
more distorted and creepy-looking the enemies become.
It gave the developers the freedom to be as creative as possible and design some really
unique and terrifying monsters.
Though players might not be eager to face these creatures, the game was designed so
that it would nudge them to move to more dangerous areas to access new resources or more valuable
items and be forced to confront tougher enemies.
To make exploration even more enticing and to generate a sense of curiosity within the
player, the developers also placed multiple interesting landmarks that are inaccessible
until enough progress has been made.
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Now back to the video.
Ben and the team intentionally made defeating enemies feel very realistic, and as a result,
very cruel.
Their goal is to make the act of killing an emotional moment for the player.
"The mutants are very hard to kill and you have to be very violent to kill them.
In lots of games you can shoot someone in the leg four times and they die instantly,
or you hit them with a stick and they die.
In our game, you hit them with a stick to make them fall over and then you get a rock
and hit them over the head three or four times to kill them.
We really want to get across that it's very difficult to actually kill someone and we
want each kill the player performs to be something they feel some guilt about.
What we don't want is just mindless killing.”
They also consciously opted for monsters that were genetically enhanced, and not zombies
or supernatural beings.
It was important to the team to ground their horror game in reality, since it made the
enemies feel more real, and consequently, that much scarier.
The survival system helps you in dealing with the mutants in creative ways.
Realism wasn’t the main concern during this part of production, since the top priority
was to make crafting weapons and other objects feel simple and fun to do.
Additionally, it had to motivate players to act and think like MacGyver in order to come
up with interesting crafting combinations.
Over the course of development, the studio hired a handful of contributors to bring their
survival game to life, such as programmer Guillaume Kehren, animator Michael Mellor,
concept artist Marina Ortega and 3D artists Lukas Patrus and Alec Moody.
Ben mentioned slowly expanding the studio from two people to over ten full-time members
was the single most difficult part of development, but said he couldn’t be happier with everyone
that joined their small studio, especially seeing how dedicated everyone was towards
the project.
Two thirds of the team even had so much faith in Ben and Anna’s vision for The Forest,
that they left their jobs in the film industry to work on the horror game.
With these artists on board they had formed an impressive team with plenty of experience
in the field of visual film effects, which greatly benefitted their desire to make the
graphics as impressive as possible.
The team was excited to apply new visual technologies in the field of lighting and shading techniques,
making the most of their background in visual effects.
In every step of the art direction process, the team worked towards creating a very realistic,
immersive gaming experience, and creating the perfect lighting was a huge component
to achieve this goal.
The game uses an advanced ambient lighting system combined with a rough pass of global
illumination to really bring the visuals together.
The studio also looked at the work of American photographer Gregory Crewdson, which greatly
influenced the game’s atmosphere.
The sky light scattering system and skin shaders were beautifully produced by the team’s
technical artists Oren Kurts and David Miranda.
While the large open world certainly adds to the immersion, the team didn’t just focus
on size, but also on the denseness, making sure it was interesting enough to explore.
Early on in development, the team experimented with a game mode where players could generate
new worlds, to add to the survival aspect, but found it difficult to keep randomly generated
areas interesting.
On top of that, the game mode was riddled with bugs.
As a result, the team focused their attention on the horror in the game and to ground players
in their own handcrafted world.
The Forest was built in the Unity engine, with a lot of custom add-ons, which the developers
remarked is one of the reasons the game world looks so beautiful, since the add-ons allowed
them to add in a huge amount of detail.
The graphics team developed a new rendering system for Unity, to make the game run faster
and to allow for more geometry and more advanced image effects.
The studio preferred not to have any of the story told through NPC’s, dialogue, or cutscenes.
Instead they told the story visually, for example through visual hints and items, allowing
players to choose how much the story influences their own experience.
For this to work, the developers had to make the world itself as engaging as possible and
therefore build a lot of interactivity into every part of the game.
Anna mentioned it creates a unique experience for every player and adds another layer of
replayability.
It was always the team’s intention to create a game that was never ending, but with the
possibility of a “definitive” ending, a climax if you will, for players who wanted
that experience.
It was something that was especially important to Ben.
“It feels important to me, that there’s this open world, all these things you can
do, but then also the option of going straight for the ending.
Your son is missing.
How do you find him, and what do you do to survive and find out what happened to him?
I feel having just a pure survival game with no goal at all would eventually be tiring,
and mixing the survival with the very subtle story is really interesting to us.
We want players to eventually build up a stash of weapons, cover themselves in armor and
then take on the enemy directly, find their missing kid and try and escape the forest.”
The Forest was announced in May 2013 and received its first trailer.
Shortly after, the game was accepted by Steam Greenlight, a service on Steam which shut
down in 2017, where users would vote for indie games to determine which titles would be published
on the platform’s marketplace.
The developers occasionally shared screenshots of the game over the next few months, while
also releasing a second trailer in November 2013.
In May 2014, after more than a year of full time development, The Forest was released
in early access on Steam.
The team had created a strong foundation of The Forest with early access in mind, in order
to make it easier to build on top of by adding things like new areas, game mechanics and
more creatures.
Initially, the studio was worried an early access release, with all its hiccups and bugs,
would turn off some players, but eventually noticed that some players really enjoyed being
part of the production process by providing feedback and filling out bug reports.
It fundamentally changed the development approach from here on out.
While communication between the studio and the community was initially troublesome, because
of busy production times, Endnight Games hired one of the Steam community mods to engage
more with early access players and essentially form a bridge between the developers and the
community.
According to animator Michael, only eight minutes after the game was released in early
access, The Forest was number one on Steam, even knocking AAA game Watch Dogs from the
top of the charts.
It took the team by surprise, especially since Watch Dogs had just been released, and they
initially suspected it was a glitch in the system.
When it turned out to be real, the devs credited part of the success to the streamability of
the game on Youtube and Twitch, stating that lots of content creators pushed it to the
forefront.
A month after release, The Forest still sat at number four.
What followed were four years of fixing bugs, improving enemy AI and lighting, adding crafting
mechanics and stealth gameplay, opening up new areas within the forest and so on.
New animals were also introduced, as were new types of enemies.
The team received a great deal of player feedback over that four year period and resulted in
every element of the game being tweaked based on that feedback.
For example: if elements of the story didn’t make sense, the team would add clues.
If the gameplay was frustrating, they would take a step back and overhaul certain mechanics.
One of the community’s requested features was the bow and arrow.
The devs were unsure whether to add the weapon, but looking back, they admitted it turned
out to be a great idea from the community.
While a significant number of players requested a multiplayer mode, the team decided to focus
on a singleplayer experience first, setting The Forest apart from the many survival games
that were out at the time.
So unsurprisingly, the team mentioned being mostly influenced by singleplayer games, such
as System Shock 2, Bioshock and GTA.
Eventually however, the studio started to experiment with a co-op mode, as the creators
felt it could add to the already existing experience.
The biggest challenge was retaining the horror elements in co-op mode and trying to strike
the perfect balance where the game is still scary if you’re playing with other players,
which they admitted was very tricky to get right.
Endnight Games wanted to stay away from the massive multiplayer feel of similar sandbox
survival games such as DayZ and Rust.
Therefore, they struck a balance, where multiplayer added a level of randomness that suited the
game.
Whether other players will help you fight off enemies or destroy your base, is up to
them, though the team felt The Forest works better as a friendly co-op game where players
help each other build and survive, instead of a PVP game.
According to designer Anna, another upside of co-op was how streamers could enjoy the
game with their friends.
Before leaving early access, the studio also put a massive amount of time into optimizing
The Forest as much as possible.
It was important to the team that even players with older machines would still have a great
experience.
In April 2018, after four years of community feedback and lots of added content and features,
The Forest left early access and version 1.0 was now available on Steam.
It received many positive reviews from gamers and critics, proving early access had been
the right decision.
“We took the early access experience extremely seriously, and listened to all the feedback
from players.
We’re really grateful to everyone who played the game in early access and especially those
who took the time to offer comments, both positive and negative.
The Forest became a much better game with the guidance and feedback of the players who
were actually playing the game over that 4 year period.”
The developers were far from done with their survival game however and announced they would
be heavily supporting the game moving forward.
In November 2018, the game was released for Playstation 4 and introduced many improvements
that added to the visuals and performance on both PC and PS4.
Soon after, The Forest also received a VR mode on the Oculus Rift.
The studio was counting on VR to add an extra level of creepiness, especially in a game
that is so immersive.
Early versions of the game were developed using a Sony HMZ head-mounted display.
As a result, the entire game was designed with VR in mind from the start, which also
added to the experience when playing on a traditional screen: from the claustrophobic
feel of the caves to the beauty of the environment.
Developing for VR presented a new set of technical challenges, the most surprising element being
scale.
The first time Ben played the game in VR and walked out of the plane into the forest with
the Oculus Rift on, everything looked wrong.
Small logs looked massive and enemy creatures looked like miniatures.
The developers now had to spend lots of time getting the scale correct and consistent throughout
the entire game.
By the end of 2018, over five million copies of The Forest had been sold for PC.
With a development budget of only $125,000, calling it a commercial success would be understating
the studio’s achievement.
In November 2018, Anna mentioned the team was interested in creating a sequel for The
Forest, saying it was a really unique game when it came out, but a lot of similar survival
games have been released since.
The team had ideas to develop a sequel that offers a completely new take on what a survival
game could be, unlike anything else that currently exists.
In December 2020, the studio released a trailer, officially announcing the development of Sons
of the Forest with an expected release in 2021.
It has been delayed multiple times since then and is now scheduled to be released in February
2023.
The team also shared in-game footage, showing a similar theme to The Forest where the player
survives a plane crash and has to thrive in a remote forest area.
It’s been confirmed that the enemies in this sequel are different from the cannibals
in The Forest.
The studio also announced that it programmed a new AI tool for the game, titled V.A.I.L.,
which goes far beyond the AI mechanics of The Forest.
The tool allows for the creation of extremely complex behavior: characters can now better
experience emotions like fear and anger, while also becoming tired, hungry and thirsty.
This new AI engine will also mean enemies will carry out more coordinated attacks.
Some fans have guessed this means mutants might adapt to certain traps, though this
hasn’t been confirmed.
With the planned release date looming around the corner, it’ll be interesting to see
whether or not Sons of the Forest can live up to the hype of its predecessor.