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. Before we move on, I’d like to talk about
my Patreon. I made a couple of changes since I launched
it in November, one of the most important ones being that for 1 dollar you’ll now
also get access to all my content ad-free, both as videos and audio tracks. The commentary track tier has been removed
and replaced by the Q&A tier, which is now 5 dollars instead of 10. Lastly, 3 dollars now gives you one day early
access to my videos, a great opportunity to have a watch party on the community Discord
server. Supporting my Patreon is the best way to directly
support the channel and hopefully help me to make YouTube videos full time someday. That way, I’ll be able to make more content,
better content, interact more with the community and generally just live a happier life by
doing what I love every single day. A big thank you to everyone that’s already
supporting the Patreon, it means a lot to me. Check out my page at patreon.com/thatguyglen
to see if there’s a tier that peaks your interest. 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.
