Studio Profile
How Creepy Jar left the big leagues and survived the wilds of indie game development
Leaving the safety of a steady job with an established game developer and going it alone is an adventurous move – it’s a jungle out there, after all. But echoing the themes of its Amazonian survival game Green Hell, Creepy Jar’s small team of Polish developers parted ways with Techland, where they had senior roles in the development of Dead Island and Dying Light, and set out to make their own way in the world.
Founding members Krzysztof Kwiatek and
Krzysztof Sałek had been a partnership long before Techland came calling, their interest in game development formed through a mutual “addiction to games”. As part of a studio called L’art, the two Krzysztofs’ first game was 2003 skijumping sim, Skoki Narciarskie: Polski Orzeł. “At the time, ski-jumping was very popular in Poland because of Adam Malysz, who was a superstar here,” Sałek recalls (indeed, Malysz himself graced the box art).
Buoyed by the success of this literal jumpingoff point, Sałek and Kwiatek founded a new studio, Prominence, and turned their hand to a different kind of sim game, creating a prototype of an illegal street racer with the working title of Dirty Roar. The team’s search for a publisher yielded interest from the Wrocław, Poland-based Techland, and while Dirty Roar itself was never completed, Techland was impressed enough by Prominence’s demo that it hired the studio to create two other motorsport games, the Volkswagen-licensed GTI Racing, and rally sequel Xpand Rally Xtreme. By Sałek’s own admission, the pair still had a lot to learn about game development – “We thought we knew how to create games after Ski Jumping, and it wasn’t true!” – but the relationship would prove fruitful.
“We began pre-production on Dead Island,” Sałek reveals. “The idea was from Techland, to create this zombie game, and in the beginning the project came to our company in Warsaw.” The studio created a demo and showed it to a number of publishers, and with Deep Silver picking up the rights, the project grew exponentially. “Our team was just nine people at the time,” Sałek says, “but they asked us to close our company and start the Warsaw division of Techland, and we ended up working there for eight years.”
During this time, Sałek and Kwiatek found themselves working on some of Techland’s biggest games, including Dead Island: Riptide, Dying Light and Dying Light: The Following. Their experience in creating firstperson survival-horror games would clearly later inform the direction of
Green Hell, but despite the success of those games, the pair found that working for an ambitious and ever-expanding developer didn’t suit them, and chose instead a different, if riskier, path. “Techland was a pretty huge company, particularly after Dying Light,” Sałek says. “In Wrocław there were 300 people at the time, and 60 or 70 in Warsaw. Techland had plans to create big projects in Warsaw and it just wasn’t something we wanted to do.”
“WITH TEAMS OF AROUND 20 OR
30 PEOPLE YOU CAN MAKE QUICK
DECISIONS AND BE VERY FLEXIBLE”
The initial leap into the wilds of indie game development could have been daunting, but any fear of leaving behind that safety net was far outweighed by the creative freedom that was now possible within a smaller setup. “With teams of around 20 or 30 people you can make quick decisions and be very flexible,” Kwiatek says. “No directors, no main man – so with Creepy Jar we have a flat organisation in terms of management and it’s something that works for us.”
Free of the constraints of the big projects underway at Techland, however, the studio was far from set on the kind of game it wanted to make under its own flag. “We’d been thinking about a few things, like walking simulators,” Sałek recalls. “It was a time when they were popular and easy to do, but we wanted to do something bigger. We’d been watching the rise of survival games and realised we could sell more of a survival game than a walking simulator.”
It wasn’t merely a question of chasing unit sales, however. Creepy Jar knew it needed to bring something more substantial to the growing
survival genre and, inspired by indie games such as The Forest and The Long Dark, set about building its game in Unity with two key pillars informing its direction – the ultra-realism of the survival elements and the game’s rainforest setting. “The Amazon is the most challenging environment in the world to survive in,” says Sałek. “It’s the most rich in plants and animals, and the indigenous population has unique survival techniques.” The perfect place to get lost, in other words.
“Great potential,” agrees Kwiatek, “but it was also very challenging to reconstruct the environment in-game because the hardware is always limited in some way – we have to do tricks to reconstruct the density of the jungle, but luckily we had a lot of experience with a similar environment previously with Dead Island.”
If Creepy Jar was to achieve its goals with Green Hell, more talent needed to be brought on board and the Krzysztofs mined their previous employer for the best and brightest developers. “We started with just four people, and our first step was to hire our old colleagues,” Sałek says. “Michał [Stawicki, lead game and narrative designer] was one of the first we hired, but we still had a maximum of 14 people at that time.”
“We wanted to work with the best people,” confirms Kwiatek, “so our goal was to hire people with great experience in development. We expanded the team, we got more people from Techland, and now we have about 20 people here, and 15 of those are from Techland.”
With the right people in place, the next step was to figure out Green Hell’s abundance of mechanics that simulate realistic survival
imperatives, elements that make staying alive more challenging and more rewarding.
“When we started, a lot of survival games were popping up and they are quite easy to make, in terms of the basics,” Michał Stawicki tells us. “A bunch of them were lacking the realism, the survival side of a survival game. We decided to go more hardcore, to get more of the feel of having to really survive.”
It was time to call in the experts. “We talked to experts in botany, and every plant in the game is a real plant with real effects,” Stawicki confirms. “We were going for everything being physical in the game – you get wounds and we use the real indigenous people’s way of treating them. In a typical survival game you have a wound, so you go find a bandage, and that’s it. We wanted to expand that, to feel real so when you cut yourself you have to wander through the jungle and find the right plant, clean the tissue and wrap it.”
Noting that physical and mental health each impact each other, the team hit the books of survival expert Ed Stafford to learn more about not just the techniques but the psychology of surviving. Incorporating these elements, and a growing wishlist of ideas, meanwhile, meant that even as launch day approached, the team was still tinkering under the hood.
“We did almost everything we wanted to do,” Stawicki says. “The main problem was that if you take away one element it wouldn’t work: the physical stuff, the psychological elements, they all had to be right. Even a few months before Early Access we didn’t have a playable version, every day it got better and better and suddenly a few days before launch it all came together.”
Happily that last minute attentiveness was repaid – Green Hell was an immediate success on Steam and it has now surpassed one million sales. The year-long Early Access period that followed allowed Creepy Jar to fine-tune the game with regular updates, noting the requests of the game’s growing community of fans and developing the game around the players.
“The community is the best source of ideas,” marketing manager Barbara Grabska tells us. “They’re the ones buying the game so we want to provide what they are asking for. Of course we have our own list. When the game was in development we had a lot of ideas but not every idea could be implemented. Add those to the ones from the community and it’s a lot!”
Creepy Jar’s player-focused approach to development and independent spirit is something the team is extremely proud of. Its flat management hierarchy means the company’s board is made up of the key creatives who are very much entrenched in the ongoing development of the game, allowing the focus to be on the quality of Green Hell above all else.
“Basically we’re trying to avoid everything that big companies have,” Kwiatek says, “like publishers that require you to have something ready on time, and it allows us to be flexible. If we want to add something to the next patch at the last minute and we feel that we have to postpone the patch till the next week, then we won’t release it.”
“Our first project was a great success,” Grabska enthuses, “but we did it with our independence and proved we can still be a small team not in thrall to a big corporation. We are all proud of the people we have here, they still want to create games, they still want to be creative. And they are not fed up yet, surprisingly, after four years of
Green Hell!”
Despite the game’s continuing development, not to mention plans to launch on consoles in the near future, the small Warsaw team already has its sights set on its next project – one that it hopes will similarly stand-out from the crowd.
“It’s still a small team working on ideas,” Stawicki reveals. “With Green Hell we wanted something new for survival games, and now we are looking for something new for base-building games – it will be a sci-fi firstperson base-building game… with a suitable twist.”
“We want to create games where we think about, ‘what kind of player is it for?’” Sałek says of the studio’s ambitions. “How many players want to play in your idea? It’s no good if only you as a creator want to play this game.” Despite the realism to be found in Green Hell, Sałek also believes in presenting games that appeal to players’ own dreams of adventure. “What kind of fantasy the game offers you should be clear. It should be a common fantasy – and we can provide that.” If Creepy Jar’s success with Green Hell’s particular fantasy has proved anything, it’s that an adventurous, independent spirit can be the key to more than simply surviving in the jungle, but positively thriving.
“WE ARE PROUD OF THE PEOPLE WE
HAVE HERE, THEY WANT TO CREATE
GAMES, THEY WANT TO BE CREATIVE”