How Landfall's Haste Gained a Competitive Edge with Unity and Steam Next Fest

Following a remarkable year, Swedish developer Landfall has achieved another milestone with its third-person running game, Haste. This single-player adventure, where players flee a collapsing universe at incredible speeds through vibrant, procedurally generated worlds, is vastly different from Landfall's previous cooperative horror game, Content Warning. Despite the differences, Landfall applied similar strategies to drive Haste's success, leveraging the concept's virality and offering a free trial before the full launch. The idea for Haste emerged from a prototyping session after the launch of Landfall's 2021 title, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. The developers were experimenting with a multiplayer concept when they created a small prototype of a character running down hills, which quickly gained traction on Twitter. This initial interest sparked a three-year journey to develop Haste, during which the team explored various concepts, including a multiplayer battle royale and an MMO. However, due to the game's high speed, multiplayer proved to be unsuitable. Landfall's familiarity with Unity allowed for rapid iteration and experimentation, enabling the team to restart and refine their ideas without being bogged down by previous versions. The use of Unity's Job system, designed for multithreaded code, was instrumental in solving the challenge of generating new landscapes quickly enough to maintain the player's momentum. As development progressed, Landfall participated in Steam Next Fest, a semi-annual demo festival, to test Haste and gather feedback. The demo, which featured a single run of one of Haste's ten worlds, was downloaded over 200,000 times and received significant attention. Landfall attributes the demo's popularity to existing anticipation, persistence in keeping the game in players' minds, and the inclusion of localized content. The feedback from Next Fest was invaluable, leading to improvements such as the addition of an endless mode and tweaks to the game's difficulty. Although some feedback resulted in unintended consequences, such as the game becoming too difficult, Landfall was able to mitigate these issues with post-launch updates. The experience with Haste has shown Landfall the value of participating in Next Fest, and the team would consider featuring games in the festival again. However, they acknowledge that a shorter-turnaround project like Content Warning might not be the best fit. To make a demo successful, it is essential to provide a memorable experience immediately, showcasing what makes the game special and sets it apart from others.