How Landfall Leveraged Unity and Steam Next Fest to Drive Haste's Success

Swedish game developer Landfall has experienced a remarkable year, with the surprise hit Content Warning in 2024. This cooperative horror game, created in just six weeks, sold over 2 million copies after being made available for free for the first 24 hours. Fast forward to the present, Landfall has achieved another success with the third-person running game Haste. Haste is a vastly different project from Content Warning, developed over four years as a single-player adventure where the player must flee a collapsing universe at incredible speeds through vibrant, procedurally generated worlds. Despite their differences, both games share a common thread - they leveraged the virality of their concepts and offered a chance for players to experience the game for free before charging for it. The concept of Haste emerged from a prototyping session following the launch of Landfall's 2021 title, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. Initially, the team was exploring an idea for a multiplayer game, but it was the creation of a simple running character that caught their attention. This prototype, made in Unity, quickly gained traction on Twitter, sparking interest in a game centered around fast-paced running. Over the next three years, Landfall refined the concept, experimenting with various ideas, including a multiplayer battle royale and even a brief stint as an MMO. However, the team soon realized that Haste wasn't suited for multiplayer due to the sheer speed of the gameplay, which made significant interactions with other players challenging. The rapid iteration process, facilitated by Unity, allowed Landfall to quickly test and refine their ideas, eventually settling on procedurally generated levels. To address the issue of generating new landscapes quickly enough between levels, the team utilized Unity's Job system, enabling them to parallelize the generation process and create complex 3D levels in a matter of seconds. As development progressed, Landfall participated in Steam Next Fest, a semi-annual demo festival, to showcase Haste's demo. The demo featured a single run of one of the game's ten worlds, providing players with a glimpse of the gameplay while keeping much of the full game under wraps. The demo proved highly popular, with over 200,000 downloads, and Landfall attributed its success to the existing anticipation for the game and their consistent efforts to keep Haste in the players' minds throughout its development. The demo's localization in all the languages supported by the full game and the inclusion of bespoke lines referencing the demo itself also contributed to its popularity. The feedback from Next Fest was invaluable, allowing Landfall to make improvements to the full game, including the addition of an endless mode. Although not all feedback resulted in changes, the experience demonstrated the importance of incorporating player feedback into the development process. Reflecting on their experience with Haste, Landfall believes that featuring games in Next Fest can be highly beneficial, but may not be suitable for all projects, such as shorter-turnaround games like Content Warning. A well-planned marketing approach to the demo's release, treating it as a mini-launch, is crucial to generating interest and encouraging players to try the game. Ultimately, creating a memorable experience that showcases what makes the game special is key to a successful demo, and Landfall's experience with Haste serves as a testament to the effectiveness of this approach.