Sponsored | Unity and Steam Next Fest: The Key to Landfall's Haste Success

Landfall, the Swedish developer behind Content Warning, has seen another success with Haste, a third-person running game. Unlike Content Warning, which was created in six weeks, Haste was developed over four years and features a single-player adventure where the player runs at high speeds through procedurally generated worlds. Landfall attribute Haste's success to its viral concept and the decision to offer a free demo before the game's release. The idea for Haste originated from a prototyping session following the launch of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, where a clip of a running character went viral on Twitter. The team spent the next three years developing the game, experimenting with different concepts, including a multiplayer battle royale and an MMO. However, they eventually settled on a single-player game due to the high speed of the gameplay. The team used Unity to rapidly iterate on ideas, which allowed them to restart the project multiple times without losing progress. Landfall participated in Steam Next Fest, featuring a demo of the game, which received over 200,000 downloads. The demo's popularity was attributed to existing anticipation for the game, localization in multiple languages, and bespoke lines that referenced the demo. The feedback from Next Fest helped Landfall improve the full game, adding an endless mode and tweaking parameters. Although some feedback resulted in the game becoming too difficult, the team was able to mitigate this by adding difficulty options after release. Landfall believes that featuring games in Next Fest is a great way to generate buzz and would consider doing it again in the future.