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

It has been a remarkable year for the Swedish game development studio Landfall, following the massive success of its cooperative horror game Content Warning in 2024. This game, created in just six weeks, sold over 2 million copies after being made available for free for the first 24 hours. Now, Landfall has achieved another success with its third-person running game, Haste. Unlike Content Warning, Haste is a single-player adventure where the player runs at incredible speeds through vibrant, procedurally generated worlds. The game's development began as a prototype following the launch of Landfall's 2021 title, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. The initial prototype, created by Director Wilhelm Nylund, featured a character running down hills and gained significant attention on Twitter. This sparked Landfall's interest in developing a game centered around fast-paced running. Over the next three years, the studio experimented with various concepts, including a multiplayer battle royale and an MMO. However, due to the game's high speed, multiplayer interactions became impractical. The team's familiarity with Unity allowed for rapid iteration and experimentation with different ideas. They eventually settled on procedurally generated levels, but faced the challenge of generating new landscapes quickly enough to maintain the player's momentum. Landfall found a solution in Unity's Job system, which enabled parallelized level generation. As development progressed, Landfall participated in Steam Next Fest, featuring a demo of Haste. The demo received over 200,000 downloads and provided valuable feedback that helped improve the full game. The feedback led to the addition of an endless mode and adjustments 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 benefits of featuring games in Next Fest, and they would consider participating again in the future. The key to a successful demo, according to Landfall, is to provide a memorable experience that showcases what makes the game special and sets it apart from others.