How Subnautica Was Made and Saved by its Community

Since the rise of Kickstarter and the Early Access model on Steam, many developers have tried to crowdfund their game, but Subnautica is probably one of the best examples that has done it successfully and even thrived because of it. After independent games developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment released the sequel to their popular Half-Life mod Natural Selection on October 31st 2012, the development studio announced Subnautica roughly a year later on December 17th 2013. However, prototyping goes as far back as January of 2013 when Charlie Cleveland, co-founder of Unknown Worlds, began work on the first underwater prototype.

A dedicated blog was created to share the Subnautica announcement with the world while also explaining that the studio was going to take a very open and transparent approach with the development process. They invited gamers onto their journey to give them feedback throughout the whole course of development. For the first subsequent weeks they shared more and more concept art on their blog, followed by a first “playable” test version of the game in February of 2014. Although, this test version was meant more as a tool that could generate procedural underwater terrain. They put the tool up on steam for fellow developers to use and experiment with for their own projects, further underlining their transparant development approach. 

Subnautica was publicly revealed for the first time at PAX East in 2014. The booth had a playable demo of a very early pre-alpha version. After the convention, Destructiod did an interview with Charlie Cleveland, the director and lead programmer. During the interview he said that after their last game, Natural Selection 2 – a more hardcore shooter focused on combat – he wanted to try and develop something that could reach a broader audience. That’s why they opted to include a lot more non-combat elements and have a bigger focus on exploration.

Charlie also told Destructoid that one of his main goals was to give players the excitement of experiencing the unknown by creating a beautiful life affirming world that you can explore and tinker with. One of the inspirations for the story was Journey, while the world itself was inspired by Skyrim and on top of that they wanted to combine all this with building mechanics from Minecraft.

Early on the developers experimented with a popular mechanic from Bioshock. In that game players can inject themselves with modified stem cells to gain several powers. Unknown Worlds really liked this idea and thought about implementing it in Subnautica by letting players inject themselves with DNA from other fish. Charlie gave a glow fish as an example and how its DNA would make the player’s whole body glow and light up dark areas of the game. This idea was later scrapped however. Besides the building mechanics from Minecraft, they also considered implementing huge randomly generated worlds, but they quickly rejected the idea in favor of handcrafted areas. Cleveland mentioned this was because they were aiming for high graphical fidelity and so they simply wouldn’t be able to support massive random worlds.

The last thing Charlie talked about during the interview was the Sandy Hook shooting and how it happened when he was first prototyping Subnautica. After seeing the horrific events he knew he didn’t want to make another game filled with guns and instead wanted to spend his creative energy doing something new.

The next few weeks and months the dev team shared more and more information on their blog and in August of 2014 they took their open development approach a step further. A link was posted on the blog that directs to a public Trello board, detailing what it is exactly the team is working on in real time.

Before Unknown Worlds released the first version on Steam Early Access, the development studio made an “Earliest Access” version of the game available to the public during October 2014. The people that bought this version of the game were given a few prototypes the team were using to flesh out the game and a couple of days after the Earliest Access release, they were able to play the first actual Steam build. Charlie also asked early backers to give as much feedback as they like on the official forums and a website where people could send feedback tickets to the team. 

He was very open and honest about the state of the game and kept underlining that there are still plenty of bugs that needed to be fixed, as well as depth and substance they still had to add. However, Charlie reassured that he and the team were very confident they were going to deliver a quality product and that the whole reason they released the earliest access version was so they could keep developing the best game possible with the help of the community.

On the 16th of December 2014, Unknown Worlds released the Steam Early Access version alongside the first teaser trailer of the game. In the coming months and years the team published daily uploads on the experimental branch and bigger updates were released every couple of weeks or so on the default branch. Bugs were fixed and content was added at a rapid pace and all with the help of the active community giving constant feedback to the developers.

The blog kept the community updated on what was coming in future updates. Things like new vehicles, new creatures, new environments, an Apple OS version and much more were added to the Early Access version. In July of 2015 it was announced that they had hired someone to helm the story of Subnautica. That someone was Tom Jubert who is most notably known for adding stories to games like Faster Than Light, The Talos Principle and The Swapper.

“Subnautica’s gameplay is about exploring and surviving in an alien world, and learning how to live harmoniously with your environment. That is literally what you do minute-to-minute. The story, then, is going to be about concepts quite alien to video game narratives in general: survival, environmentalism, life itself. I think these are topics which I can do justice to.”

In November of 2015 the team slowed down development for a week, explaining on the blog that the whole development team was going on a retreat to get to know each other better. Before they began work on Subnautica, Unknown Worlds was like most other development studios, working together in the same office space. However, when they started work on Subnautica they waved their office goodbye in favor of a distributed international team.

As the game was progressing further and further the developers started working on an Xbox version as well and on the 17th of May 2016 they released an early access version on Xbox’s Game Preview program.

Around the same time they also experimented with VR and launched an Oculus Rift version in April of 2016. However, later in the course of development the studio noticed that only a very small percentage of people were playing the game in VR and decided to stop supporting this feature. The studio is a big fan of VR but their small team simply couldn’t afford the time and cost of VR support.

During the course of development the community kept asking the developers about the possibility of a multiplayer mode. In August of 2016 Charlie addressed these questions stating he and the team would love to add multiplayer since the game was originally conceived as a co-op experience. However, they dropped multiplayer in favor of releasing the game faster. He said the team was still considering whether or not to add multiplayer, but that it would take a huge amount of time and that they would have to practically start from scratch if they choose to do so.

A couple of weeks later Charlie addressed the issue again on the official Subnautica forum explaining that it would take many years to add any kind of multiplayer and that therefore they would rather spend their time making the best possible single player experience they can, while also getting the game out sooner. The door on multiplayer was completely closed, but Charlie gave the community some hope by saying that perhaps a future installment in the franchise might focus more on players working together to conquer the many challenges of the deep sea.

In 2017 the developers were well on their way to completing the game and began preparing for the release of the 1.0 version on Steam. They called upon the community to help translate the game in as many languages as possible. A web page was set up where people could enter their translations and it also gave them the option to vote on every single translation. This was yet another example of the close relationship that Unknown Worlds had built with their fanbase over the years.

The very first version of Subnautica had not much more than some fish swimming around and a cardboard cut-out of the Aurora spaceship in the distance, but after 4 years of being on the Steam Early Access platform that early prototype version had matured into a fully fledged game brimming with content and features. The fully completed game was released on Steam on January 23rd 2018 and the studio’s hard work had clearly paid off. Both critics and gamers were loving the game with many calling it one of the best survival games ever. It even won the Golden Joystick award for PC game of the year.

Charlie Cleveland commented that the key part of their success was the close involvement of their loyal community. “Subnautica would have been half the game it is today if we had kept it internal and released it at the end. We want to make games the best way we can and the only way we know to do that for the last 15 years is by having the voice of the customer built into our development.”

While Subnautica was never really intended as a horror game, many players expressed their almost inability to play the game due to its creepy atmosphere at certain times. When Cleveland was asked about this he said that the team never intended to evoke those scared responses in players. He thinks it’s more about terror than horror and that there’s a lot of primal fears present in the game that are triggering some players. The fear of being alone, fear of running out of air, fear of suffocation, fear of open spaces, fear of claustrophobic environments and so forth. Ultimately, Charlie said he’s glad that all the stuff is in the game but that it sometimes overshadows what 75 percent of the game is, which is, to put it in his own words, a kind of serene swimming, exploring and crafting experience.

Even though the game was now completed the developers continued their hard work fixing several bugs and besides that they also announced a PS4 version in July of 2018 that came out later that year on the 4th of December. 

Despite announcing Below Zero, a sequel to Subnautica, the team is still committed to this day to optimise the original Subnautica, especially on consoles. In December of 2019 a post on their blog indicated that they’re optimising their in-house console efforts to improve the technical infrastructure across both the original Subnautica and Below Zero.

Unknown Worlds is continuing their open development approach with Below Zero and it seems it’s going to stay that way for all their future endeavours, at least for the time being. Not only did it become a sort of mantra for the studio, it’s also been a great way for them to attract new staff members. Their most dedicated fans have gotten the opportunity in the past to join the team and start designing levels, sounds or fix bugs. Charlie Cleveland once even proudly said in an interview with PCGames that the whole team is from the community. 

Their success can hopefully inspire and teach other up and comer development studios how to do crowdfunding right and how to successfully apply a transparent development approach. Subnautica has also clearly shown the world that if you’re a developer struggling with funds, you don’t necessarily need to wait to release a completely finished game. After all, Unknown Worlds have said themselves that they were on the brink of financial disaster and that the community saved them through their financial support of the Early Access version of the game. “Simply put, Subnautica wouldn’t be the game it is, nor the success that it is, without our community.”