STUDIO PROFILE

How perseverance – and chocolate-chip cookies – has kept the Subnautica studio afloat

By Niall O’Donoghue

Swimming for the surface in Subnautica is a moment of pure tension. As your oxygen runs out, the screen darkens around you and eventually goes black; however, if you’ve timed it just right, you can cheat death and break the surface, gulping down fresh air as your senses rush back to you. Looking back over the 20-year history of the game’s developer, the parallels are striking. Unknown Worlds has come close to drowning, financially speaking, on multiple occasions – but it’s managed to resurface time and time again, in the process solidifying its reputation as a crafter of immersive, player-driven experiences.

Unknown Worlds CEO Charlie Cleveland was working at Empire Earth developer Stainless Steel Studios in Boston when he witnessed the birth of the Half-Life modding movement, led by Counter- Strike, in 2000. Having worked on (but not completed) games with his friends at university, Cleveland had always known he wanted to make something of his own. “Back then, you couldn’t license an engine without $300,000 or some ridiculous amount of money,” he says – but the accessibility of Half-Life modding changed all that. “It was just: ‘Of course, this is my chance – I’m jumping at it’. And I loved it, I loved every moment of it. I wasn’t stressed about it, I was just excited.” When it came to the question of what to make, Cleveland faced a dilemma. He was a fan of StarCraft at the time, but his friends preferred Quake. So he did the only logical thing as a firsttime developer, and combined the two. Natural Selection is an asymmetrical multiplayer game which presents to most players as an FPS, with a single commander playing it as a top-down RTS.

Having saved up enough money to quit his job, Cleveland began work on Natural Selection full-time alongside a small group of part-time developers assembled from Internet forums, plus former colleague Cory Strader, now art director at Unknown Worlds, who contributed in his spare time alongside his day job at Stainless. “There was no business to deal with, there were no investors, there was no publisher, there weren’t even players,” Cleveland recalls. “It was just pure game dev, and it was my happy place.”