THE MAKING OF . . .

A moving story in more ways than one

By Chris Schilling

Format PC, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Developer Witch Beam

Publisher Humble Games

Origin Australia

Release 2021

When we invite Wren Brier and Tim Dawson to talk us through the origins of Witch Beam’s narrative tidy-’em-up, they tell us how it all started in the kitchen. You might know that already – this, after all, was how their game went viral. In 2018, fresh from accelerator program Stugan, the pair posted a GIF of the one level they’d built so far: a short time-lapse replay of various items (mugs, plates, glasses, tea towels, a kettle, a microwave, a cookie jar) being taken from cardboard boxes and placed neatly on marble worktops and wooden shelves. The response was enough to convince them that their apparently niche project could “appeal to a ton of people,” Brier says. Just as importantly, it brought publishers knocking at their door – “or rather my Twitter DMs,” she laughs – one of them being Humble, which ended up publishing the game.

Yet the tale of Unpacking begins earlier than that, when the burgeoning relationship between these two developers saw them move in together. As Dawson began to unbox his belongings, Brier noticed the process was oddly game-like. “We’re both game developers, so we just started riffing off that,” he explains. “Items come out, you match them together, you finish one box and start on the next – you’re kind of unlocking it. We were seeing things that felt like, ‘Yeah, there’s a structure to this’, like the way you can use a box temporarily to put an item on, but then have to take it off later to open it.”

It was Dawson who first began to take the idea more seriously, asking questions and “prodding at it”, in his words, until Brier understood that this wasn’t merely a joke. Having always wanted to pitch for Stugan, the pair realised they wouldn’t likely get a better opportunity. “Wren didn’t think we had much chance,” Dawson says.

“No, no!” she protests. “It wasn’t that, I just [thought] it was a long shot,” and he agrees. Even so, with such a strong original idea in mind, the pair decided to apply.

First, of course, they needed to assemble a prototype. But where to start? “We wanted to test out the mechanics before we tested out the storytelling,” Brier begins. “We wanted to check if it was even fun to unpack things and organise them around a room, and kind of prove out the mechanics and get our tech started – so, like, the whole grid system and item placement and item creation and environment creation.” They needed a room for which narrative elements felt unnecessary: a utilitarian space that could hold plenty of familiar items. A kitchen was the natural choice, not least since Brier and Dawson could use their own as reference. There was a practical aspect to it, too. “Cups and plates were good, because you can just make one plate and suddenly you’ve got four plates because you can just duplicate,” Dawson says. The pair arrived at Stugan in Sweden with around a dozen items (there’s a brief debate between the two over whether the juicer or the microwave was initially present) in their virtual kitchen. Two months later, they emerged from Stugan’s cabin with around 70. Then came that pivotal GIF.

Two more artists were hired for the final push. “We couldn’t do it [alone],” Brier explains. “There was just so much art”

ANY KIND OF HOME IMPROVEMENT TENDS TO TAKE LONGER THAN PLANNED, YET HERE IT WAS A CHOICE

By that stage, Unpacking’s narrative arc was, broadly speaking, already in place, with seven of the final game’s eight stages worked out. The original plan, Dawson says, was to spend those two months in Stugan working up three or four of those levels. Instead, the whole time was spent refining the kitchen. As many of us can attest, any kind of home improvement tends to take a good deal longer than planned, yet here it was a conscious choice and, Brier says, ultimately the right one. “We went from wanting to make half the game to a rough point to doing one room to vertical-slice level. And that vertical slice ended up being our first demo, which was something we were able to send to publishers and to show at events – it was the one we showed at Day Of The Devs.” It also enabled Brier to calculate roughly how long it might take to make the art for the full game. “I think I made it two-and-a-half years to do just the art,” she says. “And that’s not my only job on the project.”