Road to the IGF: Klei Entertainment's Don't Starve

Don't Starve is a delightfully dark, comedic take on the survival genre. Speaking to Gamasutra in 2012, Klei Entertainment's Kevin Forbes readily admitted that the studio drew heavy influence from games like Lost in Blue and Minecraft, but the vaguely unsettling art design and stark treatment of death and survival in Don't Starve helped set it apart from its inspiration. Don't Starve has done well commercially, garnering more than a million sales in 2013. It's also earned a pair of IGF award nominations, for both the Excellence in Design award and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize. As part of our Road to the IGF series, we caught up with Klei's Kevin Forbes to talk about how the game came together and why Klei decided to chop off handhold-y bits like tutorials, achievements, and save systems.

Tell me a bit about your background making games.

I made silly little games in BASIC as a kid, and then went to university for computer engineering. A couple of degrees later, I ended up working as a gameplay programmer on a triple-A sports title. I learned a lot, but I wanted to make the type of games that I like to play. After a couple of years I sought out a position at a smaller indie company, and ended up working for Klei.

What development tools did you use to build Don't Starve?

The Don't Starve engine is custom-built in C++, and has been ported to a bunch of different platforms. Most of the gameplay code is written in Lua, which is great for portability and iteration, but means that we always have to keep an eye on performance. The art was mostly made in Flash, and and then exported into our own animation format. We use FMOD as our audio backend.

How much time have you spent working on the game?

I started working on Don't Starve in December 2011, right as Shank 2 was wrapping up. We shipped the retail PC version in April 2013, and then updated it with free content for another six months. We finished working on the PlayStation 4 version at the end of 2013. I'm working on a new prototype right now, but a lot of the original Don't Starve team is working on its first DLC.

How did you come up with the concept?

We held a company game jam in 2010, during the last couple of workdays before the Christmas break. My team made a game about starving to death while defending a campfire from anthropomorphic pigs. It was a very simple game, but there was the kernel of an idea there that we eventually expanded into Don't Starve.

Survival is becoming a popular gameplay challenge, but Don't Starve was punishing players for failing to keep themselves warm or fed long before games like Rust or Starbound came out. What inspired you to make a game whose titular objective is simply to stay alive?

It was a very iterative process -- we went through several early concepts that skewed a lot more casual. That stuff just didn't feel right for the game, though. Over time the game got harder and more obscure, and eventually something clicked and we decided to embrace the more punishing aspects of the design. It really became a rallying point for the whole design, and led us to reject modern trappings like tutorials and achievements. I've read of some players bouncing off the game because it doesn't offer a standard progression model: people will die after hours and hours of play and lose everything they have accumulated in-game. They ask: "What was the point? I have nothing to show for my time!" Well, they had the experience of playing the game, and the knowledge that they gained from it. If that wasn't fun or worthwhile while they were playing, no amount of digital trinketry will make it so. I think that a lot of the social cruft that we've added to games in the past console generation is a distraction that detracts from the joy of playing. Don't Starve was built to test this hypothesis.

Don't Starve sports an eminently charming sense of style. Tell me more about how Klei settled on the game's Gorey-esque art design, and the artists who created it.

We wanted the game's setting to be creepy and just alien enough to keep the player guessing about the true nature of the creatures and the items that they find. Jeff Agala, our creative director, worked with the art team to come up with something to communicate that. We're all big animation fans at Klei, so we also wanted the style to be super-expressive and have lots of appeal. The Burton/Gorey/Addams look that we settled on fit the bill.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you've particularly enjoyed?

I really liked Papers, Please. It was incredibly stressful to play, and it captured a very unique aesthetic. Towerfall is the best local multiplayer game I've ever played, and I can't wait to see it in wider release. I haven't played The Yawhg yet, but I love Emily Carroll's comics, so I'm looking forward to it.

What do you think about the current state of the indie scene?

I think it's a great time for indie games. Computers are fast enough that you can do silly things like write your whole game in Lua, and it will still run. Tools like Unity are lowering the technical barriers to entry, and providing great opportunities for cross-platform deployment. Things like Early Access, bundles, and Kickstarter are funding exciting, niche products that big studios won't touch. All of this is going to let more people make games, which will the scope of types of games that get made.