On the 14th of April 2018 at EGX Rezzed I had the pleasure to play a press exclusive demo for Midnight Hub’s upcoming game Lake Ridden, Below follows the transcription of my interview with Erik Nilsson, co-founder Lake Ridden

RS- Lake Ridden is a first person mystery with a wonderfully enigmatic title, in your own words could you please outline the premise of the game?

EN – I think the game is about exploration, mystery and puzzles and I think that says it all, you can explore the game at your own pace, solve puzzles at your own pace which can be quite challenging and tricky, and you also experience the story and a mystery.

RS – Where did the idea for the game come from are there any existing stories out there which inspired the creation of the game?

EN- No, everything is original, when we started the studio we wanted to build an indie studio not a game specifically. We decided that we would pitch games together to each other and we would pick whichever game concept was interesting and would be the best one for the studio at the time to make.

RS – How many people have helped creative Lake Ridden? how did you all come together?

EN – From the beginning it was just me (Erik) Sara and Johan, we were all working for different studios, Johan was working at Mojang for Minecraft, I was working at Paradox at the time on Stellaris, I did a lot of consoles out there, and Sara was working as a freelancer actually she did a lot of marketing for other studios. We all felt a bit tired of these big companies and we wanted to do our own thing so we just came together and decided to found a studio. We worked on the game for a bit and got most of the studio set up and then we recruited two great students called Anton and Malin from the Game Assembly in Sweden and that’s the core team. We are two artists two programmers and Sara ties everything together, we also hired two freelance sound designers, Patrick and Malin H, to do all the voice acting the music and the sound effects.

RS- I’m really excited to see a game like Lake Ridden to have two female leads, can you tell me about the decision to have two female-centric characters?

EN- I think  from the very get go we’ve been talking about making ambitious games which we want to be different, because we feel as though there’s a lot of games focused on shooting (Destiny 2 for example) but its fun to make games that are not about shooting, its fun to make games where you have to try and create different game design. We also felt as though we really wanted to have strong female leads and we wanted to explore those strong female characters. For us living in Sweden that’s pretty commonplace and its getting more and more commonplace in the gaming industry. I felt like it was the right decision for this type of game.

RS- How has feedback from fans playing the demos effected the development process?

EN -Quite a bit actually because when we started out we were a horror themed game about a year into development we actually got the feedback that from what we were showing off people were really scared of horror games and the overall feedback was very divided. We were a puzzle game with horror elements so when we said our game had horror in it peoples reactions were ‘we don’t want to play that’ so since we already had a lot of puzzles at the core of the game so we decided to rework all of the stuff, lets rewrite most of the story lets rewrite all the dramatic tension. We’ll make a different game, that was the outcome.

R.S- So original plans had Lake Ridden as a horror game then?

E.N – Not really a horror game, more a game that had parts of a horror game.

R.S – So obviously the game is out in a month, do you have any plans to take it to any other platforms as well as Steam?

E.N –  We are looking at it but right now since we are such a small studio, we will not be doing that at the moment, we have signed with GOG (Good Old Games) so we will be on GOG, we will be on steam hopefully we’ll be on MAC we’ll see, we only have two programmers to do the work.

R.S – Thank you very much for your time today 

E.N – Thank you.

You can follow the team at Midnight Hub on Twitter at @midnighthub to keep up with the development of Lake Ridden and you follow co-founder Erik Nilsson on his personal Twitter over at @Teezec.