The Making Of... Steam World Heist

It was supposed to be a simple job – but game development rarely is

- Chris Schilling

This is so long ago that only really old people can remember,” laughs Image & Form’s founder and CEO Brjann Sigurgeirsson. Well, we suppose six years, give or take, is a long time in game development. It was August 2013, and his studio had just finished its third commercial release and breakout hit, SteamWorld Dig. Already the game was a critical success, but it was too early to reap the commercial rewards. During an internal post-mortem, Sigurgeirsson insisted that the nine-month development time had been “way too risky” for a studio of that size. Its next game would take more than two years to complete.

Needless to say, that wasn’t part of the plan. But he admits that after considering two smaller games (“One was distinctly iOS, and one… hmm, we were thinking 3DS,” he says) and spending two or three months on both, “neither was really working out”. Having set the scene, Sigurgeirsson whisks himself away; he’s busy preparing for the release of the next game in the SteamWorld universe, SteamWorld Quest, and leaves us in the capable hands of creative lead Olle Hakansson, who picks up the story from the autumn of the same year. “I think we were all sitting down at the lunch table, and we had just played the expansion to XCOM, Enemy Within,” he continues. “Basically, we loved that game. And we were just playing around with this idea – if we made a game like that, an XCOM-ish kind of game, how would it look?”