We're afraid to play horror games, so we quit our jobs and made one, with no jump scares. It's called Darkwood, and it's our debut. Here’s our story.

We're Acid Wizard Studio, three college buddies (and a dog) from Poland who teamed up to make a game. After more than 4 years of development, we have just finished work on Darkwood, a unique top-down survival horror that does not rely on jump scares (and will still make you scream out in terror).

Let us start by saying that It wasn’t an easy ride, in fact, to be honest, each of us went through at least one nervous breakdown during the development process.

Before Darkwood, we were not huge fans of the genre. While developing the game, we managed to slowly overcome our fear of playing horror games and watching scary movies. That said, Alien: Isolation is still too much for us ;)

We knew next to nothing about game development before starting work on Darkwood. We all had a background in animation / graphic design, but little idea about programming, game design or production. At one point we quit our day jobs and dived straight into developing our first game, with no backup plan.
The original idea was to make a simple tower defence game within… a month.

After a lot of sleepless nights and nightmares that partially inspired the future shape of the project, we created a vertical slice (kind of) of the game in 2013. We made a gameplay trailer using it, and… people’s reactions blew away all of our expectations.

At that point we thought that making a living out of game development was really within our grasp, so we started a Indiegogo campaign later that year to help us fund Darkwood, which evolved into so much more than originally planned…

The crowdfunding was not going well. It looked like we weren't going to make it, but then in the last week of the campaign, we released the second gameplay trailer. It gave us a big boost, and the campaign turned out to be a success. We set a deadline to complete the game by 2014. Oh, the naivety of the budding developer…

Unfortunately, our inexperience in game development led to heavily overshooting that date. We expanded the scope of Darkwood, and made some major changes to the core design of the game late in development, which ate up a lot of time.
We were forced to launch in Steam Early Access in 2014 because of financial reasons. The game was received very well by the players, and sold much more than we expected! Encouraged by this... we decided to expand the scope of the game even more!
After that, even though we committed our lives to finishing the game as soon as possible, we continued to miss every deadline we set for ourselves. Negative reviews started popping up from players discouraged by the slow development or thinking we have abandoned the game.