The Indie Game Magazine May 2015 | Issue 49 | Page 14

FEATURE INTERVIEW

Down, Down, Down, to the Bottom of the Sea

L

ife under the ocean is a fascination for many people. There are
plenty of stories, both fact and fiction, about the mysteries that lie just
beneath the surface of those beautiful
blue waves. Perhaps it’s because we’re
fascinated by things we don’t fully understand. Just look at fish, for instance.
Sure, there’s a science to gills and how
they function, but at the end of the
day, these creatures can breath and
live underwater; that’s something humans can attempt to mimic with scuba
gear and oxygen tanks, but never truly
replicate. I imagine that the first stories about mermaids and Atlantis were

born out of at least mild jealousy for
the creatures that can live in the sea.
Since we couldn’t do it ourselves, we
instead invented humanoid characters
who could do it in our place. Humanity
has a long history of inserting ourselves
into fantastical scenarios, whether it
be to attempt to understand the world
from a different perspective, or just
simply imagination at play.
I bring this up because the latest project
in development at Unknown Worlds Entertainment, titled Subnautica, is currently
in Early Access. The game takes players
to an aquatic alien world and tasks them
with surviving underwater. The protago-

by Vinny Parisi

nist is human, and so he can’t breathe
underwater, and therefore must craft the
materials he needs to survive. Just going
by that general synopsis, the game may
not sound like anything genre-breaking,
or even exciting for that matter. But the
development team is quite certain that the
visual aesthetics and gameplay mechanics of Subnautica stand on their own. To
get a better sense of why players should
splash around in the Early Access pool,
I spoke with Hugh Jeremy and the team
at Unknown Worlds Entertainment. They
offered just a bit of insight into the open
development process, and what their
plans are for the future of Subnautica.

Indie Game Magazine: For folks who may not
have played Natural Selection 2, and have
yet to hear about your team, who makes
up Unknown Worlds? What were you doing
before forming this particular dev team?

methods, and no marketing or public relations functions. At the core, we’re a group
of people that like to make games in a very
free-wheeling and open manner. Some of
us work on Subnautica, some of us work on
Future Perfect, and most of us previously
Unknown Worlds Entertainment: UWE is
worked on Natural Selection 2.
made up of a globally distributed and diverse team of game developers. There are IGM: The team prefers to design games out
about twenty of us scattered all over the in the open, stating you believe “it’s more
globe, from the United S FFW2F