We sat down with Dominik Schneider, co-founder/co-founder, and Paul Lawitzki, game designer and programmer at Chasing Carrots. The team is responsible for one of the most acclaimed indie titles in recent times: Halls of Torment. The game is also their first commercial game developed in Godot.
W4 Games:
Hello Dominik, Paul, it’s great to have you here. Can you tell us a little bit about how Chasing Carrots came to be?
Dominik Schneider:
Patrick Wachowiak and I started Chasing Carrots from scratch after working together at another company, doing interactive presentations for trade shows. It wasn’t creative work, and we wanted to make games. Our first project began as a side experiment there, and when our employer showed no interest in game development, we decided to go independent.
W4 Games:
And how did you decide on what kind of games you wanted to make?
Dominik Schneider:
From the beginning, we made the games we wanted to play. Most of them took years, so we’ve released four so far. Our first publishing deal went badly, but we rebuilt that game and switched from the old Vision Engine to Unity after Havok shut the engine down. Good Company followed and took about five years to complete.
Over time, we became unhappy with Unity and wanted more control over our tools. The open-source nature of Godot, and its supportive community, convinced us to switch. Our first Godot game, Halls of Torment, started as a small project, but the demo and Early Access release were very successful. Even now a year after release, sales remain strong. And that makes us want to keep working on it, even now as part of the team moves to a new prototype.
W4 Games:
So we can confirm it’s not Halls of Torment 2?
Paul Lawitzki:
Yeah. We talked about making a sequel at first, but later decided to explore a different concept. Maybe there’ll be a sequel someday , we’ll see.
W4 Games:
Talking a little about Halls of Torment: we know it’s similar to other games, but you have details that set it apart. It’s a genre that has seen huge growth lately, yet your game is one of the most successful and appreciated, how did the idea come to be?
Paul Lawitzki:
For Halls of Torment, it’s second nature for us to give our games a personal touch , something that excites us and feels like it’s missing in the market. We’re big fans of the old Diablo games, their dark, grim atmosphere, and that was lacking in the genre. I also wanted the graphics to evoke that pre-rendered ‘90s look. We tried it, it fit perfectly, and we ran with it.
W4 Games:
So how are you dealing with the success and owning your company and being developers, all at the same time?
We don’t enjoy the business part that much, that’s one reason we didn’t just grow when Halls of Torment was successful. I’m a programmer, lead programmer, and I still want to program. I don’t want to manage people, and nobody really wants to do that at our company. It’s more a collective of people who work as autonomously as possible with a shared vision, so the game doesn’t get pulled in different directions.
W4 Games:
It’s a great philosophy, and sounds like a really great environment to work in.
Dominik Schneider:
Thank you. It has its ups and downs. People working here have to be a good fit. Not everybody wants this kind of freedom , some people want to do what they’re told and have someone judge the work. So it has to fit. It’s not always easy.
W4 Games:
You mentioned Halls of Torment is your first game in Godot, how are you guys finding working with Godot against other engines?
Paul Lawitzki:
It has been a blast. It was a big change, and we saw the benefits left and right when we started working with Godot. Here, it was a given that basic concepts would work: input would be simple, working, and versatile; scene trees would work very well. The fundamental features were aligned properly, and the developers cared that those don’t regress.
They wouldn’t just focus on big features to create marketing buzz. That was very good in our eyes , the grunt work works and is robust. We didn’t have that in the past because other engine developers were chasing monetization. This felt well thought through.
W4 Games:
What is your history with console publishing?
Dominik Schneider:
We wanted to publish our very first game on consoles, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. You needed a publisher back then. We got a not-so-good publisher, he got us the dev kits and made us developers on the platforms, but in the end they didn’t publish the game even though the ports were finished. Afterwards we didn’t do any console porting until the remake of Pressure Overdrive, where we released it on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Switch.
Good Company was a PC title through and through. But for Halls of Torment it made sense to go to consoles. We already had test kits for Switch, but we didn’t have the dev kits for Xbox Series and PlayStation 5. Now we have all the test kits, all the different generations
W4 Games:
How have you experienced the process of talking with the manufacturers? What would you tell someone on the fence because of the work it takes to publish?
Dominik Schneider:
It has gotten way easier. In the Xbox 360 era you couldn’t publish without a publisher. Now you can, but you need a good prototype so they become interested in your game. You can apply for ID@Xbox, a good way for indies to get in and even get dev kits for free (as far as I know that’s how it was). If the game is good, they’ll welcome you.
There’s still a lot of bureaucracy, but you have support. In ID@Xbox you get email addresses where you can ask questions, and support is great. With Sony you have an online ticketing system, also really great. It’s complicated, but you can get through it by asking questions and reading a lot of documentation.
W4 Games:
We’re seeing the Godot ecosystem grow so much lately, and undoubtedly it will keep growing, mainly because of high quality, successful projects like Halls of Torment. Do you have any advice for people learning Godot and trying to make their first commercial game?
Paul Lawitzki:
The first thing we always say is start small. Don’t make your dream game. Find out what might work. Look at the market. Look at games that are popular in their niches. I don’t mean Call of Duty, I mean games that succeed in their area.
Also, maybe don’t start with a platformer. There are so many platformers, many great ones, but there are so many. Get inspiration from somewhere outside games. Expose yourself to different kinds of media to be creative. That’s from me, from a design perspective. Also accept some market realities.
Dominik Schneider:
Market reality is a good point. If you have a job and you’re thinking about jumping into the new thing and leaving your job, I would say don’t. If possible, reduce time at your current job and start as a side business. The unfortunate reality is your first game very likely won’t sustain you. If you put all your eggs into that basket, you’ll probably fail. Be on the safe side. It takes longer, but it’s not fatal.
Paul Lawitzki:
This is important: people look at successes; there’s a lot of survivorship bias. For us, we made four games before we hit with Halls of Torment, and it took 14 years. The studio took 14 years to be successful. We were lucky to have generous investors who believed in us, and eventually it paid out, but it took one and a half decades. It takes time. You learn by failure and consciously deduce your lessons from what you make and why it didn’t work out.
W4 Games:
You mentioned “don’t start with your dream game.” What would be your dream game?
Paul Lawitzki:
As a designer, I abandoned the idea of a dream game. Every game is different, and what a good game is, is subjective. If I ask you your favorite game, you might say Monkey Island. I love Monkey Island, but I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite because there are many great games, very different, great in their area. I don’t have a dream game , I have games I’d like to make right now. A year from now, I’ll probably have a different itch to scratch. Certain goals change with time.
Dominik Schneider:
We started out sort of making our dream games. But we didn’t have a genre, we made all kinds: business simulation, trading simulation in space, an arcade racing game. We made what we wanted to play. But you start to realize what you have in your head as your dream game won’t come out like you have it in your head. The more you go on with production, the more you realize it doesn’t feel like the idea you had. It’s difficult to make it like that , you realize that the more games you make.
That’s why we try to tell every game developer starting out: do a lot of game jams. Game jams are production from start to finish in one weekend. You learn how to scope and how to finish. You learn that ideas you had at the beginning don’t always turn out like in your head. Dream games are difficult.
W4 Games:
You told me that with the success of Halls of Torment you’re not chasing bigger, you’re happy with your structure. For your next game, is the scope similar?
Dominik Schneider:
We set out to do something similar, but truly it has a larger scope than Halls of Torment. We didn’t hit our target of one year of production, so it will probably take two years plus, I hope not too long. In our plan it takes 22 months. We all know how game dev works , let’s see. It’s a bit more advanced in tone, and also 3D and multiplayer.
W4 Games:
So definitely a little bit bigger and more complex. Thank you for your time Dominik, Paul, it’s been great talking to you and learning more about Chasing Carrots!
Do you want to port your game to consoles? Are you interested in switching to Godot for an upcoming project? Contact us!