Dutch independent developer KeokeN Interactive, founded by brothers Koen Deetman and Paul Deetman, is back on Kickstarter for Deliver Us Home. KeokeN had to let go of almost all its employees not long ago, and now it’s just the two brothers again (plus a couple of collaborators), making the crowdfunding proposition a necessity.
I spoke with Koen Deetman at length about what that means for this third entry in the sci-fi franchise, how they’re coping as a small indie team, and much more. As a reminder, the Kickstarter campaign is active for three more days, with KeokeN looking to raise another €12K to fund the project.
The last time we spoke was ahead of the launch of the Deliver Us Mars. In our review, we called the sequel an improvement over the first one. But you had some issues in the studio, right? You also had to let go of most employees. What happened there? Was it an issue with low sales or was it something else?
We had a great development on Deliver Us Mars. It was absolutely a step up. I would like to think that that moment of crafting Deliver Us Mars was also very much part of our ambition in the studio. Besides trying to, of course, get into the same success rate as Deliver Us the Moon, we also tried to do new things and to show a little bit where our ambition was headed.
When we released in February 2023, which is when a lot of games were released, I don’t think that the moment of release helped its performance. However, its sales were almost five times quicker than its predecessor. That was definitely not the problem. But when you saw the whole landscape of game publishing change every year, you saw that most of those deals relied on publishers recouping their budget. Once you understand what your landscape looks like, you cannot really sign anything else.
We were very open to our team and said that we had to fight for it in order to land a deal. But if the landscape changes this much, then yeah, connecting another project, was just really, really hard. As much as we tried, and we tried a multitude of things to make that a reality. But in the end, we just didn’t make it with our core team intact.
I guess one of the main issues in the industry is that it’s harder to get funding. That’s also what you’re seeing, I imagine.
Right. It’s more or less where risks are just not being taken in the same way. Of course, interest rates have gone up. I think it’s the publishers who are just not connecting to their investors anymore as much or getting enough resources available to them. They are in a position where they just have to take a bet on something that is far more guaranteed, in a way. That makes the whole landscape a lot harder or a lot more competitive to the midsection towards indie.
Basically, there is no more space unless you are a really, really low-cost indie team or a big AAA developer.
That’s essentially the case. You can see that. It seems like the big AAA companies can safeguard themselves in time, and then there’s a huge gap where safety only begins if you are an indie developer of, say, three or four or five people.
With Deliver Us Home, you’re returning to Kickstarter after using the platform for the first game. For a few years, crowdfunding seemed to fall out of fashion, but with all these issues in the game industry, maybe developers are rediscovering this tool as a means to fund their projects.
It’s interesting that you say that. It’s where it all started. Paul and I were just discussing that we were very much on time to try and pitch a new project. This was in 2020/2021. Throughout those years, we had amazing discussions with several partners. I think that we talked to around fifty publishers. What was eventually the case is that if you have your own IP or a new IP, the risk is more in whether this IP is going to land a big audience or is going to return its investment. But if it’s a known IP, then it’s more or less, is it something that is lucrative in that business?
After pitching almost 200 times, we always seemed to have been bounced back and forth about something in the end. It was either too expensive or too cheap, or we had something with the game that was not particularly to their liking. Maybe we were too niche, or for someone else, too commercial. It was always about listening to what they wanted.
But we were like, can we go back to what we want? After we had to make this tough decision, and we had something like, ok, so what brought us success in the first place? Then we saw that crowdfunding is not particularly in the same area as back in 2016 because it was different back then.
We felt like, what if we would develop the game closer? We saw that the prototype project that we opened up in a small video was something that was actually very applauded. So we were like, what if that can help maybe develop a better sequel in the series. Right now, it does show potential from a different perspective.
Definitely, if you want to make a specific game that publishers don’t want to fund, maybe Kickstarter or crowdfunding in general is the best way forward. Will you be working with the community on certain aspects of the game? How open are you to feedback?
Yeah. I have to say that working with a, let’s say, 45+ team as we’ve done for Deliver Us Mars at the peak and now being back to just us two ( plus two very, very nice people who are still with us trying to help out where they can) brought this challenge in front of us. We had all these hard decisions made by getting the company scaled down to zero. But then we were also tasked with creating a demo that is engaging and interesting enough for the Kickstarter campaign, plus the trailer in time to release it literally the month after. So we had this at the start of May and released the Kickstarter campaign in June.
As much as that is a crazy endeavor, this was great. For Deliver Us Mars, I’ve been running the project as a game director and now here I was creating holograms and parts of the level myself again. Also, it’s shown us what we were capable of doing in our series creatively that we didn’t necessarily – well, if I look at what the people who played our demo are saying, it doesn’t necessarily detract from any expectancy they have. It might actually be more mysterious, something that they really like from the series. So, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. That’s something we’ve come to learn now that we are almost through the Kickstarter campaign.
Do you have any plans to release the demo of Deliver Us Home at some point on Steam?
First of all, anyone who backs us right now for the game already gets the demo and we are actually developing it now closer to the community. We got a lot of feedback, actually, in great directions. If you look at Steam Next Fest, we explicitly didn’t put it in there because we thought we were not really showing a demo of a product that was about to be released. We were like, maybe that’s not the place right now, but now that it’s forming, we do have ideas on that. We’re not sure yet, but it seems to be interesting to try it out, maybe even to get some wish listing interest or to get some eyes on the demo as it really develops in a great state. It is still a prototype demo, but far more finished and interesting to show there. We’ll definitely talk about it.
You talked about the studio being much smaller than it was with Mars, right? Can you speak to how this changes what you’re able to do with this new game? Should fans expect Deliver Us Home to be a smaller game in content and scope?
Deliver Us The Moon was the debut. We set the tone there; that was the game people take as a basis. Then we got to Mars, which was more about the ambition as a studio and the level of quality we would like to reach.
Of course, now we have scaled back to being this very lean, tiny indie team again. We are super open to first honoring the series’ strength. That push to drive forward is something that we want to kind of return to. That goes hand in hand with player agency. Mars was more on rails, so we really want to loosen up that grip. In that sense, Deliver Us Home will be more in the player’s control.
Over the years, we didn’t want to create an open world, but we did want wide linearity, where the player still needs to rely on their senses and figure out what’s going on in the environment. If you combine that with some customizations, you can have more control over your astronaut suit. There’s something you can build up to or maybe track towards or collect towards. We added as much as we could do realistically with four people in a month.
In terms of gameplay, what are the main changes players will notice compared to the previous titles?
The platforming aspect in Deliver Us The Moon was nearly non-existent. In Deliver Us Mars, we really took a huge bet on platforming in general. Some of those things were a hit and some of those were a miss. The climbing was something we really like to add a bit of danger, but it was maybe found a little bit hard at times by some players. So instead, we upgraded climbing to be more traditional.
We also thought that you could upgrade your suit, for example, with something like a jet pack part that could give you that double jump to reach other locations. That could give you interesting ways to explore your areas. We’re looking into those things.
In the demo, you don’t really know where you are. It’s almost like an Earth-like planet or something. We also thought, what if you encountered something in your environment that could be a danger to you as a character? In the demo, we toy around with something like a bear. The pressure of that is very interesting and feeds into this element of mystery and unknown. Why is it there? Is it actually there? Where is it? And I think that those elements give you a bit of a thrill while you are finding out more about our story and what happened there.
Surprisingly, that gives that sort of a feel back, especially from Deliver Us The Moon, but even one-offs, such as a Morse code puzzle game where you literally have to listen to the radio and hear some sort of Morse code come through. That code translates to something that you find that you can actually open a door in.
What I like in that Morse code tidbit is that the frequency is always different. If anyone wants to try to find this place, then they cannot look it up on the Internet because you actually have to learn and listen to what the code is. So there’s nobody that’s going to say what the code is because it’s always changing.
From a story standpoint, can you at least give us a hint as to where there is a connection with the previous stories and protagonists from previous games?
When we started Deliver Us The Moon, we always envisioned this as a series, although we were not really sure how long yet. At the very least, we knew there could be a couple of games. Moon and Mars are set up as standalone games, just like Deliver Us Home, but we always try to find something of the backstory or something else that combines all these games together.
Without spoiling the whole surprise with the ideas we had for this new one, it is going to be about an astronaut now fighting to secure a home for humanity. But yeah, players can be assured they will find traces from the previous games. Also, if there is unfinished business in the previous games, we will absolutely make sure that we find creative ways to either answer them or build upon them.
Are you using Unreal Engine 5, or is this still made with UE4?
Right now, to kind of win speed, because we’re just a few people now coming from a bigger team, we use UE4. That was the quickest way for us to craft something that could be convincing enough to bring over our ideas.
Of course, there is a huge urge, especially now that we’re smaller, to upgrade to UE5, which is, in multiple ways, maybe even better than UE4 for a smaller team. This is one of our wishes. It’s part of the plan. Also, we’re all aware of ray tracing and all that stuff. We at least want the game to support it, but we’re unsure if it’s sensible to do that right away. So we are not guaranteeing it. However, we always try to be in tune with what the series is expecting.
I remember the first game was one of the first to add ray tracing. Now, some games have gone full path tracing.
By the time we’re in a close-to-released version, then absolutely, we have the neck to be upfront with those technologies and try to figure out if that’s possible for us. That’s why we love Unreal 5 and would like to upgrade. The latest version of Unreal Engine has always helped our environments come to life.
You will soon launch Deliver Us The Moon on Nintendo Switch. Would you be interested in launching the rest of the franchise on Nintendo platforms, too, possibly the next console due in 2025?
Interesting question. The reality is we went from a 20-man team to 0. There’s nothing we can actually promise anymore on those ports; however, there’s always an intent. What we really like about Deliver Us The Moon is that even though it was released sporadically over the course of years, looking back at that cadence, it didn’t really seem to have hurt our game.
Maybe the beginning could have been better, but you can see that as a smaller indie fighting for attention, some of those console releases can actually help. They become something of a moment and a part of the campaign or into the lifetime of the game where there’s a little bit of attention to it.
So the fact that Deliver Us The Moon came out even on Stadia and old generation consoles, all in due time… Deliver Us The Moon was ported by another company. They said it was just not possible on the Switch. Now, though, they called me back and said they changed their mind. I was like, really? In a month’s time, they kind of convinced me, showing that it was playable and I was like, well, maybe it is actually worth looking into. Eventually, we finished the game on Switch, and now it is coming out.
Realistically, though, we cannot promise or investigate these things right now. If we see an opportunity, we would love to bring it to more places, but it only depends on the situation.
Soon, you’ll be able to estimate the interest of Nintendo fans in the franchise.
Yes. For me, it’s also something of a breakthrough that we finally got something released on Nintendo. That’s just really cool.
They also have a really big install base.
Indeed. It would be helpful if the game picked up at a great pace, but we are also realistic. I mean, it’s an older game, but it looks quite great on Switch. I wasn’t expecting it to be running like this, but I do recognize the game, and it’s still a great experience. We’re very excited that we made that happen.
Speaking of new technologies, how do you feel about the use of generative AI in games, such as with NPCs?
Paul and I have had a lot of discussions about this. There’s two things we recognize. This industry just keeps evolving. If we look back to where the games industry started 40 years ago, it is impressive how fast that change came about.
I do have sympathy for an artist, for example, who says, hey, it’s also something I love to do and I don’t want it to be replaced by something that’s artificial intelligence.
However, I see it a little differently. If you were working in a shop like a factory and you were flipping pieces of, I don’t know, maybe a car. That wasn’t necessarily a great job, but at the very least it was making a living for some people, but at some point, that changed for robotic arms.
Now that worker is actually more in a control center, he controls the whole chain. I kind of see it a little bit like this as well. Instead of being very pessimistic about it, let’s try to make use of it. Like, how are you able as a creative to control or work with it? As much as you are against it, I think it’s inevitable. This is going to be a change of pace. It’s gonna significantly decrease budgets in a way that can help evolve your game or your production. Then again, we need to be sensible because we also understand that it might take jobs that people would love to do rather than being happy that they are replaced.
That’s certainly the biggest problem in the industry, with some AAA games costing as much as $300 million to make. But generative AI can help indie teams like KeokeN, too, in doing a better game even with just a handful of people.
True. For example, I remember that concept artists were used to create a sense of idea. But now, we don’t necessarily replace them because even if you generate something, it doesn’t really come down to something that you exactly want.
But helping the artist teams speed up the process of crafting an idea or crafting a certain concept was already—we don’t necessarily use it in a final game, but it does help set an idea, set what people want to explain or try out in the game. That’s something quite powerful, actually, as it helps rather speed up the understanding.
What do you think about potentially adding your games to a subscription service like Game Pass or something similar? Would that help reduce the risk in a situation like yours?
In the past, we’ve seen Deliver Us The Moon launch on Game Pass. With all our previous games, there was a publisher with us that was either negotiating this or dealing with it eventually.
I can see how a deal like that can help an independent company. It is absolutely something we think of as a possibility. Then again, there’s no guarantees to that. We know there are lines and lines of developers lining up to get there.
I think because the landscape has changed so much, for us, it turned more into that we had to deal with how to get our people to a safe place or get them new jobs.
Of course, we were trying to set things up, but it was not really realistic at that point. Right now, we could actually think of it and how that would change our course of development, especially because we’re now so lean in that sense that those deals could be very feasible. But like I said, we’re not having any guarantees yet for that or any conversation, for sure.
I asked because some developers are openly pro subscription services, while others are vehemently against them.
Maybe a good thing to say about Game Pass is I am not so sure what the impact on your overall success in sales figures is particularly, but I do know that Game Pass is a great discovery tool for an indie.
We saw a lot of change in pace when we were on Game Pass. People just knew the game. Even the sentiment around it, I think there were over a million plays for Deliver Us The Moon on Game Pass. A lot of people know our game because of it. That is absolutely valuable. In the end, of course, as this is a business, you also need to make sure that you can survive on it.
There needs to be a great middle ground in some way where it is something that you can live from, something that generates enough eyes and commercial value that your game gets discovered.
On that note, did you ever think about whether your games would be successful on mobile? More and more developers are porting their titles. CAPCOM, for instance, has recently ported Resident Evil games to iPhone and iPad. The Deliver Us franchise may be even better suited since it’s more adventure than action.
It has passed our minds. This is maybe a little bit strange because I’m from a generation that was very used to gaming on a PC or console, but I can see with my kids nowadays that the phone or the tablet is probably the first thing that they’re going to say that they played a game on.
We haven’t really made solid plans for it, but I remember we had some research done on what it would take to bring Deliver Us The Moon to a mobile device. Nothing really came out of it because the fires that we have been fighting were more pressing, but our minds have been there.
Your way of saying it might spark me to check back into this because you’re right. It’s potentially something to consider.
I believe it could do well. Also, nowadays, phones are powerful enough to run it. Anyway, I don’t know if you have anything else you’d like to say about Deliver Us Home that we haven’t already touched upon.
We are going, to some extent, back to our roots. We always fight to get this game out there because we also see that the community’s sentiment is absolutely there and fighting for it with us. That’s something that’s extremely nice to see.
Maybe not super surprising, but a little bit surprisingly, it gets to a better state, maybe a more unique and surprising state of the game than we initially thought. Scoping down doesn’t necessarily mean that the game is going to be less fun to play.
We have a lot of things invested in the series already, and we can creatively use a lot of cool things that result in an exciting third game. We are on Kickstarter until the 11th of July. That’s where we pick it off and see where we go up next.
Thank you for your time.
