Image & Form - SteamWorld Heist development used all revenue from Dig, another game teased

A portion of a Nintendo Life interview with Image and Form...

NL: Compared to previous projects within the company, how smoothly would you say development's progressed over the course of the whole project? Also, how long has this game been in development, overall?

IF: Well, except that it took twice as long as planned, I'd say it went without hiccups! Yeah, it's been a bumpy road. We've worked 22 months to reach the first release of Heist. It has soaked up every penny we made from SteamWorld Dig. This was never the plan, but that's where we are right now.

This might sound like a cliché that every game developer spews out, but we don't release bad games. We hate playing them, we don't want to make them, and it makes very little sense to do so. Rather than "cutting our losses" and dumping something crappy a year ago, we kept on working until we could release something we are proud of. Again, we're there now.

We'll probably do a post-mortem with more details later on, but for now, we're just happy to be through the "worst" part!

NL: You've said in the past that Dig had to come out when it did due to the company running out of resources (money). Though I appreciate details won't be given, can you talk about whether there's a similar degree of pressure with Heist, or if the situation for Image & Form is now a little different?

IF: The pressure is both higher and lower this time:

In terms of money we've again decided to bet the farm; everything we've made from SteamWorld Dig has gone into making SteamWorld Heist. Although we're still a quite small studio at 17 people, we're definitely a bigger and more expensive outfit than when we made Dig. But Heist isn't the same reckless gamble. Looking back at the relative mountain of money I borrowed for us to complete Dig, my best conclusion is that I must have been suicidal at the time! We're also in a different spot now, having acquired a bit of notoriety: we get quite a lot of "instabuy" and "day one purchase" comments, something we definitely did not have with Dig. Plus we now KNOW that we can make really good games. So that's more relaxed.

On the other hand, one of the prerequisites of Heist was that it had to be bigger than Dig in every direction - we never want the simplistic "on the short side" con again - without becoming boring and/or grindy. Olle and the rest of the guys came up with the Heist concept a few months after Dig was released, and it was really quite a relief when he presented it. We could drop everything else and start on this - by our standards - very big effort. It would have been strange and awkward to follow up on Dig with something smaller. So in a sense, the pressure is higher than ever: we have wanted to create - and people are expecting - something much bigger than Dig.

NL: I guess I must be suicidal again, because I'm lovin' it. Or I'm just very eager to show this game that we're so proud of.

IF: Have you had many moments in which you've wondered whether the 'easy' option of Dig 2 should have been taken on, or has that not been in your thoughts?

Yes, the thought was there immediately when we saw that SteamWorld Dig was selling well. But we came from a work-for-hire background, where we spent years making games in the same, rather unchallenging edutainment franchise. It was financially sound, but in terms of creativity it was anything but thrilling. Making Dig 2 right after Dig would have pigeonholed us as "that mining-game studio, you know, the ones without the crafting." I think it would have been hard to diversify if we didn't do it right away.

We wanted to do something else, but we also wanted to explore SteamWorld more. It's extremely likely that there'll be a game that fills the gap between Dig and Heist, but we had our reasons for keeping that one brewing. SteamWorld Heist was the game that we wanted to make, and Dig provided the luxury to start making exactly that.