Sleep Tight dev on the importance of publishers, 8-bit fatigue, and the power of nostalgia

Coming from a GamesIndustry interview with We Are Fuzzy's Maxx Burman

"They know how valuable they are, and they really are the most valuable piece of the puzzle right now. The challenge is getting people to play your game and marketing it and all of that. Because of that, they really do hold the power. And we thought, would we rather give away the majority of our ownership to a publisher, or do we think we could build a publishing team and a marketing team and find the right people to do these things for us?

It becomes a question of do you want to do it yourself, or do you want to bring in someone who specializes in that and can do it very well and has a proven track record? Do you need them? No. Are they an amazing tool? Completely. Can you build that tool for yourself? That's what we believe and why we went down this road."

Burman also went on to discuss why Sleep Tight is taking a polygonal approach to its gameplay, and mixing it with a bit of nostalgia.

"Making this game, one of the constant things that's been going on in the media has been 8-bit fatigue. Most indie games are going after this retro style, and from the beginning we wanted to go the opposite route and focus on a beautiful, polished looking game with visuals that suck you in and a gameplay loop that's addicting and keeps you playing...

There's the nostalgia of the types of games you played when you were a kid, but we wanted to go back to the nostalgia of what it feels like to be a kid, to play make-believe with Super Soakers or dart guns. And that carries across to every part of the game, the little details in the levels and the music itself. It's not '80s retro music. It's not synthesizers. It's percussion and bells and the sounds that make you have that emotion of being a kid, just having that playtime and imaginary battles you'd go through, without relying on trying to make games look like what they looked like in the late '80s and early '90s."