Phasmophobia Dev Is Preparing To Shake Things Up Again

Kinetic Games’ Phasmophobia came from humble beginnings, with a single developer bringing to life their vision for casting players as paranormal investigators and then letting them loose to explore spooky environments and be terrorized by a variety of malevolent entities.

Its success was impressive and has even paved the way for other social-multiplayer games to achieve similar success. But now, Kinetic is preparing to take another big step forward. And although it has the attention of Hollywood, with a big-screen adaptation now in the works in partnership with Blumhouse Productions, the devs are staying focused on making sure its players have plenty to look forward to too.

We recently spoke to Daniel Knight and Asim Tanvir from Kinetic to discuss the success of the game, as well as what the future holds for it and the team.

GameSpot: How did you research for the diner, the game’s upcoming new map?

Daniel Knight: There’s enough houses in the game now. And we’re not doing the larger ones anymore. So, what unique small maps could we do? I’m not sure what led us in the direction of diner.

Asim Tanvir: We see it from the community and the player data, that the smaller maps, the players like them more.

Knight: Something like 70% of the players just play Tanglewood Drive, so now we’re trying to create maps that are a similar size, so the diner aligns with that.

What lessons have you learned from making bigger maps like Brownstone High School or the prison? How does it feel to make something like the prison and the high school, and see the data that so few people play them?

Knight: It takes a long time to make those maps. But we are reworking all the maps, which includes the prison and school, similar to how we reworked Sunny Meadows. And we might be making the prison and the school smaller as a part of that rework, as well as making them a lot higher quality. Because currently in the school there’s a lot of rooms that are more or less the same. So we want all the rooms as unique as possible. Which is why when we did the Grafton Farmhouse rework, we cut out some of the bedrooms to make them more unique, and added certain things like mannequins and dolls.

Tanvir: Now we have a big team. A big art team and an art director as well. So Grafton and the Bleasdale farmhouse rework is what their focus is. Bleasdale is ornate looking, while Grafton is the opposite. It’s dark and dingy. Dilapidated.

Knight: The reason why we do stuff like that in reworking maps is because we want the game to have an identity beyond the game mechanics. Because I used stock Unity assets to make the game initially, you can go into other games and see the same assets.

So it really sounds like the major push is graphical fidelity, allowing the game to have its own identity, and refining what’s already there. A lot of my experience and relationship with the game is playing with friends and laughing at how the character models move. Like the infamous bendy backs. We still love the game, and get very scared, but it’s formed alongside the game’s visual quirks as well.

I know replacing the character models is a part of the roadmap. And I understand that if you want the game to have a higher benchmark, then that means changing the character models too. I just hope there’s a toggle for the original character models and bendy backs.

Now that the team has grown, and its primary focus is Phasmaphobia, do you have any thoughts on Kinetic Games becoming more an entity outside of being a one-man-studio when Phasmaphobia first began development. How are you viewing the growth and identity of Kinetic Games beyond just Phasmaphobia?

Knight: It was very hard getting into the headspace to hire people. Even when we decided to bring it to consoles, it was still only five of us. That’s when we decided to start hiring more designers, more artists. Now there’s 32 of us.

Do you have ideas for other games?

Knight: Yeah. There’s always ideas in the back of my head all the time.

Tanvir: Once Phasmaphobia releases Horror 2.0, then we’ll start thinking about new stuff. So nothing concrete we’re working on right now.

Daniel, in a previous interview with GameSpot, you admitted you didn’t really play horror games. Has making Phasmaphobia changed your perspective on horror games, or playing them?

Knight: I think for me, it’s interesting to watch people play, and watch them still be scared even if they’re playing with three of their friends. Most horror games, even multiplayer ones, everyone’s just kind of running away from each other. And I wanted to make a game where the players are actually experiencing the horror together.

And it was interesting to see that’s what actually happened when Phasmaphobia launched. I didn’t do much play testing before the game’s release. I just wanted to get it out there and just see what people did with it.

Have you ever been scared by your own game?

Knight: There’s definitely been moments. We’re adding new stuff into the game as well, and we’re always hearing people in the office getting jump scared. QA team, art team, programming team – you can hear them screaming from across the office.

What is it like having an office full of people scared all the time?

Tanvir: It means things are working.

Since you’re a fan of horror films, what’s it like now working with Blumhouse Productions?

Knight: Oh yeah, I like most of their stuff already. I think The Conjuring Series are my favorite.

What’s your favorite of The Conjuring films?

Knight: The second one.

That’s the right answer. You’ve mentioned in a previous interview that you’re fan of shows like Ghost Adventurers, was there a horror movie or show that specifically inspired Phasmaphobia?

Knight: The Haunting of Hill House was the big one, because it was mostly tension based. Then there’s a TV series called The Terror. Those two were the main two that inspired Phasmaphobia.

If movies and TV primarily inspired Phasmaphobia, and you don’t play horror games, what kind of games do you play? And any that inspired Phasmaphobia?

Knight: I don’t have too much time to play games. But I’ve been playing a lot of Rematch. I prefer to play games where I can jump in for 30 minutes and stop. It’s one of the reasons why I designed Phasmaphobia that way.

Kinetic Games has been getting a lot of press recently because of the movie deal and staffing up the team, releasing new maps and redesigning old ones. What are some of the things you don’t get to talk about as much?

Knight: When the game was so successful at the start, I think a lot of people assumed we were a 200 person team, and I’d say no. It was just me. And when people started finding out that it wasn’t some massive team, everyone seemed a little confused. We’re even still getting that now, even with the 32 people we have now.

When did you realize you needed to hire people?

Knight: It was seven or eight months after release. I think I was working 60 plus hours a week. Every day, and on the weekends. And it got to a point where I couldn’t do that for years and years. So I had to hire people so I could have a life.

What were you doing for a living when you first started developing the game?

Knight: I had been out of work for a while. I didn’t have a lot of experience making a game. I just wanted to try and do it, and stuck with that for a while.

I really wanted to work for myself. I was living with my parents at the time which made things significantly easier.

My parents told me it was time to get a real job. Even me at the time, I didn’t have any real expectations for the game. My goal was to sell a thousand copies, and that was surpassed in a few hours after it was released.

You started the game alone and used existing assets. So the identity of the game was in its mechanics. Then it got in the hands of the community, and they started to inform the game’s identity in culture. Now, you have a team of people working on the game, changing the way it looks, and polishing it up. Where do you strike the balance of your vision, the communities expectations, but also that of a team and how they’re contributing?

Knight: 90% of it is the teams’ vision, which a lot of it comes from me. But when the game was released, I couldn’t get every feature in there that I wanted. So a lot of the work we’re doing now is kind of getting that done. And now we’re getting input from the art team which is great. We take in community feedback, obviously. Every month we’re doing a feedback form on our Discord. We go through all of that. It doesn’t necessarily shape how we move forward, but it informs minor changes we make.

What is the one thing the community asks for that you will not put in the game?

Knight: One of the biggest requests we get is to allow players to be able to capture the ghost after identifying it. I did play around with that, and it kind of made it not as scary because you’re made more powerful than the ghost. So I got rid of all that.

The other thing is playing as the ghosts. It’s a social game, and I don’t want to make it competitive. I don’t want to bring in that side of the player base.

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The moment you give control, it becomes less predictable, and you start to think more logically. More competitively.

Knight: Yeah, I want to keep the community friendly.

Are there any levels or environments you haven’t been able to explore yet?

Knight: The one thing that keeps coming up internally is doing a fun fair.

Tanvir: We see a lot of requests for collaborations. And the most we can say is maybe. Unlike Fortnite, if we do a collaboration, it has to make sense in our universe.