How the epic 12-year dev journey to make Sub-Species was saved by a switch to Unity

Screens from an indie game set under the ocean

(Image credit: Howling Hamster)

Game development is hard and can take longer than ever, though it's not always because of a grand, ambitious scope and scale like GTA 6. For indie devs, it's often just the case of balancing time and resources, especially when you're working a full-time day job while pursuing the game dev dream.

This has been the case for artist Trevor Burke and programmer Manus Burke (no relation), who have been working on 2.5D underwater action-adventure Sub-Species since 2014 as Galway-based indie team Howling Hamster.

Self-taught game design

"We made a very small platforming Android game, which was to prove to ourselves that we can actually work together and get something finished," Trevor tells me. It also taught them, however, that they needed to move away from mobile development for their next project, even though Sub-Species spent its first six months as a mobile game.

"I decided to do some marketing research, and then we immediately downloaded Unity and moved to PC," says Manus. "But our decision to move to PC also extended the time." Nonetheless, the move from what Trevor referred to as "rudimentary 2D" graphics on mobile to creating decent 3D visuals made for a more exciting project.

Development, however, was quite on-and-off, and in the early days, they also hired out Manus's nephew's unused dining room as an ad hoc office. But as time dragged on, Sub-Species has largely remained true to its original concept as an underwater Asteroids.

"We settled on it having four environments, and there's been very little in the way of feature creep," Trevor says. "The truth is that we can't implement a lot of what's new and popular because there's a lot of stuff that's just set in place, and we don't really want to mess with it. Another thing is, we just don't have a lot of resources. So we just basically drew a line under the design of the functionality of the game and went, okay, we're going to take this small thing and make a version of that as best as we can."

Interestingly, another inspiration that Trevor cites is 16-bit classic Ecco the Dolphin (which is also having its own revival), a bizarre comparison given Sub-Species has you controlling a submarine, though it does make a bit more sense given that these waters are also alien-infested. "Ecoo the Dolphin was one of my favorite games growing up because it was just so fucking weird. There was nothing else like it out there exclusively set in water, and told a compelling story. But if Ecco could fire torpedoes, it would be a much better game, absolutely."

Of course, the best game development software, such as Unity, also updates regularly, providing new tools as a project progresses. With a project going for as many years as Sub-Species, however, it was also a double-edged sword.

"We started using Unity when it was version 4, and then when we updated to Unity 5, half our textures just disappeared or stopped working," Manus recalls. "So we realised then we had to lock in our version. So we went as far as the very final version of Unity 5.6.7 [note: released back in 2017], and we stayed locked in that and got the professional license for what we developed."

The downside was that they missed out on using Unity's latest tools, such as its Universal Render Pipeline. Since finally moving to Unity 6 late last year, Trevor has mostly noticed that things just run slower. He's also proud of building the game's assets by hand without relying on modern conveniences like store assets or procedural generation: "That gives us a certain amount of artistic cohesion because it's exactly the way we want it to look." That also means balancing the creation of, say, cool underwater monsters with the bread-and-butter of lots of dull but necessary rocky terrain in each level.

Fortunately, Sub-Species' development is apparently almost coming to an end, and Manus doesn't hide the contempt that can come from spending so long working on one game, and the desire to move on to something else. "I don't think there's anything I hate more in the world than making this game. It's a hate-hate relationship. But there's a lot of lessons learned over the years, and definitely there's going to be more games made."

If some indies are known for iterating on a formula that works, Trevor only hints that whatever the future holds for Howling Hamster, it will have to be a very different kind of game. "It would be set on land, and there wouldn't be a rock in sight!"

Sub-Species is coming soon to PC, and you can check out the Steam demo now.

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Alan Wen is a freelance journalist writing about video games in the form of features, interview, previews, reviews and op-eds. Work has appeared in print including Edge, Official Playstation Magazine, GamesMaster, Games TM, Wireframe, Stuff, and online including Kotaku UK, TechRadar, FANDOM, Rock Paper Shotgun, Digital Spy, The Guardian, and The Telegraph.

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