Krillbite Studio is an independent game developer creating unique and innovative game experiences. The company was founded in 2011 by graduate students who went on to develop and publish the critically acclaimed horror title Among the Sleep in 2014, a game that has since been ported to Playstation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
In all our games since we’ve been exploring the interactive space, trying out new ideas and concepts.
History[]
In the winter of 2009, Ole Andreas and Havard Stene Skjaervik (a former team member) gathered a group of eager students at Hedmark University College to get together for their final bachelor degree assigment. Deciding what to do for the project didn't take long, as the group was quickly convinced by our designer Anders' idea.
The pitch back then was as follows: You're a 2 year old waking up in the middle of the night, and you can see a dark shadow standing in the doorway. It approaches and violently tips your cot over, leaving you exposed and alone on the floor, scrambling to escape and find the safety of your mother.
For the school project, our goal was to make a demo that we could build upon after graduating. To keep it simple, we settled on rudimentary mechanics and goal when making the first part of the game.
As inexperienced students, we started making our own engine from scratch, and worked on that for six months before realizing that we could never finish a representable demo before the deadline. We made the switch to Unity and recreated everything we had made in a fraction of the time. Unity was used for the entire production after that point.
A while into the project we started discussing the possibility of turning the demo into a full game, and starting our own company alongside it. Most of the group joined in this endeavour. A few declined, but we recruited other friends from class to fill their place. Later on, we were also joined by Martin, our sound guy.
After graduating and forming a company, we took a fresh look at our concept. What kind of game did we want to create? The initial thought was horror, but we dabbled for some time with the idea of Teddy as a more powerful companion, with ways to overcome or neutralize enemies with a range of abilities. At this point, the game looked more like an adventure game than horror.
There were many ideas for the Among the Sleep universe, most of them dreamlike and bizzare, but the first journey we started creating went through a large and open world. It began by exiting the home through the basement and coming out to a frest path, ending up in a bright and sunny meadow.
After the comfort of the warm meadow followed a dark and hostile forest, where the child and Teddy would have to use glowing mushrooms as both shelter and flashlights against the light-sensitive monkey-like creatures (dubbed "Monkreatures") hunting them.
Underneath the forest was an underground cave system, made (and inhabited) by giant tunneling worms who ate their way through everything and immense crystal halls guarded by ruthless rock giants. In later iterations we had plans for a world in which the child would enter a life size dollhouse, and one of the threats was an aggresive, hungry furnace.
Another world had the child traversing through a vast steam-powered machinery, where parts of the machinery itself came alive and was out to get you. These first worlds resembled more that of an epic journey, and each one was designed to tell a small side story in addition to elaborating the main story. As we progressed with development, we wnated the worlds to be more connected to the child, so we made some tough choices and cut a lot of parts we had really liked.
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