Peak, the breakout hit climbing game whose wobbly scout characters you've probably seen tumbling down mountainsides on social media over the last few days, was a product of indie dev collaboration. It was created as a partnership between Another Crab's Treasure developer Aggro Crab and Content Warning creators from Landfall, and according to the studio heads involved, the bulk of its development was a madcap game jam.
Initially, Aggro Crab studio head Nick Kaman said that Peak's development was motivated "mostly from jealousy."
Speaking to PC Gamer over email, Kaman said that when his team learned that Content Warning's core development was created during a month-long Landfall game jam in Korea, it "turned everything we know about game development upside-down."
"At the time we were on the precipice of launching our biggest game ever, Another Crab’s Treasure—an intense 3+ year-long project that burnt a lot of us out. While it was a success, Content Warning was a much bigger one made in MUCH less time," Kaman said.
Luckily for Aggro Crab, there had already been a friendly relationship between the studios. "When three of us asked if we could hop on that gravy train for a return trip the next year to Seoul (because obviously that's an important part of the formula), we got a resounding yes," Kaman said.
Just four months ago in February, three Aggro Crab devs and four of Landfall's regular collaborators descended upon an Airbnb in Seoul. "We brought our computers to an Airbnb in Hongdae and locked tf in for a month," Kaman said. "As soon as we landed, we beelined straight for the nearest IKEA and spent the day assembling office chairs and desks (that were donated to the local indie scene at the end of the month)."
Peak wasn't built entirely from scratch during those four weeks in Hongdae. "I pitched the idea for this game almost exactly one year ago in a hot tub in Sweden," said Aggro Crab creative director Caelan Rashby-Pollock. "The concept was a lot more vague then and much closer to an open-world survival thingy, but we all quickly got excited about being a group of lost scouts on an island, and the macabre slapstick that can come from that."
But once Aggro Crab and Landfall devs touched down in Seoul, it was all systems Peak.
"Basically any given moment was either working on Peak or getting food while talking more about Peak," Kaman said. "While it was pretty intense, it was also the most fun I’ve ever had working on a game." As Kaman tells it, that fun is probably responsible for Peak's 1 million sales.
"On a silly multiplayer game like this, the player experience often mirrors the development," Kaman said. "Most of the design was driven by the question: 'Wouldn’t it be funny if THIS happened?' And now every TikTok I’ve seen of a great moment in Peak reminds me of the great moment we had while implementing it."
Peak is available now on Steam.
