The Outlast Trials' initial playtests went poorly: Designer says 6-year development took 'a f**king long time' and 'a s**t-ton of prototypes'

Gamedev may as well be conducted in a black box as far as many players are concerned, so it can be easy to think of a good game as one where development went smoothly and a bad game as one where things went terribly awry. But in the case of The Outlast Trials, making something sickeningly good took a lot of struggle.

As Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin told Gamespot in a recent interview, it took six years to turn the vague notion of a co-op Outlast game into something ready to launch via early access. It was "a fucking long time," as he recalled it, and the product of "a shit-ton of prototypes."

"[The Red Barrels team] went too far trying to make [The Outlast Trials] systemic, random, and trying to reach our ultimate goal of infinite replayability," he told Gamespot. "We needed to come back to something that maybe added less replayability, but definitely felt more like Outlast." …