12 Episodes in 3 Years: How a Fast-Updating Dutch Studio Built Gaming's Own Twin Peaks

Reaching the ideal state between players and developers

One of the most common binds an indie studio faces is how to get its vision seen and recognized by more people — how to sell enough copies of a game to keep making the work it actually wants to make.

A Dutch studio that built a "12-episode series" may hold a few lessons for other developers. Starting with several interconnected free titles, Robin & Maarten gradually built a world unlike anyone else's: the puzzle series Rusty Lake / Cube Escape is, like the show it pays tribute to, Twin Peaks, packed scene after scene with mystery and suspense, its story dark and richly imagined. What matters is that players turned into something like that show's die-hard fans — kept hooked by clues scattered across each installment, willing to wait, to speculate, and to pay. That is what carried the studio through 12 games in 3 years, nine of them free.

The first installment, Cube Escape: The Lake, opened the Rusty Lake universe in April 2015. Its visuals were spare, but its surprises hit as hard as any paid game's. Players taken by its unsettling mood and strange puzzle logic soon found another surprise: Seasons (also carrying the Cube Escape prefix), released the very next day, showed a setting completely unlike The Lake — yet it held one extra, apparently useless code, exactly the one needed to open the locked box in The Lake and change a character's fate.

That is uncommon in puzzle games. Step back further, and even a puzzle "series" is a rarity. In a fiercely crowded app store, it is hard enough to get a single indie puzzle game enough downloads; you rarely see a developer keep a series going and still make a living.

Rusty Lake's strategy was to keep shipping high-quality updates, win loyal players, and only then think about money. It pinned its hopes on mutual trust between developer and player, and on both sides doing their best.

Over the following months, Cube Escape rolled out one new installment after another, each in a different setting. Among them were Arles — set in Van Gogh's studio in Arles, recreating his painting style and folding in stories from his life — and Harvey's Box, in which the player is a bird trying to escape a sealed cardboard box. The reasons behind each design differed (they felt Van Gogh's paintings and his life fit the series' themes exactly; animals, meanwhile, mattered too much to the series to leave out), but the developers managed to vary the puzzles and the mechanics through those different settings, and in the end every setting was pulled back onto a single main thread — not a loose, barely-there connection, but a real one, like a television series screened out of order.

The series' signature traits emerged quickly: puzzle mechanics odd enough to demand lateral thinking, a mood that mixes horror and black comedy, storylines that stand alone yet interlock, and tributes to David Lynch's Twin Peaks at every turn.

Unlike the dry atmosphere and textbook scares of most puzzle games (overusing horror props and jump scares, say), the series found a balance between "unsettling" and "funny." Robin's explanation is that with every new game they try to work in some "special fun" along with an eerie "Rusty Lake moment" — the kind of moment players cannot stop thinking about after the game ends. Most of the time the game stays calm; the developers save the hair-raising scene or the jump-scare trick for exactly the right moment, the moment they want players sliding to the edge of their seats.

The games scare you now and then; they also keep you confused. Yet the scattered clues seem to add up to something true, which is precisely what pulls in curious players. Taken as a whole, though, the story is a large hole being filled in slowly — because, just like a TV show, it is being told in installments.

"No, we didn't have the whole story worked out from the very start. We only had a rough plan for what kind of universe this would be and what themes it would be built on. When we released the first two games, we had no idea whether they'd succeed in terms of downloads. Without enough downloads it would have been hard to keep the series going, so we weren't thinking that far ahead."

In fact it already had the ingredients of success. Beyond well-made puzzles, a mood distinctive enough to stand out, and the linking mechanics, one thing cannot be overlooked: the games were completely free, carried almost no ads, and still held more content than most paid games. The App Store is full of overpriced puzzle games whose playtime does not necessarily beat any single Cube Escape installment.

Six free games like these came out within half a year — sustained, frequent, high-quality free updates. That is what gave Rusty Lake a foothold among puzzle fans.

By the seventh episode of this "series," both the story and the business model changed. Rusty Lake Hotel, the seventh installment, was the first to ask players to pay. "We couldn't keep doing it forever, because we were about to go broke," Robin explains. "Luckily, by designing those free games, we'd already invested a lot in the player community. That created a community that was especially eager to engage, one where we could cross-promote and keep people interested in new projects." Once they had the idea for Hotel, they asked the community straight away whether they would buy the game to support them. "Fortunately most people said yes, so Hotel became our own version of 'crowdfunding.'"

With that precedent, the two of them could alternate free and paid games to suit the community's spending habits. One benefit of alternating was that the paid titles carried less pressure — because players knew they were really supporting a whole series, including the free games they had already played.

Still, the developers knew a paid game had to be designed differently from the free ones, or players would not stay loyal, stay interested in what came next, or keep trusting them.

"We knew Rusty Lake Hotel first had to have an interesting story of its own, one that could stand alone, while still carrying the atmosphere players had come to expect from the Cube Escape series. Tying those five rooms [in Hotel] into a bigger, more interesting storyline turned out to work quite well."

"With every paid game we release, we try to improve on many fronts. For Hotel, we tried to build a shorter, fun story with the right atmosphere. Rusty Lake: Roots is more of a deep story — you accumulate information as you play, and there are so many characters across the whole family tree that we can develop them fully. We think Rusty Lake Paradise combines the strengths of both — a story that's easy to explain, while still letting you watch a family's characters and history develop as you play."

Going one step further than the free games on every front became the rule for the two paid titles that followed. So far, they have pulled it off. The three paid games carry on Cube Escape's plot and mood, but they feel quite different at first touch: the design is more ingenious, the art finer and more considered, the puzzles larger and more complex, the stories clearer and more complete.

Here the idea of the "locked room" widened — the settings move into more rooms, even into open outdoor space; the narrative grows complex enough to span four generations of family history, the timeline stretches, and relationships and characters fill in; the chapter design turns more artful. Roots, for instance, has a family tree that branches into different side stories, its branches eventually crossing to explain where certain stories came from, while Paradise, built on the "ten plagues of Egypt," offers ten styles of puzzle set and a steeper challenge.

The puzzles do not come first. Robin says that in building these three standalone titles, they first had to find an interesting theme or place and build the whole game around it. The family tree of Roots and the plague-struck island of Paradise were those initial themes. Once the overall idea was sketched out, the next step was to draw the characters, build each one's storyline, and start designing some early puzzles. If the first playable version held up, they kept adding story detail on top of it.

Twelve games in, puzzle ideas inevitably start to repeat, and players get better at solving them. For a studio always hunting for new puzzles and new mechanics, design keeps getting harder — but they can draw on different environmental elements, and they already have a player community invested enough to give feedback all the time.

Another way to find something fresh is to try something entirely different — even to change medium. Robin & Maarten plan to make a film this year. They got in touch with Sean Van Leijenhorst, a horror director and a friend from high school, whose award-winning short Banshee drew good reviews on YouTube. The Rusty Lake pair felt the style of his short fit the series, so the three began work on a spin-off film — "adapted from the games, with plenty of scenes players will recognize at a glance, but one that also has to interest people who've never played them." Paired with the film, naturally, is a new Cube Escape game.

Three years have now passed since the first Cube Escape went up. As noted, few developers can keep up Rusty Lake's pace — updates that go far beyond bug fixes, demanding new stories, new designs, and new ways of telling them. How much they have put into this universe of their own making also shows in their development blog and their constant contact with players (to reach players abroad, they even opened a Weibo account with help from translators). In the end it is high-quality design that keeps players around, and diligence and enthusiasm that sustain the trust — holding the relationship between players and developers at its ideal.

Below is a Q&A that contains some spoilers

Q = QDaily

R = Robin

Q: About the family tragedy that hangs over this series — do you have some fixation on family tragedy? Does anyone get a happy ending?

R: Family tragedy is something everyone can relate to on some level, and given that the rooms in the series are small and square (the setting itself is limited), that meant we had to set the right atmosphere from the very start. Family tragedy happened to give us the perfect backdrop.

Q: Did you work out the characters' personalities right at the start, or did they evolve as the games went on? Does anyone actually get a happy ending?

R: A lot of the characters evolved over time — Dale and Laura in the Cube Escape series, for instance. Our paid games were different. For both Roots and Paradise, we tried to build every character from a blank slate, so they could evolve as you play.

Q: The ending of Paradise explains, to some extent, why we had to kill those guests in Hotel. So had you already thought of that while making Hotel — that players might one day clear themselves of the guilt?

R: While we were making Hotel, we already knew those animal characters had lived human lives long before they visited the hotel. The idea for Paradise came much later, and we thought it was wonderful to be able to connect the two series at last.

Q: Which installment is your personal favorite — as a game, or from a development standpoint?

R: If we have to pick, we'd say Seasons or Theatre. We love Seasons because it was our first work, and we found the "time travel" idea genuinely interesting ourselves. Theatre is the one where the atmosphere is exactly right, told through an important character who reveals the most crucial elements of this universe.

Q: What's the most exciting, and the most annoying, part of development?

R: The most satisfying part is finding a new idea for a puzzle, or coming up with a Rusty Lake moment you sense people will remember. The most annoying part has to be the last few weeks of development, when we have to play the game hundreds of times to clear out every bug!

Q: What were you doing before you made games? What turned you into game developers?

R: Neither of us had a background in making games — I studied law, and Maarten studied landscape architecture. I built interfaces for small flash games, and Maarten made flash games as a hobby, and in the end we worked together anyway, making a few tiny, news-based stories that took off quickly. After trying more than 50 games with different mechanics, we felt escape-room and point-and-click adventure games were the best fit for a series.

Q: What opportunities and challenges do indie developers face now? Any advice for beginners?

R: For developers, nothing is harder than working on a game for years, releasing it, and falling short of the downloads you expected or deserved, so you can't keep going. They need to put a lot of energy into building their own player community; people need to know about your game before it launches. Our advice is to make and release some small projects first, get some feedback, see what works, and then spend a lot of time building up a player base.

Q: What excites you most about the game industry right now?

R: For us the most amazing thing is still this: we're two independent developers, and the moment we press publish, someone on the other side of the planet can download it straight to their phone and play it on the way to work. Small team or big company? It doesn't matter. Online platforms make it easy for developers like us to reach players everywhere.

Q: Recommend a book, a game, or a film.

R: For films: Donnie Darko, Being John Malkovich, Under the Skin, Enemy, and anything by David Lynch. For writers: Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster.

Cover image from the Rusty Lake official website