Games
We talk to Nelson Sexton, the teenage developer responsible for one of Steam’s most popular games.
Unturned may have only been officially released this July, but its story goes back much longer. The zombie survival sandbox has been playable since 2014; its creator, the then-16 year-old Nelson Sexton, has worked tirelessly in the intervening years to update and prepare the game for its eventual full release on Steam.
Its downloads number in the tens of millions, it has over 280 thousand player reviews on Steam – almost 260 thousand of them positive – has received over 260 official updates and at the time of writing it sits 13th on Steam’s most played games list, higher than Rust, Rocket League and even Skyrim. Sexton, a Canadian and native of Calgary, has designed and built these updates himself, the volume of additions and the scale of the diversification over and above the original release adding to Unturned’s appeal and providing fans with confidence as to the future appeal of the experience.
Unturned’s success as a solo venture makes it one of the most apt examples of how the commitment and dedication of an individual can lead to great things. Sexton only saw the possibility of being a full-time game creator after his game started to rise in reputation, however.
“I got started in GameMaker when I was nine years old,” he tells us. “After Unturned launched on Steam and exploded in popularity the possibility of [game making] becoming a career seemed more and more plausible. At this point I've basically committed to it as my job.”
Sexton’s initial goals had nothing to do with pleasing the huge volume of players he would go on to entertain. What he wanted to do was have total control over something that could be a source of focus and amusement for him and his friendship group, explaining that “initially there weren’t any particular goals with what to expand [in Unturned] beyond having control to change the game how I liked and play it with my friends.”
Increasingly, Unturned has been seen and celebrated as a source of originality and openness with the survival genre. On a technical level, its visual style is simplistic to a degree that, even in this post-Minecraft era, large publishers would be terrified to even attempt, but it’s this very simplicity that makes it easier to accept and indulge in its more complicated underbelly.
The crude, thickly painted blocks that makes up everything from character models to vehicles and trees to buildings stand in sharp contrast to equally well-established genre peers such as DayZ or ARK: Survival Evolved. By presenting complex systems within a simplistic aesthetic wrapper, Sexton has demonstrated that quality design leading to player engagement stems not from the visual element but with the ideas the visuals are able to communicate. And did we mention that he’s still a teenager?
Despite the rejection of the gloomier, nastier and more detailed graphics usually adopted by survival games, Sexton is open about his influences and it’s clear he is not trying to undermine the work done by others.
“Dean Hall and his creation, DayZ, were a big source of inspiration, and of course other games in the genre such as Rust, but I like to play a wide variety of games and bring in ideas from all of them.
“One particular aspect I love [about survival games] is the stress that losing hours of progress adds to the value of your life. You actually care if you die. It’s also fun being able to work essentially anything into the sandbox gameplay so I’m not really limited in what I can do with the game. Over time I’ve brought in features that I felt could really benefit the genre, for example NPCs and quests.”
Much of what we see from Unturned now has come not just from the mind of the creator but from the collective feedback garnered from the community, with Sexton saying: “there are things I specifically want to do because they're fun to work on or interesting, but most of the ideas come from feedback.”
The decision to opt for a free-to-play model was mainly inspired by the desire to build the player base to a big enough point whereby it would be able to provide a large volume of this kind of feedback. Further, Sexton explains that an “unintentional benefit” is that the lack of an entry fee means that players that might not be interested in a game of this sort run no risk in downloading Unturned and giving it a chance.
It’s not easy, however, to handle the pressure and demands of managing the creation of a game when so many people are watching you.
The 4.0 edition will revamp the game from scratch again.
“It was difficult dealing with all the attention at first,” Sexton reveals, “but over time I’ve gotten better at filtering the volume of it. Sometimes it can still be overwhelming. My parents are very polite people, which I think has helped raise me to maturely deal with the pressure.”
Unturned is presently in its 3.0 version, with Sexton now continuing to expand the offering, as well as beginning to put firm plans in place for the 4.0 edition that he says will “revamp the game from scratch again”.
The most recent additions include dynamic snowstorms, the ability to import custom decals into the game, a socket wrench tool for removing tyres from vehicles, the ability to lock and unlock cell doors and, because why ever not, German variations of emergency vehicles. Even for a genre as detailed and diverse as survival sandboxes, these are ideas that go well beyond what players would expect or even be able to imagine.
Having created all of this himself, Sexton is more experienced than most game designers and is young enough not to be locked into set ways of operating and thinking. Unturned might be taking the plaudits, but the real point of interest is its creator and what he does from now.
Unturned is Sexton’s first full release. What might the second bring?
