The story of Deathsquitoes, "rule of cool", and Valheim's journey: Robin Eyre, Art Director and Creative Lead [Sportskeeda Exclusive]

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When I first jumped into Valheim, I did not quite know what to expect. The Norse mythology and the multiplayer aspect attracted me but I wondered how the in-game experience would be. Banding together with your friends, you jump into a procedurally generated world and tackle its monstrosities to survive and further your adventure.Keeping aside the ridiculously low download size for an early access which was anything but "early access", Iron Gate Studio's offering instantly clicked with me and more than half a million other players around the world. The premise may seem simple on the surface, but, in essence, it was anything but. Be its visual allure, its almost realistic physics, and the in-game world content, you can pretty easily sink hundreds of hours in Valheim without even noticing.And to shed a light on this developmental journey and to answer some of my personal curiosities, Robin Eyre, the Art Director and Creative Lead behind Valheim, agreed to a quick chat with me. In the discussion laid below, you will read his thoughts about Iron Gate's design philosophy, the birth of the Deathsquitoes, Valheim's striking art style, and plenty more.Valheim dev on the game and its journeyQ: Why did you guys choose procedurally generated maps and non-persistent servers?Robin: At the core for us at Iron Gate, we like to be surprised when we play our games. We want to go in and play our games and feel a little bit blind on going in. And it just felt like the replayability and being able to discover things over and over again from the beginning.Exploring in Valheim (Image via Iron Gate Studio)I am one of those players who love Meadows. So I am doing a new playthrough, and I go through Meadows, and then it’s Black Forest, and I think, “Yeah, it is nice,” but I just like Meadows. Even though we all know what it is, we all know Meadows look similar even though you make a new playthrough, but it’s a little bit surprising. We like to be surprised, so that [procedurally generated map] is mostly due to that.[Regarding non-persistent servers] There have been so many back and forth about what Valheim could have been. In the beginning, it was like a way to make an MMO peer-to-peer connected. It was an experiment from the beginning – a peer-to-peer connected MMO, but then everything needed to be like a game. So it was like, where would we place this game, because it is a bit boring if you are just having blocks.It is easier to tighten up everything if you have some kind of a theme behind it. From the beginning, at its core, it was an experiment to play around with the P2P connected MMO.Q: I think one of the most striking features of Valheim that immediately caught my eye was its art style. One of my favorite things to do, even so many years later, is to watch the sun rise from my fort beside the sea. Can you share more light on the thought process that went behind the design decision?Robin: It actually comes down to the necessity, the scale, and the scope. If you had to be one person alone working on this game, the art style had to be as simple as possible but as inviting as possible, and scoped out as small as possible to be able to produce everything yourself.If you are one person, you might not be able to – you could, I am not saying it is impossible, but if you are shooting for a Riot Games’ kind of League of Legends style or Blizzard or something painterly and stylized that takes a lot of your time and effort, then all of a sudden, you are just doing art and not doing other pieces of the game.The slow life in Valheim (Image via Iron Gate Studio)So it had to be something small, easy, effective, and easy to produce. The model lighting in the post process effects were just to keep it shiny, nice, and inviting. You want to be able to play your own game, but you also have to be able to produce your own game.Angshuman: With how popular Valheim’s art, especially the environment, has gotten, retrospectively, would you say that it was an intentional design choice to keep it like that? Just not about allocating manpower but intentionally keeping it like that – low poly, low res, but also absolutely beautiful in the environment.Robin: Certain things were established very early, like how the art style should be. Obviously, before going into early access, we made some decisions regarding a few changes, but we had always been trying to figure out where the limit was.I think we had an example of this when I created the Bone Shield – the Bone Tower Shield, where it is low fidelity, high details in the mesh, but it is also very low poly, so it’s like a lot of bones, but you can’t have too many because then it actually differed from everything in the game. I think that’s where we found out that this is the limit where we want to be regarding the level of detail. But that wasn’t until Hearth and Home, so that was still like we had already released into Early Access, and it had been six or seven months. It is always an ongoing process trying to find where the borders are and how much you can push.Because another mishap that can happen when you are doing bigger game projects like this is that, as you get better at doing stuff and your taste in art might change during the long process, so the game style might look a little bit different when you have gone into the end game. Thus, you have to maintain that consistency all the time. You have to have these borders and limits, and you need to find where they are.Q: Valheim has an interesting balance between survival and exploration aspects. Was this intentional? How has it been crafting and developing both aspects (and maintaining that balance) with the introduction of new biomes over the years?Robin: We have never seen Valheim as a survival game ourselves. We were borrowing a lot of the survival mechanics, I guess. We see it like an adventure game – that is always what we wanted to create.Feasting in Valheim (Image via Iron Gate Studio)That is why we have made the design decisions to not be able to starve or not be able to die from hunger. We wanted to flip that on the other side, instead, like, “Hey, you are really weak if you are not eating, but if you do eat food, you would get stronger instead”. The place is set in the purgatory, where dying is not fun. So we wanted to focus on the positivity, where we wanted to incentivise you to cook and to get armor. We would rather lean on the positive effects than on the negative effects.Once we had a few biomes up and running, we kind of knew how we wanted everything to be. It is a kind of rinse and repeat, doing a new biome; however, we wanted each biome to feel unique, not just like how it looks, but the enemies you encounter, making it more difficult, and some specific mechanics. For example, Plains for the longest time was called Heathlands.We wanted to have pipes. The play mechanic was going to be that it was a dry place in the Fall or Autumn period. But you were going to have to use pipes to direct water lines for agricultural and stuff. But it was a little bit difficult – if you could draw pipes from one side of the Plains to the other side, and we are loading in zones, would the water still be directed through the pipe as we are unloading zones and stuff?It is a lot of complicated stuff, and we try to find these small mechanics that drive specific themes around the biomes. While the base of crafting and food have to stay the same, we want to give you a different challenge.Q: What’s been Iron Gate’s development philosophy while changing or fine-tuning aspects like combat, enemies, and quality-of-life changes?Robin: We have been a small team for a very long time. Jonathan entered as the second programmer on Valheim. He is a huge quality-of-life proponent. When he got in, that gave us the chance to do more QoL stuff. We try our best to keep up to date on certain things as long as they fit inside our philosophy within the game design.Normally, we have our vision for Valhei,m but the way we work has always been like we want to get it up to just good enough. If everything is consistent and everything is just good enough, like 80% to 90%, the last 10% you could polish forever – could spend years if you wanted to. So we have always had like, “Oh, this feels good enough, we have the VFX, we have the SFX, we have the feeling, we have it all, so this is good enough, so check that as ready and done”. That has always been our guiding star – good enough. And of course rule of cool.There is a lot of cool stuff in Valheim (Image via Iron Gate Studio)If someone comes up with a bloody cool idea, we will just stick it in the game. That’s always been so. I just remember walking into a room where people were having a discussion, and I was wondering before, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we didn’t have a map? What if we didn’t have a map in the game? Can I play the game without a map?” So I walk into the room and say, “Hey, can we just disable the map and call it no map or something and see if people can handle that? Because I would love to play that”.I thought it was a cool idea, and now it is actually a thing in the game. It is a small thing, but it changes the entire game if you try to play it no-map. You then have to try to find waypoints and put up stuff yourself to remember where you have been. But it is always small things like that. The rule of cool, I would say, almost trumps good enough.Q: Why Norse mythology? Did the team consider any other mythology before building the gameworld?Robin: It has always been a Viking game since the start. The tendencies have been leaning towards Viking all the time. It is a lot of Norse mythology, the whole setting is that, but a lot of what we have in Valheim is actually more Swedish and Scandinavian folklore than actual Norse mythology. The setting and premise are Viking Age, but Valheim itself is more of a Scandinavian mythology and folklore.Angshuman: What would you say is the source text for the lore or folktales you guys got influenced by?Robin: We have a lot of the creatures from Scandinavian folklore. There is this naked guy in the forest who would drown people in the rivers ,and he is named Näcken. All the Necks in Valheim come from here. We could obviously not put naked dudes down at the river. So we had to find something else.We also have something else called the Abomination in Swamps. That comes from the folklore in Sweden, where it is the Rotvälta, where parents tell their kids not to play around trees that have fallen down because you have the roots sticking up, because then the Rotvälta can swallow you up. That’s where the Abomination comes from.The Draugr, obviously, is from Norse mythology, the dead coming back as zombies. We have more sprinkled out throughout the world – it is definitely a mix between the Norse mythology and Swedish folklore.Q: Why the Deathsquitoes? (That’s it, that’s the question) Jokes apart, how did the team come upon the pesky enemy idea? Did you guys have a chuckle on seeing the community posts surrounding it?Robin: It was Richard and I, probably early morning, 8 or 9, we always spent that time talking and discussing, be it about cars or what’s happening around the world. We both love Diablo 1 and 2, and we were just talking about enemies in the Plains and whether there is anything we can add. In Diablo 2, there were these mosquito swarms that would fly around the desert, I think. It is like one enemy, but there are lots of mosquitoes in one swarm, so you are attacking a big swarm.We were talking like, “What if we had a swarm of mosquitoes trying to kill you?”, then Richard goes, “What if we had one big fat mosquito that was trying to kill you?”, and then I go, “What if it is called a Deathsquito?”. That’s how it was born. Just by the name itself, “So if it is going to be called a Deathsquito, it has to pack a big punch.” (laughs)We put that in there, and I don’t think we intended for it to become the guardian of the Plain,s but I think that’s what happened, just out of it being fast, which makes it very difficult to see it in the distance. Once you know it is there, you are absolutely terrified of entering Plains too early.And it is a happy accident, going from a swarm of mosquitoes to a big fat mosquito to calling it Deathsquito to Deathsquito means that it needs to hit hard. And that was like two minutes of talking, and then we spent a day putting it together, throwing it into the game, and trying it out. The story of the Deathsquito.Angshuman: And now it terrorizes people.Robin: Yes. Nice!Q: Nearly half a decade after the early access launch, has community feedback influenced how Iron Gate Studio developed the title or added any content? If so, how?Robin: We do look a lot at people’s feedback. Ashlands was one of those things that we did change a lot with how the enemies came in. But it has also been stuff from how you manage chests and being able to handle the inventory space within them. We try to listen as much as possible, but it is also very difficult to filter everything from the players.You can be quite the builder in Valheim (Image via Iron Gate Studio)We have two or three distinct player bases – we call them the A, B, and C of Valheim – the Adventures, the Builders, and the Combat people. What we try to do is we try to listen and read between the lines a lot of times. We call it shinies when we try to give someone a new weapon or a new build piece. We try to cater as much as we can and listen to feedback, but at the same time, it is difficult to balance the whole game after just listening to Builders. If the core community is just Builders, they would just want to build and get most of the things for free at least. But at the same time, if you are balancing just for the Combat people, then the Builders would not get anywhere by the end.We also want to make the progress more difficult as you progress through the game as well. That’s always a little bit difficult. We have this linear progress throughout the game with damage, with food, and how we balance stuff. But then we have these outliers where some creatures will do massive damage, like the Deathsquitoes. I would like to say that we listen to the community as much as we can and try to implement where we are able to.Q: From the developers’ perspective, why do you think Valheim became an instant hit?Robin: Nobody really knows, but I have my theories. I think we released into a period – this is a very hot take – where you had big AAA games releasing at the same time, getting a lot of heat for being buggy and not polished enough. I think when we released it in the beginning of the year, in February, it was a good time for us to release because it was COVID. People were not allowed to spend time with each other, and I think that was a very big thing.The amount of mail we received, “Hey, thanks for helping me connect with my brother, with whom I played the game, it was a great opportunity to reconnect with my brother”. There were so much mail in that manner. I guess that’s [COVID] not why, but that’s probably after.But I think with the games coming in unpolished and very buggy, and having a survival game with trees that could actually kill you was very new at the time. In most of the survival games, you cut down trees, and now it’s on the ground, and you pick stuff up. People were not really expecting trees to kill people, and I think that helped on Twitch, with streamers having a very interesting and fun time.I think it’s a lot to do with the combination of COVID, AAA kind of failing, and we released into early access with Valheim being a full game. We always try to keep in mind that this is not an early access game but a full game, so we need to work at it and behave like this is a full game and never think like, “Oh, we will fix that later”. Everything has to be good, done, and dusted.So I think when we released it, people were playing a game in early access for a very small/low price point, low download size – and it wasn’t planned or anything, it is a small download size.Angshuman: How did you guys manage that? How is the file size still so low?Robin: So we have a good build script that we use. If you look at AA or AAA assets in other games, they are much higher. The textures are a big, big culprit, especially with 4K textures. We downscale all our textures to 64p or 140p. They are so small and with a low poly and with a good build script, we can get it down to a very small size. You wouldn’t think that it would matter, but it does. When we released, I remember people were like, “It’s not the full game, it’s just a 1000 MB,” and people started playing it, and then, “It is the full game, it looks like it is the entire game on 1000 MB”.It was cheap to buy, it was easy to get a hold of, AAA was failing, it was COVID, it was easy to share with or buy for each other – those are the biggest things. And I hope it’s also because Valheim is a good game. (laughs)Angshuman: That’s a given. That’s a given.Q: There are a few lifehacks that Valheim players quickly found, like using the troll for collecting resources, building trenches, using the hoe to get high ground, or digging a hole to tame animals. In the team’s opinion, what has been the most creative and/or unexpected one?Robin: When I saw Let’s Game It Out making a video on Valheim, and I was like, “Oh my god, our game is so broken”, but the fact that you could build campfires to kill bosses and kite them through it. (laughs)Eikthyr before Valheim's early access wasn’t a lightnight stag at all. It was just a normal deer with no chains or lightnight powers. We had players building stuff in the trees, spawning the boss, standing up in the trees, and killing Eikthry – just cheesing. We thought about how we could fix that – what if it had lightning damage to break the trees or pull down lightning from the skies to help prevent the cheese. But no, then people started building fires and kiting him through fires – they will go through any lengths to make it an easy fight.And I think it is great to have that kind of community as well. I adore that we have a community that wants to break the game, to make it as easy as possible, and find these small things. But the list is many and long, and I don’t even know where to start. (laughs) We have tried to fix these things to try to balance out the game.The fact that you can build a little hut in the Mountains and try to get Moder to land over the hut and build a big bonfire under her as she is trying to reach you, and let the bonfire just burn her. There are so many cheesy things that you can do – and I salute you.Q: What is your favorite boss of the game?Robin: That’s so difficult. I love making creatures, I love doing monsters. Monsters and creatures are more interesting than people. (chuckles) And getting to design them is so fun. But the cleanest fight is Bonemass, a tactical and timely fight where you have to handle Bonemass spawning enemies that can overwhelm you if left unchecked. You also have to consider the poison, and you also have to do it in the Swamp, where the environment is fighting against you. And all of these things are happening at the same time - it’s the worst place, it’s the ugliest boss, but how it feels makes it for me the most fun boss.Various enemies in Valheim (Image via Iron Gate Studio)The most fun boss to be created is Fader. I think that fight is exceptionally stressful and difficult. You are in Ashlands, and you are fighting Fader; a lot of things can go wrong. But the most fun boss to play against is Queen, because you go into this place, whichis more of an arena and her grounds.I love the design of her and that boss fight. I love to play it, especially with friends, with a Feathered Cape just falling down. Like if you are at the top and you are falling down to the bottom and you are like, “I hope she is not standing where I am going to land”. And most of the time, she just teleports there, ready to gobble you up.Q: With the 1.0 release looming ahead, did the developers always have a roadmap in place on how it would look? Did the team add content/mechanics that weren’t planned initially?Robin: Before we went into early access, there was a plan that if we were not successful, we would just finish up the Plains and not continue making Mistalnds, Ashlands, and Deep North. They were already in the game, their spots. We would just have left them out.But since then, going into Mistlands, we wanted to redesign it from what it was originally intended to be, for good or for worse, depending on who you ask. But Ashlands definitely took a step towards being a place of rage and hate and war. That was important for me to lean into the catapults and your wagons – having the feeling of war. And going into Deep North, I think it’s going to be very interesting for people to come and play when Deep North is ready for everyone.A lot of things have changed. You could say that – we changed what Mistlands was intended to be, we changed what Ashlands was intended to be, and I definitely think we have changed what Deep North was intended to be.The world of Valheim (Image via Iron Gate Studio)Valheim released in early access on February 2, 2021, and is currently available on Linux, WIndows, macOS, Xbox One and Series X|S. Players are looking forward to the release of Deep North (biome) and 1.0 (full release) in 2026.