Founded in 2017, Under the Stairs is a small indie game development studio based in Zagreb, Croatia. They are known for Eyes In The Dark, a beautiful and haunting “roguelite” game released in 2022, which was designed on Wacom devices.
The team is hard at work on their next game, “Heritage,” which will be a fantasy strategy game with tactical combat and world-shaping decisions.
As they work on the new project, Wacom tools have continued to be essential. In this interview, they discuss their process and how Wacom fits into their game development workflow. They also give a few behind-the-scenes looks at the new game! Watch and/or read the interview below.
How do you use Wacom tablets in your workflow? What is it like doing design on them, and how does it affect the creative process?
Domagoj Bilušić, Game Artist: Well, I personally use it at every part of the workflow every single day. And having a device so both of us — like one of the designers and me, an artist — we both need a dedicated device that can kind kind of translate those creative ideas into the game itself. We can just work on it on a tablet each, because we each have our own device, and if one of us needs something from the other we can just yell it across the office and the other one can do it immediately.
Filip Neduk, Game Designer: I usually use the Wacom tablet in like, everyday life. I’ve been using it for like 15 years, and it’s great at everything. It kind of makes your work flow faster, because you have features that you don’t have in traditional art. I usually say it’s the only pencil that you’ll ever need. So you can basically have all these shapes and colors just in one pencil, and the feature I like the most is the “undo” button.
What portions of character design do you work on digitally? Are there parts of the process that are easier to do when working on a tablet?
Neduk: I do most of my character design digitally. I used to do them first traditionally, but I figured out it’s much faster [digitally]. Because it lets me do things that that I couldn’t do otherwise, like I can iterate really fast. I can cut things up, I can scale, I can recolor them in a second. It’s really fast and really effective and saves a lot of time.
Bilušić: Well, I like to start the process of character design with sketching it out on paper first, and then after that I like to slide the tablet over on my desk and start kind of translating that immediately into digital form. Because it’s much easier on a tablet to kind of adjust things if you need to just adjust them a little bit. You can play around with colors, you can play around with line weights, and all of that. You have much more control digitally than you have in, say, a sketchbook.
For those who are new to the game development industry, what about Wacom makes it a good fit for your studio?
Vladimir Bogdanić, Director: We’ve always been a very, sort of art-focused studio, and we feel that in today’s environment with so much generative AI and overall hyperproduction, it’s really important to stand out visually. So having a distinctive style or just a specific art direction, I feel, is super important in today’s environment that helps us stand out. Having hardware that can remove those barriers to entry is a huge selling point for us and very important and is kind of core to our studio’s philosophy.
Bilušić: I started my digital journey in 2018. Up until then, I was working with markers, traditional stuff like that. But later on I switched to Wacom. I got that as a present from a family member, and I immediately noticed that it was super easy to use and get to know for any beginner, because I was as beginner as it gets.
Neduk: I think that owning a Wacom tablet, if you’re a game developer, it’s standard now. I think every studio should use it. It really just saves time. It’s really an efficient machine.
What programs do you use for different parts of the design process? Is it something that can only be done on the tablet? How does Wacom fill those needs?
Bilušić: I use Autodesk SketchBook Pro and I use Spine. I use Autodesk Sketchbook Pro for designing characters, or the locations or whatever, and I use Spine for animating those same characters. Because animation is such a precise process, and a precise kind of technique to do, every little movement matters and having a tool that can really carefully adjust those frames by frames is very important. And for drawings just by themselves, it’s very important to have control over line weights for me, personally, because I have these grungy little tiny lines that like to taper off and whatever, and that defines my style and the style of the game itself that we’re making. Having that kind of control over everything, I think, is specific only to tablets.
What are you most excited to work on as Heritage continues to develop? What has the early evolution of the game looked like so far?
Bogdanić: So it’s definitely been kind of more exploratory than we initially imagined. It’s just been a lot of iterations, a lot of challenges to kind of get the mechanics that we want, to make sure that everything kind of fits into place. That’s usually kind of the fun stuff, just iterating on specific mechanics
Neduk: I’m mostly looking forward to kind of seeing it all come together. The game has been … we’ve been iterating a lot on a lot of systems, and just seeing everything click is what I’m looking most forward to. To see it as the experience that we wanted to make.
Bilušić: I’m most excited about working on the style itself, and defining it into a very cohesive thing. Both the environments and the characters and everything, because up until now we’ve been experimenting a lot with styles. So whether it’s the character styles, the animation styles, the environmental styles and all that … I’m very excited to kind of find what vibe fits best for the game. Since early on, when I joined the team, the game is kind of completely different than what it is right now. We’ve kind of been trying to fill those holes that we need to, style-wise.
Bogdanić: Now we’re finally at this moment where things are starting to kind of lock down and we’re kind of entering production slowly. So it’s a little bit easier, and a little bit more exciting as well, because we we’ve kind of crossed that threshold of uncertainty and not really knowing like what the final experience is going to look like.
About the studio
Founded in 2017, Under the Stairs is a small indie game development studio based in Zagreb, Croatia. Led by a tight-knit group who grew up playing all sorts of games across all sorts of genres and mediums, Under the Stairs is a place where imaginations and hobbies run wild.
The studio released the critically acclaimed game Eyes In The Dark in 2022. Their next game, Heritage, is set to be released in 2026.
