Making a Co-Op Survival Horror with Lovecraftian Creatures Set in Antarctica
Nord Unit's Co-Founder and CEO Fedor Danilov talks about what inspired the visuals and mechanics of UNFROST, explains how and why they changed the movement of the main in-game enemy once the prototype was built, and sheds light on the team's Unity workflow.
Introduction
UNFROST is being developed by an extremely small team. Basically, there are two core developers: Fedor and Alex.
Fedor is responsible for the overall game direction, design, production, and marketing. Alex focuses on programming, systems, gameplay, and technical implementation. At the same time, game design is very much a shared creative process for us: we discuss and develop the core mechanics, ideas, and major decisions together.
Fedor: I came into game development from graphic design in 2016, when I founded Nord Unit. In 2018, we released our first game, Hyperforma. From the beginning, I was interested in creating games as a cohesive experience: combining visuals, sound, and mechanics in a way that gives the player something new.
For a long time, Nord Unit focused primarily on mobile platforms. At that time, it seemed more accessible for a small team and was also a rapidly growing market. But over time we found ourselves spending more time on monetization and economy than on actual games. That was quite far from the reasons we had originally started making games.
UNFROST became, in many ways, an opportunity for us to return to that original idea: making a game first and foremost for the experience itself.
Alex: I also spent many years working in mobile games, from hyper-casual projects to much more complex MMOs. One of the last major projects I worked on was the mobile MMO Broken Sun. I also released several indie projects on Steam before UNFROST.
So our backgrounds and day-to-day responsibilities are different, but we are essentially building UNFROST together – from the earliest ideas and prototypes to the final gameplay.
Getting Started with UNFROST
At the very beginning, we wanted to build a game around the feeling that the player is not just fighting enemies – the environment itself is working against them. Antarctica felt almost perfect for that: cold, snow, poor visibility, huge empty spaces, and isolation already create tension before you add anything supernatural.
Two major inspirations immediately came to mind in that setting: John Carpenter's The Thing and H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. That's where cosmic horror comes up: biological anomalies, unknown life forms, psychological effects, and entities so powerful that an ordinary human being should feel fundamentally outmatched by them.
That led to one of the central ideas behind UNFROST: you cannot just shoot the 'main creature' until it dies. A Riftborn is simultaneously a threat, an object of research, and the goal of the mission. Players have to investigate it, find traces of its presence, understand what exactly they are dealing with, and only then figure out how to destroy it.
UNFROST is aimed first of all at players who enjoy cooperative horror where success depends not only on shooting and reflexes, but also on communication, shared problem-solving, and adapting to situations where nothing goes according to plan. We are also very interested in systemic games, where memorable moments emerge from mechanics interacting with each other rather than only from scripted sequences.
Building the Game's World
UNFROST is set in the near future. Antarctica becomes the center of a global threat after ancient ruins of unknown origin are discovered beneath layers of ice that have remained untouched for millennia. Research into the ruins leads to the appearance of rifts connecting our world to other dimensions.
The rifts become a source of enormous energy and new technologies, but at the same time, they trigger the rapid collapse of research stations within their sphere of influence. Contact with expeditions is lost, personnel lose their sanity, and life forms begin to emerge from anomalous zones that cannot be classified in any conventional way.
The most dangerous of them are the Riftborn – gigantic entities that can affect the human mind. What makes it trickier is that destroying them from a safe distance is impossible: to understand the nature of a particular Riftborn and discover its vulnerability, expeditions have to enter the area under its influence. Players take part in these operations. Every mission is simultaneously an investigation, an attempt to complete a contractor's objective, and a risk that the team may not return at all.
Deciding on Visual Style
We wanted UNFROST to feel realistic and recognizable, because we think cosmic horror works best when something impossible seeps into a world the player already believes in. The visual language of UNFROST is built around the intersection of three main environments:
- Antarctica itself: natural landscapes, ice, snow, rock, and vast empty spaces;
- Human-made environment: research stations, technical structures, and equipment. This side of the world is dominated by straight lines, sharp edges, and functional industrial forms;
- Extraterrestrial biomass: this one contrasts with everything created by humans. Its language is organic: webs, roots, growths, rounded surfaces, and structures whose purpose or origin is not always immediately understandable.
The second major element of our visual language is scale. Antarctica constantly allows us to emphasize how small and vulnerable a human being is: huge empty spaces, limited visibility, snowstorms, small stations in the middle of icy environments, and a gigantic creature that may be somewhere far away in the sky.
That is why lighting, weather, and visibility are not simply ways to make a scene look beautiful for us. They directly support the horror experience. Sometimes the player can see the threat from hundreds of meters away; sometimes they can only see its silhouette or the consequences of its presence; and sometimes they realize it is nearby only because the world around them begins to change.
Development Tools
We use Unity 6 primarily because we know the ecosystem very well. When the team is small, it is especially important to move from an idea to a working prototype as quickly as possible and find out whether a mechanic actually works. The High Definition Render Pipeline also allows us to achieve the visual quality that fits our art direction.
We also use several custom tools for procedural generation. They help us save time during production and get to actual gameplay faster.
For example, we have a procedural generator for Antarctic bases. We first design the layout in Figma, then bring it into Unity, configure the assets for walls, floors, and ceilings, place the doors, and very quickly get the basic structure of a complete location.
After that, we work on the environment manually, adding details, unique objects, lighting, and everything a particular location needs. This lets us automate the most repetitive part of production while still keeping full manual control over the final result.
Game Mechanics
The main idea is that every mission begins with uncertainty. Missions are procedurally generated: the location, the placement of key objects, and the clues connected to a particular Riftborn – they all change. Players cannot simply memorize a single optimal route in advance.
The Riftborn is the central mechanic of the mission. Conventional weapons cannot destroy it, so encountering one becomes an investigation. Players explore abandoned bases, caves, and anomalous zones to collect clues and try to understand the creature's vulnerability. Once they have enough information, they need to prepare the correct combination of warheads and call in a nuclear strike capable of eliminating the target.
At the same time, the Riftborn does not wait for the players. It is present in the world throughout the mission and constantly applies pressure: it affects the characters' perception of reality, reacts to their actions, can attack directly, and can even destroy parts of the map. We want players to feel its presence throughout the operation and to constantly adjust their plans depending on what is happening.
At the same time, the team searches for supplies and weapons, completes side objectives, such as extracting valuable scientific data or biological samples, and decides how much extra risk it is willing to take for additional rewards. Main and side objectives provide experience and reputation with different contractors, unlocking access to more advanced equipment and new missions.
It is also important that Riftborn is not the name of a single boss, but an entire class of creatures. In our public materials, we have mostly shown one type so far, but the structure of the game is designed to support different Riftborn with their own traits, behaviors, and ways of being investigated.
Creative Challenges
One of the most illustrative examples is the Riftborn itself. In the earliest version, we imagined it as a creature living beneath the ice and attacking from below – something similar to the sandworms in Dune. On paper, the idea sounded dramatic and felt very appropriate for Antarctica.
But the prototype exposed a problem very quickly: the player had almost no visual relationship with the main source of danger. Something happened beneath the ice, the character took damage or died, but the player often did not understand what the creature had actually done or even where it was. Uncertainty is important in horror, but when cause and effect become completely unreadable, fear turns into frustration surprisingly fast.
So we changed the concept completely and made the Riftborn a flying creature. That turned out to be a much stronger solution. Now it can be visible from far away; players can track its movement and try to estimate how close the danger is. At the same time, we did not lose the sense of helplessness – if anything, the enormous shape in the sky became a constant part of the environment.
That example describes our development approach quite well. We try not to hold on to an idea simply because it sounds good in a design document. If a prototype shows that the player is not getting the feeling we are aiming for, we are willing to change even fairly fundamental parts of the game.
Future Plans
More than anything, we want to make a game that players will remember. It would be great if, several years later, someone could still remember a particular situation from UNFROST and say to a friend, "Do you remember that time when XYZ?"
At the same time, we do not see game release as the endpoint. The structure of UNFROST gives us room to keep developing the game over time: adding new Riftborn, new missions, locations, contractors, equipment, and expanding the world around the events unfolding in Antarctica.
We want players to keep encountering new situations, threats, and stories that emerge naturally from playing together.
The simplest and most helpful way to support UNFROST right now is to wishlist the game on Steam. We have also opened registration for the playtest. If you would like to see the game at an early stage and help us test its systems with real players, you can request access directly through Steam.
And, of course, tell your friends who might enjoy cooperative horror, survival, and systemic games. For a small project like ours, that kind of organic interest really means a lot.
