Servant of the Lake: Devlog 1 – The journey so far…

The days are growing longer, the sun is slowly defrosting this long winter, and we are very excited to return with a fresh devlog for Servant of the Lake #SotLDevlog. And what better way to start than with a brief history of the project?! Let’s dive into some behind-the-scenes and share more about where we are now at the start of Spring!

Going back to our Roots

We’ve always known we wanted to return to the Vanderboom house with a new game. The two brothers Aldous and William are an important part of the creation of the elixir, but their roles were never fully fleshed out (remember the secret achievements level in Roots?). Besides the two brothers, there was another mysterious character tied to the family that had yet to make an appearance in our games: their little sister Alexandra!
After the release of Underground Blossom we finally had time to explore a prequel to Rusty Lake: Roots and the first step was to revisit the house and its background story. Several iterations and a first prototype later, we found the right angle to approach the story from the perspective of a new servant arriving at the house for the first time.

A very important step of the initial creation process was to brainstorm with Johan Scherft about the idea and reexamine his original paintings. He was very excited to create new visuals of the house, yard, surrounding vistas and of course the sibling portraits which will be an important part of the game as well (More on the game’s art in an upcoming #SotLDevlog)! 

With Johan’s first paintings ready and creating a first prototype based around a full day working as a servant in the Vanderboom house, it was time to announce the title. And we did this in a special way; a hidden trailer among the achievements of our 10-year anniversary game, The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show, for our most dedicated fans to find! 

After the whirlwind of our 10-year celebrations, we shifted our full focus to developing Servant of the Lake and putting together a first playable demo.

Gamescom 2025 & World Premieres presented by Solid Snake and Lady D

We had the incredible opportunity to showcase it at the Indie Arena Booth during Gamescom in August – a perfect milestone to work towards. This opportunity got even better when the brilliant Atelier Clement sourced an actual vintage carriage to decorate our booth with. Everyone who came by our booth was able to step inside the carriage and play the demo, while our voice actor, Mike Wijdenbosch, was cosplaying the in-game coachman, welcoming everyone aboard. This carriage design can also be seen in the demo and will be part of the full version of Servant of the Lake!

While the news of Servant of the Lake was quietly announced inside our anniversary game, The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show, the official, worldwide announcement came during the Gamescom Future Games Show! This marks the first time we’ve announced a game during such a huge gaming event! Which, of course, meant we needed to put in some work into a nice trailer! Luckily, we had the amazing Bob Rafferty to create a nice presentation and the talented Mike to add some extra voice lines to our favourite coachman! Hence we were able to put together the official Servant of the Lake announcement trailer:  

It’s still surreal to know our game got announced to the world by David Hayter, aka Solid Snake / Big Boss, and Maggie Robertson, the one-and-only Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil Village.

The Servant of the Lake Demo Launch Takes Next Fest by Storm

This gave us the confidence to move toward releasing the Servant of the Lake demo during the upcoming Steam Next Fest. With the feedback from Gamescom, we had just one month to implement changes and cast the perfect voice for the maid, a key character players meet early on. Remarkably, we pulled it all together in time: a polished build, localizations, music and sound design by Victor Butzelaar and Driftwood Audio, and the incredible Kara Edwards as the maid, plus an updated trailer for launch. And what a launch it was! Thanks to your amazing support, Servant of the Lake became the 14th most-played demo during that Next Fest, yet another major milestone for us. If you haven’t yet, play the demo ✨ here! ✨

Working on the Full Game: The Good & The Bad

With this added confidence, we moved forward with work on finalising the overarching story together with the level structure and puzzle design. We even experimented with some gameplay elements not so common in our brand of point-and-click! While the code base and in-game graphics are getting laid out, we are also working with our amazing composer Victor to create an immersive and atmospheric soundtrack, and with his suggestion, we’ll have #SotLDevlogs for that!

Over the past 2 months, we have been hard at work porting the game to a new engine (Unity). This was a bit of overdue necessity to ensure the continuity of the project. It has taken quite a bit more work than anticipated, but overall, this will be great in the long run, as such a port will make it infinitely easier for us to launch on consoles. This decision was later confirmed by the concerning email from Adobe stating their intentions to fully shut down Adobe Animate, which was then amended to “the software will stop receiving updates”. On top of this, the coming months are busy with finalising the dialogues, sounds, music, voiceovers, the final bits of content and achievements. While all of this unfolds, we are also very busy with playtesting and fine-tuning every part of the game.

Release Date Updates & More?

With so many moving parts behind the scenes, we had to come to terms with the fact that our current release schedule is very ambitious. While we are still hoping to launch by late spring, we also want to ensure that we release Servant of the Lake with the quality we envisioned. We truly believe it has the potential to become one of our best games to date, but for that to happen, we just need to keep working hard and see where we stand in the coming 2 months!

In the meantime…Would you like to play the demo on mobile as well? 

Stay tuned for our next upcoming #SotLDevlog and let us know if you have any specific topics from the development process of Servant of the Lake you’d be interested to know more about!