The Little Club in the Treehouse

Squeezed below the big name streamers with their lightspeed comment feeds and above the lonely hearts broadcasting into the empty night air, there is a swell of streamers who have what might be termed a decent following. Not too large, not too small. Just right.

“Neila” is one such streamer, known for her chill streams, where the sign over the channel door indicates: ‘I want my streams to be a safe and welcoming place, where you guys can laugh and interact with each other or simply just lurk, lay back and doze off!’ Sometimes she is playing a game. Other times it’s illustrations and doodles.

She mused on a stream about how she wanted to develop a portfolio to get into the games industry. One of the audience stepped forward, a fellow called DoktorOndskan, and suggested, together, they could try making a small game to help kickstart her portfolio.

DoktorOndskan was Nicklas Nygren, more popularly known as Nifflas.

Their collaboration resulted in Xenosphere, a game which presents itself as a platformer in the vein of Sonic the Hedgehog but is far stranger and more uplifting than I expected. Leap Year was the first of my top two games of the year, Xenosphere was the second.

I spoke to them to understand how the project came about. If you haven’t played Xenosphere, please do so before proceeding; it’s warm and Wholesome with a capital W. It is also free and will take you around 20-30 minutes to complete.

If you have played, then step through the curtain with me and enter the lair of spoilers.

In real life, Neila goes by the name Kati, possessing a hybrid accent that seems to harken from a place that doesn’t exist. She is Belarussian by birth, but grew up in Germany and moved to the UK with her husband last year. She first dipped her toes into streaming in 2022 but it has now become a regular part of her routine. It seems to fit her well; Kati isn’t a screamer streamer but she’s definitely further along the audience interactivity slider than I am.

I previously spoke with Nicklas Nygren in 2012 when he was living with Doug Wilson in Copenhagen and showed me what was to become Knytt Underground. Now living in his native Sweden, he seems roughly the same person I remember, although I swear that beard is more bushy. Known for a string of polished platformers such as Uurnog Unlimited, his most recent commercial title was Ynglet which I’d describe as a blend of swimming and platformer. He has been fully funded by his games for 15 years, although he admits it is getting harder to remain so.

I ask about the origins of Xenosphere. Nicklas explains how it came about during one of Kati’s streams. He says to her, “We were talking about game design and you mentioned you wanted to do art for games or something like that. And I started to wonder if we could make a small game together. And we talked about joining in a game jam or doing something, right?”

“I was talking about trying to do a game jam because I’ve never done that before,” Kati replies. “And Nicklas just came up with it and said, well, if you don’t want to do [an official] game jam, we can actually do our own.”

And so Kati directed the visual design of Xenosphere and Nicklas was on the programming and gameplay. Of course, Kati’s involvement goes a lot deeper than this: she’s the star of the show.

According to Nicklas, the original concept for Xenosphere goes back nearly ten years. Initially, it was based around Let’s Play videos but, after watching the 2020 Japanese film Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, a recursive aspect of the plot nudged him towards building a game around streaming.

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Long time readers of Electron Dance will know watching streams isn’t quite my thing. But as I have developed a tendency to hop through reaction videos, I’d always assumed that’s what people were largely there for: reactions, emotion. For example, watching someone play Outer Wilds for the first time to witness all those moments of tragic discovery and existential angst. And exhibit A is Xenosphere itself, sometimes recommended to streamers just to see their response. I also have that niggling question of how much of these reactions are genuine or a Pavlovian response to what you assume the audience craves?

So I streamed from a perspective of complete ignorance of what a streaming audience wants or needs. I’m focused on what I consider to be valuable: compressed data. I feel guilty if I indulge in what feels like white noise gaming, like playing through some difficult levels of The Talos Principle II where I spend most of my time looking exasperated (don’t worry, only a few people turned up). If people have gathered around my stream, I must personally validate their choice! I insist on it being a transaction: your time for some information.

But JFC, it’s easy to miss the wood for the trees.

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When Xenosphere starts, it appears to be an elegant platformer in which you control a little ball, some type of… sphere. The world is a sequence of curved, glyph-soaked platforms and the player must build momentum and leap at just the right point to reach the next platform. It’s not too difficult and also earns points for being good on the eyes.

But then…

…chat erupts in the middle of the screen. Oh no, I think, is this one of those games which connect you to some server and all our experiences are shared somehow? But then it weirds up even more: a streamer glitches into the corner of the screen talking about this new game “Xenosphere” she’s going to try today.

For the briefest moment I am fooled that the streaming is real – convinced by the chat pouring out across the screen. I shake the insane notion from my head, but, gosh, for those few seconds it seemed credible. The streamer, whose name is Neila, interacts with the chat then she pauses your game in the middle of you attempting to jump a gap.

Hey! Whose game is this anyway?

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I have to ask Nicklas and Kati about the perfect choreography of the Xenosphere chat with the stream of in-game Neila – let’s call her “Xena” just to make this easier on the brain. I imagined Kati having a script to follow but it wasn’t like that at all: it was all improvisation.

“We just planned out the general events,” says Nicklas, “and the overarching jokes that would occur in it. I had built a chat client into the game so when we were recording footage, Neila could just play the game and I would [generate] chat on the other side. So I was typing in what all the characters were saying and Neila responded to whatever I typed.”

“I think that’s why it felt so natural to me,” Kati adds, “it just felt like a normal stream. Even though I knew it was [Nicklas] I just did what I always do – I just press record and then I’m there.” She laughs.

They did three full recordings of the entire game with just some isolated moments to re-record. “I think the only part where you told me we should record again is when you were struggling with my verbal responses to everything,” recalls Kati. “We went back and tried to record again with just sounds, non-verbal things.”

It turned out, however, Kati’s original, natural responses came across as the most genuine.

This is why the back and forth feels authentic because there was no script and her reactions were real. At one point, when the game’s colour palette turns blue, Xena comments on how cool it looks – because it was the first time Kati had seen it.

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When I’m streaming, I intend to note everything entered into the chat, but if the chat hots up, it’s easy to miss messages from the audience. After all, I’m playing a game, right? Real talk: if you want to practise multitasking, I’d recommend streaming as a workout.

In some ways, Xenosphere simulates the act of being a streamer, with the player trying to read the chat while negotiating challenges – all that’s missing is the need to respond. The Xenosphere chat moves at a spritely pace at times so I only read bits and pieces while I play. Despite this lucky dip approach to the chat, I can still pick up the personalities of the audience and – Darth, stop asking Xena to move the damn camera.

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Where did the cast of chat characters come from? Kati tells me: “I think it was like a team effort, but we made up most of the names and applied some personality traits to them. Some of them maybe write in all caps and others maybe a lot of emotes.”

The individual personalities became more concrete as Nicklas engaged in chat roleplay. “Like, it wasn’t planned that Darth would be the troll who always messes with the stream,” he says. “I think we had some idea that ShinyMushroom would be the one who played the game before and was trying really hard not to spoil the game but he’s a little bit bad at it. KittykittyBangbang is just this friendly person who would not troll at all.

“It was weird how the characters emerged as I was typing what they were saying. And then after, when I was putting the footage in, I tried to elaborate on the characters and rewrite all the dialogue.”

But not all of the characters in the game are fictional. One is Nicklas’ Twitch alter ego “DoktorOndskan”. And then there’s our streamer, Neila. When I played, I assumed Neila was an invention and was surprised to find a real Neila on Twitch afterwards.

I checked out one of her streams and, dang, it was surreal to discover Xena was exactly the same person as the real Neila. It felt as if Xenosphere had leaked out into the real world and I had never left the game. But then again, is there much difference between being a streamer and playing a streamer? Even for the most authentic streamer out there, a stream is still a performance before an audience.

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Something you might not realise when playing in the safety of your own home is that Xenosphere is designed to troll streamers.

Xena is forced to move her video feed around the screen when her audience redeems a stream reward to “move the camera”. As many streamers will similarly have their own mug positioned somewhere on the screen, Xenosphere streamers will be forced to keep moving their own camera in response to stay out of Xena’s way.

But there are other nods to the wacky world of streaming. I once forgot to change the scene in my streaming software and played an entire level of Death Crown where viewers were left looking at a static shot with my face reacting to something they couldn’t see. That’s in here too: Xena accidentally fills the screen with her camera output obscuring something “amazing” happening in the game.

But once you’ve finished the “campaign mode” of Xenosphere, the High Score mode unlocks which allows you to play without Xena and her entourage. Can’t we see the “amazing” thing in High Score mode?

Apparently not as Nicklas explains: “I kind of regret not putting it in. It doesn’t make sense visually without it being covered up because it just looks like an ugly texture rotating. I should have put it in there but with only a 10% chance of it happening – and then this text ‘I apologise it is so disappointing’ or something.”

I’m of the mind that keeping the mystery intact is important. But then feel free to ignore my hot take hypocrisy, writing an article exposing all of the behind-the-scenes magic.

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Once I reach the end of Xenosphere’s obstacle course, the game loops and, just as when I started the game, a streamer invades. The new interloper is game developer Alistair Aitcheson, the brains behind several stage shows such as The Incredible Playable Show and all sorts of interactive streams. Not only does Alistair bring his own chat into my Xenosphere game, but steals the game away from Xena.

This is genius. Xena is confused while an oblivious Alistair takes the helm. Alistair’s demeanour is different, looking somewhat distracted, while Xena’s chat goes crazy and one of her audience, ItsTheSkelet0nLord, recognises the invading streamer and leaves to intervene in Alistair’s chat.

But just as ItsTheSkelet0nLord gets there, Alistair is called away for something urgent and closes not only the stream but also the game. Xena is left hovering, alone and lost, over someone else’s desktop. There’s nothing left to do. She leaves a trail of unfinished sentences then quits the stream.

In someone else’s hands, I imagine Xenosphere would be a “haunted game” that traps streamers in some netherplace. Beware streamers! You never know what you’re getting into! But this is not that type of game; Xenosphere comes to a close in a restful silence and a non-threatening desktop. It even thanks me for playing.

Xenosphere stops precisely when it should: when you want to see more.

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Let’s talk about how the camera glitches to mask Xenosphere cutting between different video clips of Xena. What appears effortless to the player was not at all. “A lot of work went into that,” says Nicklas. “It’s just one of those things that seems simple but it was probably like several days of the game’s development.”

Kati says, “Yeah, I remember you struggling.”

“For it to come across naturally I had to introduce a frame lag so that every time it cuts the video pauses for a while.” Thing is, if Xena’s camera only glitches when switching to another clip, it will become more obvious, so Nicklas also applied glitching between cuts.

And if you’re wondering about other small details that might go unnoticed, did you catch that the date and time shown on the desktop at the end of the game is accurate except for the hour? It’s a privacy feature. Xenosphere scrambles it to ensure the time doesn’t inadvertently give away the player’s region if they are streaming the game.

I also ask about the origins of the word-based score and statistics. Nicklas says, “First, the idea came from Super Mario Bros. Wonder where if you jump on enemies, they phased out numerical scores [for] words and that was awesome. But then I was wondering why they removed the global score, why don’t all these words add up to something? They should put in words there too, like, add in tons of words. I realised if Nintendo didn’t do it then I’d have to do it.”

But that’s not the whole story; Nicklas and Kati also wanted to force a playing streamer into a camera checkmate. When Alistair Aitcheson, a second invading streamer, enters the game, the plan was to have Alistair move his camera to force Xena to take refuge in the last free corner and thus trap the player in a difficult situation for their own camera feed. “For that joke to work,” says Nicklas, “there has to be a reason why Alistair had to move his feed.” And that reason was a score in words.

There’s one last story I want to share with you from Xenosphere’s development. There’s a “bug” in Xenosphere where, if you pause the game when the player’s ball is mid-flight, on unpause the ball loses all of its momentum and drops like a stone. This is then used as a cheat to get past a broken section of the game.

“That actually used to be a real glitch from Uurnog Unlimited,” Nicklas tells me. In Uurnog, he disabled all of the game objects on pause. “When you do that in Unity, all their objects lose their velocity. So I did add a fix in Uurnog before release, that stores the velocity and puts it back.”

So Nicklas wanted to use this as a joke in Xenosphere. “Since Uurnog, that fix is part of my default codebase now that I use in all my games. As that was already fixed, I had to introduce a simulation of the bug to Xenosphere – so there’s a fix for the bug and a simulation of the bug that overrides it.

“Then I started work on my new game that I’m working on right now and I realised the bug was back. But, no, it wasn’t the bug – it was the simulated bug from Xenosphere!”

We all laugh. Xenosphere seems effortlessly funny but, to me, it’s much more than a series of fun japes.

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Who am I in Xenosphere?

For a good portion of its runtime, it feels like I’m Xena – even if, every now and then, Xena quits the menu and interrupts my play. I could imagine those moments as AAA game cutscenes where player agency is curtailed in exchange for a sliver of story. But then she vacates her seat to visit the toilet, with the audience howling at her to keep the game on so they can listen to its music. At this point, Xenosphere reveals its surreal side because as you continue to play the game while the streamer is MIA, Xena’s audience freak out that the game is “playing itself”.

However, this only seems like a mystery if you play it quietly at home. If you’re streaming it, you’re just another streamer caught in the Xenosphere’s web. Maybe someone else is aghast that you’ve interrupted their stream. It’s no mystery at all.

But hold on. Most players will not be streaming when they play and the ambiguity of the player’s role is fascinating in that context. It asks the question: who is really playing the game? Whose game is this anyway?

I’ve discussed many times how I like the idea of a game being a dialogue between the developer and the player. But streaming conjures a more complex relationship into existence, one where the spectators are doing far more than just spectating, where they become participants in the theatre of the game. And perhaps that’s what we are in Xenosphere, the force of will of the audience to engage in play even when the streamer’s seat is vacated.

And, in the end, Xenosphere is a celebration of the goodness of streaming. Streams are much more than just watching games being played. They’re about people and channel as a community. Social media doesn’t work like this because it’s a party where the universe is invited – it diminishes intimacy and is obsessed with the viral, often of the negative kind. Where once people found a digital escape from the overrated real world in newsgroups, ICQ, forums or Tumblr, they can now hang out in the chat with a streamer as their anchor. Welcome to our little club in the treehouse. Welcome, friend.

Xenosphere taught me the reason for small streamer communities is the same reason I’ve got some readers who have been hanging around Electron Dance for over a decade. You might have amazing “content” – a slick, debasing term that does for creativity what the term “franchise” did to that television series you loved – but it’s the people, stupid.

Xenosphere was beautiful. It was a game that taught me more about streaming than streaming did.