Why Henry Stickmin is coming to Among Us

Among Us and Henry Stickmin: two indie games that have seen fantastic success in 2020. In the comments section to our video on how Among Us became so popular, many, many of you pointed out that the game is referenced in The Henry Stickmin Collection. What’s more, an upcoming new map for Among Us will be themed around the Henry Stickmin games. The connection here is simple: Marcus Bromander, the creator of Henry Stickmin, is also one third of InnerSloth, the development team that made Among Us. In fact, he made both games at the same time.

00:34 - In 2007, Bromander was a 17-year-old fan of games and animations, and tried his hand at creating interactive Flash content. According to Bromander, when he first signed up to the Flash community Newgrounds, he felt awkward that his brand new page looked so bare and empty. He spent all day turning a small project into something that he could release: a collection of interactive animated jokes called Crossing the Pit. This got a small amount of positive attention from the Newgrounds community, and Bromander, known online as Puffballs United, got a taste for creating online content and receiving attention. He worked to make a larger, more expansive interactive film – he wouldn’t, at this point, call it a “game” – called Breaking the Bank.

01:19 - This, as with Crossing the Pit, was a series of simple stick-figure animated segments, and Bromander didn’t exactly expect it to take the world by storm. He later said: “I made a stick man cartoon, I wasn’t expecting it to be anything, I just thought it was something fun, but it evolved over time thanks to all the attention and the feedback I got. “Knowing that people would be interested in another one gave me drive to continue to make another one.” Offline, Bromander’s life was changing. He and a friend from middle school, Amy Liu, were both attending the same college, where he met Forest Willard. One day, Bromander and Willard were talking about how they both really wanted to make games, but neither had the right skills to do so.

02:03 - Bromander could only draw, he had no idea how to program, while Willard could program but couldn’t create art. Slowly, it dawned on the pair that if they worked together, they might be able to make some good games. So, they started work on a project together. They spent a long time trying to figure out this first game, but it didn’t seem to click, and eventually, they abandoned it. So, they started again, and after some experimentation, made a mobile game called Dig 2 China. This was fun, so they thought they’d try something else. They brought in Bromander’s friend Amy Liu, and after a bit of trial and error, they created the prototype for a frantic, cartoonish multiplayer that they were sure was going to be a hit. That prototype was called… Deitied. The game was submitted to Steam Greenlight, and got some attention, but the project ultimately fizzled. All this time, Bromander was still working on Henry Stickmin, which was going from strength to strength.

03:01 - Having made many successful entries in the series, Bromander was now working on a remastered collection that brought all the Henry Stickmin stories together in one package, along with the final, expansive episode, Completing the Mission. With InnerSloth still struggling to make a follow-up to Dig 2 China, the team decided to make another multiplayer prototype. Bromander paused work on Completing the Mission for around a month to draw the initial map for this game. While Among Us was intended as a quick project, it earned a fanbase that encouraged InnerSloth to continue supporting the game, adding new features over the next two years. In January of 2020, Innersloth announced that they were officially moving on from Among Us, and in August, Bromander finally released The Henry Stickmin Collection; a project that had taken him well over a decade to complete.

03:52 - Then, to the team’s surprise, Among Us, already a popular game globally, started taking off among English-speaking players. Thus, Innersloth managed to have two incredibly popular games that were the result of many years of work, which had been built side by side. The team’s road to success was paved with failures and abandoned projects. In recapping his own experience, Bromander said that the moral of his story is: “You’ve got to tune out the loud voices and trust your gut, because that’s what got us where we are. We’ve got to have confidence in ourselves.” .