Whole Tomato had a chat with one of the developers of Into the Unwell, an upcoming third-person co-op roguelite. We had the chance to learn more about his journey, the studio, and their upcoming game.
Before joining She Was Such A Good Horse Studio, Måns Olsson spent over a decade in a AAA game development company. He started programming in 2008 at the Game Assembly in Malmö, Sweden, a school dedicated entirely to making video games. After an internship at Massive Entertainment, Måns joined the team full-time and spent a decade programming there. He then worked at King on Bubble Witch Saga before co-founding his own studio.
After years in big studios, Måns and a handful of friends felt something was missing. They wanted creative freedom, the kind of collaborative environment where ideas could be tested quickly, and where the game could evolve naturally. The result is She Was Such A Good Horse, a Malmö-based indie studio with big ambitions and a small, passionate team.
Their first project, Into the Unwell, shows that even a small group of developers can create something polished and unique. The game’s charm comes not just from its gameplay, but from the personalities of the people behind it, their iterative process, and the way they bring art and story together in every pixel.
Into the Unwell poster.
Table of Contents
From AAA Studios to Indie — Why We Started Our Own
Måns explains that the transition from AAA to indie wasn’t planned overnight. “Some friends came, and they asked me if I wanted to join and start our own game studio,” he says. “We were five people who founded the studio.”
After years of following strict production schedules, Måns and his co-founders wanted a different approach, one where creativity wasn’t bound by rigid milestones and where the team could explore what felt fun first. Måns adds, “We always have it playable. That way we can test all the things. We’re not that much of a paper design studio.”
This combination of experience and experimentation is what defines She Was Such A Good Horse.
The Team, the Roles, and the Horses
Starting with just five people, the studio has grown to ten. Each member brings a unique skill set. “We are three programmers. Then we have one designer, one technical artist, one animator, and then one, I would say, technical designer. Then we have a character artist. Did I miss anything?” Måns lists.
When asked if he wanted to give a shout-out to anyone specifically, Måns says, “I love my team and they’re super nice […] All the horses* made this happen.”
(*What they call their team members)
The studio’s playful name fits this spirit. Måns admits, “It was something like it was so hard to find a name. And then we have one person who wants to stand out. I’m not sure how he found his name, but it’s quite long. And whenever we say it, people always react. It’s more like people will remember it.” He adds a personal anecdote, “I have kids, and they go to their daycare, and they ask me, like, what company do you work for? And I have to say this, and they have no clue what gaming is.”
Making Into the Unwell: Rubber Hose, Roguelite, and Mental Health
Into the Unwell immediately grabs attention with its rubber hose animation style. Felix, the studio’s art director, brought his love for old Disney cartoons into 3D. “It’s called rubber hose animation. Basically, where the hands and everything stretch a bit. So that’s what he wanted to bring into 3D,” Måns explains.
Early look at Into the Unwell gameplay. From Steam.
Gameplay draws inspiration from roguelites like Hades but adds an extra layer of fun with multiplayer. “When you complete something, you go back, and then you can upgrade things in the village, and then you start a new run, and you meet new bosses,” Måns says.
Humor and storytelling are integral too. “Now we have some weird characters. Someone who resembles [a popular tech CEO], for example, but it’s not his name. So I wonder if people will see it,” he adds.
Development at She Was Such A Good Horse is fast-moving and collaborative. “We made a prototype. And that was the start of the game. And we sold that to a publisher. And then we just kept working on that. So we always have it playable. That’s a big thing for us, to always have it playable, so we can test all the things. We’re not that much of a paper design studio. We’re more of a try it, and if you like it, we keep it,” Måns explains.
Playtesting happens every two weeks. “We invite the publisher and everyone who wants to try it, and we play together using Discord. We write down all the feedback we have in the end, and then we work on that feedback for the next two weeks,” he says.
Surviving thousands of lines of Unreal code
Even a small team faces technical challenges. Unreal Engine projects can balloon to hundreds of thousands of files. “It is quite a lot, though. Even if I don’t do any code every day, there is code maybe every other day. But it’s mostly like if I want to know what a function does, for example, then I always use Visual Assist. Unreal Engine has 350,000 files. It’s quite easy to use Visual Assist instead of something else, or there isn’t anything else that could compare to it,” Måns says.
While Blueprints handle most of the scripting, the underlying C++ systems, like multiplayer functionality, base systems, and initial prototypes, still rely on heavy coding.
How Visual Assist helped jumpstart development
Visual Assist, supports the team quietly especially in the early days of development. Måns first encountered it at Massive in 2010. “When I joined Massive, they told me basically, you have to have this because it’s a big project and you won’t find anything if you don’t have it,” he says.
Even new team members are starting to adopt it. “The one that started recently, he was new to Visual Assist, but he’s starting to use it more, actually,”
Now that they’re closer to release, Måns shared that they are more on using Blueprints heavily so their usage of VA is somewhat less than their early development days which was C++-heavy. But even then Måns reports that it is still crucial with navigation, symbol searching, and understanding Blueprint nodes via C++.
Toward Beta and Beyond: All the Horses
With Into the Unwell moving toward early access, Måns and the team are excited to share the world they’ve built. Playtesting continues, bugs are being squashed, and the team is preparing for wider release.
“I like the art style and the humor. I don’t think I’ve read any of the [in-game] jokes yet because I was looking at the trailer and the screenshots. But yeah, that’s exciting.”
For players and developers, the studio encourages checking out the trailer and wishlist on Steam, and they will soon be inviting players to join the playtest. This is a story about passion, creativity, and collaboration—and the people, the horses, who made Into the Unwell possible.
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