Steam News15 April 20262mo ago

White Knuckle - First Year Retrospective

The Last Year We entered Early Access on April 17th of 2025, with a lot of excitement and worry for how the game would do.

In this update15

Full notes

Full White Knuckle update

Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.

What changed

1 fix12 additions18 changes0 removals

Gameplay
Maps
Events
Compatibility
Balance
Store

fixedThe Last YearThe big scare was found right away, a major level generation bug that snuck in during one of our internal tweak patches the night before the game went public. Service Shaft, in Habitation, could generate with some incorrect level geo which prevented a player from progressing. It was an easy fix, fortunately, but it did leave us in a panic to get a hotfix out within the first hour and a half of launch.

changedThe Challenge UpdateThe first real content update was the Challenge Update. Challenge maps were something we knew we wanted to include from the very early days of the White Knuckle demo, and we were excited to experiment.

changedThe Challenge UpdateIn addition, we had other major features we wanted to include with the update: 'Random Events', a level content expansion for Habitation, and the 'Training Sector' gamemode.

changedThe Challenge UpdateIt was, in a lot of ways, a test to see how well we could work as a studio to produce something outside of the general scope of the campaign in a fairly short timeframe, while listening to player wishes and expectations.

addedThe Challenge UpdateWe also just had a lot of fun with this update. The Challenge maps were engaging to figure out and put together, the new content in Hab made replaying the game more enjoyable internally, and the random events gave us something to think about and implement as a break from the other necessary work that came with the patch.

addedThe Abyss UpdateThe Abyss was the first major Region update to drop, and represented a massive amount of effort on our parts. It required new systems for the artifacts, for level generation, for perks. It featured a new form of the mass, new hazards and denizens, and levels at an increased scale and scope than any we had made before.

White Knuckle changes

fixedThe big scare was found right away, a major level generation bug that snuck in during one of our internal tweak patches the night before the game went public. Service Shaft, in Habitation, could generate with some incorrect level geo which prevented a player from progressing. It was an easy fix, fortunately, but it did leave us in a panic to get a hotfix out within the first hour and a half of launch.

changedThe first real content update was the Challenge Update. Challenge maps were something we knew we wanted to include from the very early days of the White Knuckle demo, and we were excited to experiment.

changedIn addition, we had other major features we wanted to include with the update: 'Random Events', a level content expansion for Habitation, and the 'Training Sector' gamemode.

changedIt was, in a lot of ways, a test to see how well we could work as a studio to produce something outside of the general scope of the campaign in a fairly short timeframe, while listening to player wishes and expectations.

addedWe also just had a lot of fun with this update. The Challenge maps were engaging to figure out and put together, the new content in Hab made replaying the game more enjoyable internally, and the random events gave us something to think about and implement as a break from the other necessary work that came with the patch.

The Last Year

We entered Early Access on April 17th of 2025, with a lot of excitement and worry for how the game would do. White Knuckle is a weird weird weird game that defies the many genres that form it, and while we had a small but dedicated community that had slowly grown since the original Demo released with the Indie Horror Showcase, our early access launch was going to be the make or break moment.

And, fortunately, we didn't break. The launch week was as absurd as it was stressful. The game blew up with a huge swath of players who had been following its development, and for the first few hours we enjoyed watching people see more of the game: Habitation, Perks, Saves, all of it.

The big scare was found right away, a major level generation bug that snuck in during one of our internal tweak patches the night before the game went public. Service Shaft, in Habitation, could generate with some incorrect level geo which prevented a player from progressing. It was an easy fix, fortunately, but it did leave us in a panic to get a hotfix out within the first hour and a half of launch.

The rest of the day was a flurry of minor patches and fixes, discussions within the community, friendly bantering, and as the sun began to set; a celebratory launch party. The three of us were driving to the party location, separately, when we all got the notification: Markiplier had played White Knuckle. Truly fortunate and wild timing, and something that supercharged the success of our launch. (Thank you Mark! And also thank you everyone else who has covered the game!)

The resulting momentum over the next week, and month, was a powerful motivator, suffice to say.

The Save and Continue Update

Our first content update was the Save and Continue Update. It wasn't a major patch for most players but we couldn't help but throw some absurd bonus content in. (A theme that seems to keep repeating)

In a haze of weird brainstorming and tossing around concepts, we made the Ladder. If you haven't seen the ladder before… Ladder. LaaaaaddDDdDddererrRR.. LADADdDDDERRRErrRERRRrrrrrrr….

[The ladder is one of my favorite things I've made for the game. I'm glad we're at least a little unhinged when it comes to development. -Holly]

The Challenge Update

The first real content update was the Challenge Update. Challenge maps were something we knew we wanted to include from the very early days of the White Knuckle demo, and we were excited to experiment.

In addition, we had other major features we wanted to include with the update: 'Random Events', a level content expansion for Habitation, and the 'Training Sector' gamemode.

It was, in a lot of ways, a test to see how well we could work as a studio to produce something outside of the general scope of the campaign in a fairly short timeframe, while listening to player wishes and expectations.

We also just had a lot of fun with this update. The Challenge maps were engaging to figure out and put together, the new content in Hab made replaying the game more enjoyable internally, and the random events gave us something to think about and implement as a break from the other necessary work that came with the patch.

The Abyss Update

The Abyss was the first major Region update to drop, and represented a massive amount of effort on our parts. It required new systems for the artifacts, for level generation, for perks. It featured a new form of the mass, new hazards and denizens, and levels at an increased scale and scope than any we had made before.

It was incredibly stressful too. We are a small team, and the Abyss, like Habitation before it, was a risk, it was something different in a lot of ways.

After months of work, we took a beta build to PAX West in Seattle, roughly a month before the update itself launched. We told our community, and the three of us had the absolute pleasure of meeting many of you in person. To say we are grateful for the fans of the game who showed up is an understatement, hearing you talk about White Knuckle was incredible and truly meant the world. To think that within a year we went from a shoddy prototype to meeting people who came to PAX specifically to see the Abyss is as absurd as it is wonderful. Thank you.

Steam post image (This is technically a picture of the Wuckle booth at Pax East, but I couldn't help but share it!)

After PAX, we recuperated, worked on feedback and insight gained from the beta showed there, and wrapped the Shortcut Regions (Tangled Sink and Expulsion Chute), and then we worked hard to get everything ready in time for the end of September launch date.

Abyss was launched, and we watched people get their hands on it. We spent the following week doing the usual post patch support: Fixing bugs, making balance changes, enjoying the outpour of art and memes and videos from the community. But, we didn't have time to rest for this one, because we wanted to do something big for Halloween which was only a few weeks away..

Parasite

Right off the heels of Abyss we dove into doing something weird and one-off for Halloween: Parasite. Based on our mutual love for Alien, Flesh Pit National Park, and generally strange environments, we put together what was essentially a larger scale challenge map, one that forced the player to confront some new denizens in a strange and unsettling environment.

We are, frankly, shocked it came together as fast as it did, and it did come together fast. Given the lack of downtime between Parasite and Abyss, we decided to take November slower, taking a few weeks of well needed rest.

Chimney

Parasite and what followed; Chimney, were seasonal modes, but we wanted to make sure that the time we spent working on them had applications across the rest of the game so once the holidays ended we could hit the ground running.

Chimney is effectively an endless side-campaign with new mechanics and systems all with a holiday theme. The first three subregions of the Chimney were made a year prior, during the old demo's 'Winter Break' update, which was nice because we already had a base to expand off of.

This year, our goal was to use the Chimney as an excuse to refactor a lot of underlying systems within the codebase in preparation for the volume of systems work coming with the Nest. And we did, and added some new quality of life features across the rest of the game. In addition, that foundational work let us bring in unlockable and moddable hand cosmetics to let you all be the freakiest climbers possible (<3)

One Year On, and the Anniversary

It's hard to think that it's already been a year since that first day and the surreal months that followed. During the last few months we have all been exceptionally busy working on the Nest. It was an update that grew to be so big we had to make the decision to split it in two, with the new meta-progression features becoming the Anniversary Update (Out on April 17th!), and the Nest content coming a bit later.

We won't talk too much about the content for the Anniversary Update here, but it's got a lot of stuff in it! When the update drops it'll have a full changelog of every new feature, but for now: Check out the trailer!

We cannot stress enough how grateful we are to all of you. Hearing you talk about the game, watching you play it, seeing the art and comments and even more absurdly stumbling into people who know of it in real life, has been life altering for everyone here.

A year and a half ago, Dark Machine was little more than three friends who didn't expect their niche project to make a splash. Now, thanks to your support? We can make the kinds of games we love and put all of our weird and horrifying and difficult and exciting and funny ideas all into the kind of work we love, for a community we love. We also want to thank our publisher DreadXP, for the sheer volume of help they have provided, and for being chill people all around.

Thank you, for giving us this chance, for rating our game so highly, for playing it and talking about it. We aren't planning on letting you down.

So, what's next? We know everyone is excited about the Nest, ourselves most of all! It's absurd that they let us put so much wacky stuff into this game

We're not going to talk too much about the Nest now, though we will be in not too long! Just know you can look forward to a roadmap very soon which will give a rough timeline for the Nest, and the regions and content beyond. We're taking our time on this one, both for the sake of keeping up with the level of quality we expect, and so we don't lose our minds! But we are very excited!!!

After the Nest? Well, you can expect more wuckle. A lot more wuckle. Ten thousand years wuckle.

Dark Machine - Our Experiences

Into the Substructure. (Holly)

Hey everyone! I'm the lead dev for White Knuckle. I do a lot of things, code, art, levels, writing, maniac ideas that somehow get into the game. The usual. I also voice the Announcement System.

Back in the late summer of 2024, we started work on White Knuckle. We didn't know what form it would take, but I took two words from our brainstorming into the prototype phase: "Horror Climbing".

On that first day of experimenting I had slapped together the most basic form of the White Knuckle movement system, one button for each hand, the base of the grabbing mechanics, and a really terrible climbing area to test it all in all using primitive shapes. The rudimentary concept for the movement was inspired by some climbing VR games though it was a loose inspiration, and mainly I was curious what a left-click/right-click based movement system would feel like to play.

A screenshot of what the game looked like after the first night of prototyping the movement concept. Riveting.

I named the project "Cliff Climber", a terrible temporary thing that stuck around in some form within the game's files until Jack came up with White Knuckle in a night of spattering names at a wall months later. The plan was simple, you'd be climbing a cliff and something would be skittering or clambering or clawing up from below, getting faster until the player was caught in its jaws. Get as far as you can. Kind of a score attack, maybe a bit of devil daggers, it was meant to be as unambitious as possible so we could get some silly free thing out without the project turning into a slog, and so we wouldn't feel bad if it wasn't finished at all.

That, obviously, isn't what happened. After getting into the Indie Horror Showcase the game took off way more than we expected. We signed with DreadXP (Thank youuu!!!!), I quit my job, and by the day before launch we had over 50,000 wishlists. It was a number beyond anything I could have imagined.

The last year has seen so much, multiple huge updates for the game, the explosion of a community, soooo much fan art, and getting noticed by content creators of all sizes. We've said it before, and I'm going to say it again: Thank You. Thank you for the art, for the memes, for the bug reports, for the compliment and the criticisms, and most of all - thank you for playing the game in the first place. For giving it a chance.

I'm excited for this next year, for the Nest, for [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and [DATA EXPUNGED], for 1.0 and the wild ride to continue.

Its Been Real, Its Been Fun, Its Been Real Fun. (Jack)

I might owe some of you an introduction since I’ve only ever been active in our community Discord. So to get that out of the way, I’m Jack! I’m the guy behind White Knuckle’s music and sound design. I'm Voice 2 for the player, the Warden Unit in Parasite, and numerous creatures. I've contributed a lot of writing to the game's deep lore that we pull from to make our notes and set our tone for specific parts. I've been the editor for all the sick trailers you see, and I have a hand in designing some parts of the game. Usually elements to do with the gameplay loop's flow and informational clarity. Oh, and I named the game so, I'm kinda a big deal /jk

It's been a truly wild ride watching this crazy little prototype bloom into the growing and successful game it has become. I think back to the long summer nights we had in the early weeks of the project, laughing manically together at the grub creature, the cockroach based economy, and slap stick ways players could meet their end. The air changed when we saw the opportunity for the Indie Horror Showcase pop up. It felt like a long shot but we had already designed such a weird game it felt like they HAD to take us. That was my thinking anyway.

The weeks leading up to the Showcase is a time defined by a feeling of accelerating towards something big for me. You have to temper your expectations with any thing like this of course, but there was a vibe that was nearly impossible to shake. If there was a time where a project of ours was going to work out, this was going to be it. The game is the culmination of nearly a decade spent doing hobby game development. Jams, prototypes, ruminating over another game's design choices, etc. White Knuckle couldn't have happened without that many years worth of scraps to pick from and repurpose into what it became. That only carries you so far though. What happens when it's time to make entirely bespoke content for a growing audience with a publisher backing your work?

We had a rough idea for what Habitation was supposed to look like, but it was sparse compared to the Abyss and even the Nest. Teeth had a lot of technological hurdles, and we ended up needing to rapidly scale back our presentation of that creature and the environment he would be in. That was before everything else in that update was even being worked on. We gave ourselves an incredibly short timeline to get things ready for quality assurance testing, and capturing media for trailers and promotional material. Calling it stressful would be an understatement, and there were a few harrowing weeks for myself just doing the music and trailers. I do believe that that kind of time and pressure made us better artists and designers going forward though. We couldn't have made it without being the very tight nit team we already were. I also have to thank all of my loved ones for having my back while we were in the trenches as well.

There isn't much I can add to the release week stories that you haven't already heard. If I wasn't hanging around the Discord getting reactions from the fans and processing what had and hadn't worked, I was probably sleeping. I do remember the night of the 17th fondly though. We were still intact, with a game we were proud of for sale on Steam. I had moments were time felt like it was slowing down for a minute and we could all breathe again. The following day, Markiplier's first video came out and everything promptly leapt into another level of coverage that even our most optimistic visions didn't include. I do want to skip ahead to a month or two later when Ster and Jerma tried the game, since I've been a fan of them for about 13 years now. Thanks guys! And to everyone else who has enjoyed the game of course. We wouldn't be here without you!

My life has been a whirlwind since then in the best kind of way. White Knuckle has given me opportunities I never expected to have, and it is a main contributor to the best days of my life so far. The best piece of news with all that said is we're still going, and are doing better than ever a year later. We can't thank everyone for that enough, but we're going to try anyway! Grab on to something tight because here we go!

Gamedev is like climbing, I can't convey what all it means to me. (Quinn)

Quinn works on item and denizen art, and a ton more.

The last year of development has been a lot, it's like being hit in the face with a pie. I'm disoriented, whatever plan I had is out the window, but the taste on my lips is quite nice.

I've got to pitch a lot of ideas to the crew, work in an art style pretty alien to me but given the freedom to follow my creative instincts making whatever I feel like. Even stranger people have taken my creations and made a metric ton of fanart of them. I was paid to showcase the game with my friends at PAX. With some skillful subterfuge smuggled Bala onto the team early, spent countless hours working alongside my friends cracking non-stop jokes. I feel so much control over my life in a way I haven't before. I wake up every day excited.

Its like climbing, you can have a beta in mind, but the most fun lies in the moments when your plan breaks down, you pivot hard and find what feels most natural. I did not have White knuckle in my beta, and I couldn't picture my life without it.

Dark Machine Grows (New Studio Members!)

With your support, Dark Machine as a studio has been able to grow, and we've brought on two phenomenal people to help make White Knuckle even more… Knuckle-ey? They are adding more knuckles (perhaps literally).

Balabonobo

My work on White Knuckle started before I was even a part of the team.

After getting invested enough in the game to start interacting with the community, and running for time, I decided I wanted to get into making my own hand cosmetic mods. I poured a lot of time and energy into them thinking they would simply be a fun way to keep myself motivated to play more, and even share them with the community if anyone was interested. As it turned out many people were interested, including the developers of the game! Holly and Quinn contacted me about making some bespoke cosmetics for the game, and the rest is history.

I love working alongside Holly, Quinn and Jack, and despite having only joined the team in the last few months, I feel completely at home here designing cool creatures and making intricate hands for the players to enjoy. Look forward to more cool, scary, funny, and sometimes cute art as we make White Knuckle the best it can be!

Shiloh

A year or so ago, a friend of mine invited me to a local discussion group on games - we’d be talking about climbing games, specifically Tomb Raider, which I never did get around to playing, and White Knuckle.

It grabbed me quickly, and it’s been holding me in its albino hands ever since, climbing the ranks into one of my favorite comfort games. Had anyone told me way back then that I, a weird Handmade (link to

https://handmade.network/

:3) C game engine programmer would be joining the awesome team behind it, tackling bugs, features and performance issues alongside Holly, I’d have called them crazy. But they would have been right. Somehow.

DreadXP

Almost one year ago we launched White Knuckle into Early Access, which means it’s been almost a year and a half since our partnership with the Dark Machine Games team started. They are some of the most highly skilled and talented developers any of us have ever met - and White Knuckle is their first game!

We’ve all been honoured and lucky enough to support the team and watch the game grow so much more than any of us expected it to. Dark Machine is so passionate and energized about White Knuckle it constantly invigorates all of us and makes our jobs that much easier and enjoyable to do.

Just about every week when we have our meeting with the team, one of us will make some suggestion or request for a feature, we’ll finish the call, maybe blink a few times, and then we’ll get a message from Holly that the feature’s been added with full sound effects, animations, polished to perfection. They really put the machine in Dark Machine games 😀

There is so much more White Knuckle to come, but please look forward to the Anniversary Update this week, it’s one we’re especially proud to have worked with the team on.

Congratulations Holly, Jack, Quinn, and new members Balabonobo and Shiloh!

The DreadXP Team

Fan Art

Finally, we would love to highlight a few piece of fan art to come out of the last year of Early Access. There is truly a staggering amount of art by phenomenal people, most of which is posted in the official discord.

There truly is too much to show, so much art that we love, and we want you all to check out the #wk-fan-art channel in the discord and let people know how cool the stuff they are doing is. Here is a small selection of pieces we've loved.