When people hear “game polish,” it’s easy to imagine the fun stuff. Better art. Precise lighting. Juicy little particle effects. Maybe some screen shake if we’re feeling dangerous.

And sure, sometimes it abarcador about making things prettier.

But a lot of game polish is much less glamorous. It’s figuring out why a player walked straight past the thing you were sure they’d interact with. Or why a perfectly functional laser doesn’t quite feel like something you should be afraid of yet.

Our dev team likes to compare polishing a game to decorating a cake.

First, you need the cake itself: the mechanics, systems, level design, and all the stuff underneath that makes the game actually work.

Then come the layers. Animation. Sound. Lighting. VFX. Art. Feedback.

Slowly, the greybox starts disappearing and something that actually looks – and feels — like Stay Dead begins to emerge.

So this month, we went digging through some very old, very bare-bones development footage to look at how a few pieces of our demo got there.

Some changed dramatically.

Others just needed handles.