Neighbors: Suburban Warfare Interview – “How can we make these people hate each other?”

Danish studio Invisible Walls has been creating games for over ten years. In 2017, the team released Aporia: Beyond The Valley, a first-person walking simulator that began as a student project at Aalborg University. First Class Trouble launched a few years later, a social deduction game reminiscent of Among Us, where you work as a team to complete tasks and figure out who the cheater is.

While both games received good reviews from critics and gamers, their successes were modest. With their new upcoming project, Neighbors: Suburban Warfare, Invisible Walls wants to try something new. This is a multiplayer game about destroying your opponent's property while defending your own house.

Depending on the character you choose, you will use vacuum cleaners, pans, golf clubs, fireworks boxes, hammers, slingshots and baseball bats and many other things to wreak havoc on the opposing team. You also have to upgrade your house's defenses and build traps like the video game version of Home Alone to make it difficult for your opponents to break inside.

“The social setting you're in with your neighbors is something that's very intimate,” explains Invisible Walls CEO and Founder David Jean Heldager. “You all intimately understand what a neighbor is and how you are in society. So how can we make these people hate each other? Just keep pulling at those strings of tension and annoyance you have with your neighbors. We see this tension in our own lives. How can we turn this into a game?

The game will have voice chat enabled for both teams and you will be able to talk to your opponents as you battle them. Heldager tells me it's “an integral part of the game.”

Neighbors: Suburban Warfare has the usual Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag modes (hilariously called Capture the Deed here because you need to steal that document from your enemies), but its main mode is focused on protecting the “essentials” of your home while destroying your valuables enemies. This creates a unique dynamic as your team is always defending and attacking at the same time, so you have to communicate and strategize to find the best moments to strike.

Heldager explained that the difficult part of this came with creating “breakout zones” for this dichotomy. You and your time need a break from time to time, a space that allows you to think about your next steps and how to proceed. This is how the day-night system was conceived.

“During the day, your dog or whatever animal you have will come out and defend your house and make sure that whenever someone breaks in, they will be killed immediately. That makes people say, 'Hey, go back to your house, fight, talk, rest and have fun'.”

Something that struck me when I spoke with Heldager is that the team seems to have fun coming up with subject ideas. He tells me about some of the most powerful weapons and gadgets available, like a remote-controlled seagull that you can use to throw poop on enemies' equipment, or a van that plays loud funk music outside their property. “If you order ten of them in a row, you're really going to blow people's brains,” he says.

Neighbors has a visual identity that is refreshing from the typical shooters we see in the market, with a cartoonish atmosphere and unexpected character designs like an old lady in boxing gloves or more typical like an annoying brat with a slingshot. The team also likes to add things or people from their own lives, such as Heldager's dog, which is a guard dog that protects your house, or the names of the developers on the various cars you see on the streets. There are even some character designs based on real people, like one of the Invisible Wall bosses.

“I still haven't really figured out if he likes it or not, but he's saying to other companies, 'Hey, I'm in this game.'

While the game will have its default modes at launch, Heldager emphasizes that he wants players to play it in any way they want. “Neighbors is about creating tools for fun,” he explains. “We created a game where you can play 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v3, 5v5, however you choose.”

However, that doesn't mean Invisible Walls won't work hard to balance the game. Heldager explains that the team will listen to player feedback and make decisions based on it.

Launching an online-only title is always a big gamble in today's market, and the CEO of Invisible Walls knows this all too well. He remembers having trouble with publishers who doubted the success of First Class Trouble, a game about lying and forming alliances, because of the need for microphones. “People don't have microphones, this will never take off,” they told him. And then Between Us happened.

“It's such a competitive market. I feel like we're not like the others, we're not another heroic shooter,” explains Heldager. “We're not built on big monetization schemes or things like that. We just want to allow players to have fun. When I look at these multiplayer games, they are all the same. They're all based on Fortnite and Overwatch, and I feel like we're going to come across something different in that world.”

Along those lines, Neighbors won't have a “win payout scheme” and its monetization would be solely on cosmetic items like skins that won't give you any benefits during matches. Heldager also told me that they learned from the mistakes they made in First Class Trouble with expensive dedicated servers and this time they will be using a peer-to-peer system.

Neighbors: Suburban Warfare doesn't have a release date, but the team is aiming for an early 2025 launch. “I just hope they play the game,” Heldager says when asked what he expects from launch. “We listen to our players and then give them what they want. That's how we develop games.”