New platforms like the Nintendo Switch 2 are a siren call for many developers—and being selected by Nintendo to create a launch-exclusive title can be a huge boon for a game studio. So developers may have been surprised to see one of the few platform-exclusive titles at launch was a game called Survival Kids. It’s published by Konami, but was developed entirely in-house by engine and in-app advertising company Unity.
Given Unity’s prior aversion to developing games with its own engine (a practice sometimes called “dogfooding“), it was surprising to see the company land in such a prominent position. But as producer Andy Dennison explained to Game Developer, this doesn’t mean Unity is all-in on internal game development. The team cooked up Survival Kids to achieve two major goals: first, to make a game fully “end-to-end” with Unity to help Dennison’s team with its main task: parachuting in to help Unity developers solve engine-specific technical problems.
And second: to prepare Unity—and everyone who uses it—for the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2.
From Gigaya to Survival Kids
Unity nearly began making games with its own software in 2022 with the game Gigaya, which was meant to be a “sample” game and a commercial product. But just two months after the game was announced, it reportedly laid off the bulk of the development team and canceled the project.
In the same year, Unity was quietly ramping up a division called “Unity Studio Productions” in the United Kingdom. Its first employee was Dennison, who leads the studio, primarily helping developers “behind the scenes” optimizing Unity. “You don’t often hear about the work we do,” he admitted in a recent chat with Game Developer, saying that the team’s projects can range from short-term engagements like high-level performance profiling to larger long-term projects like porting or moving codebases from one engine over into Unity.
Dennison said that these smaller projects taught Unity plenty of lessons that could be used to improve the engine. “But they’re always relatively narrow windows into [game] development,” he explained. “You might only be looking at a specific problem or platform.” That drove Unity to resurrect the idea of making a game entirely in-engine from end-to-end.
It was in late 2022 that Dennison and his colleagues connected with Konami at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, striking it up with Konami Europe exec Richard Jones. There the two teams hit it off, and Survival Kids entered development in March 2023.
Image via Unity/Konami.
With a slew of Leamington Spa-area developers on the team (many veterans of Codemasters, Playground Games, and Rare), Dennison said the company was able to ship Survival Kids in a relatively quick two-year period. With neither Konami or Unity relying on the game’s success to prop up their financials, Dennison said the Studio Productions team could focus on “replicating what many of our customers go through.”
“They’re building games with [schedules], with scope they have to think very carefully about, and a team they have to manage and look after,” he observed. “I think that replication of our customers’ day-to-day, and how they operate their businesses, was important as well.”
It’s why he’s glad the studio made what he called a “larger” game—not a platformer or mobile game Unity is more broadly used for. It also made Unity Studio Productions one of the first teams to get a look at two key Switch 2 features: GameShare and GameChat.
Survival Kids is optimized for GameShare and GameChat
The Nintendo Switch 2 isn’t a console with major new gameplay features like the Wii, Wii U, or the Switch. Its primary advancements come in the form of modest internal hardware upgrades and AI upscaling, a Joy-Con mouse mode, and a slew of social features marking Nintendo’s first major foray into the world of online multiplayer games.
Dennison said Unity learned about the social features after work started on Survival Kids, but “the stars aligned” and the game became a strong testbed for two key features: GameShare and GameChat. Dennison was particularly proud of the work on GameShare, which allows one player to invite other Switch and Switch 2 users to their game session without installing additional software. “It’s essentially an extension of split-screen technology,” he explained. When players use GameShare with Survival Kids, their device renders a separate in-game camera for each player and streams it out to other Switch devices. Unity had already been developing two-player split screen for local play, but found it could push and optimize the engine to support up to three players over GameShare.
“We worked really closely with the platform team, who didn’t have another test case for that at this stage because it’s so new.”
This also made Survival Kids a test for how game designers can think about games players might want to play together over GameChat—the video/audio chatroom system built into the Switch 2. It’s not as straightforward as just making a good multiplayer game. Developers we’ve chatted with in 2025 have spoken about how “presence” and spaces where players can relax and form their own kind of play are part of an emerging trend particularly popular with younger audiences.
According to Dennison, once Nintendo explained how the Switch 2 would handle the chat components of the game, his team doubled down on the “emote system” as a tool for in-game socialization and cooperation. Players can tap an “emote” button to auto-play a “smart emote” that aligns to what they’re mostly likely trying to communicate, or use a wheel-like interface to pick specific emotes like planting a flag. This emote makes a flag emoji pop up on the other players’ screens, pointing them in the direction of their teammate.
Focusing on emotes puts Unity in the same camp as Riot Games, which is counting on them to boost the socialization aspect of its upcoming tag-team fighting game 2XKO.
Dennison previously worked at Rare on Sea of Thieves, so he’s familiar with this kind of play. He still thinks the industry is only “scratching the surface” of this genre. “It’s really encouraging communal play. I think there’s another 20 years of innovation in that space, for sure.”
Just don’t expect Unity Studio Productions to be the one doing that innovating. Dennison made clear that his team’s first priority is “doing everything we can internally to make sure what we build is production-verified.” It’s the company’s policy to make sure the engine is ready day zero for the launch of new platforms like the Switch 2, and in this case, making an original game was a great method for hitting that goal. It’s not the team’s primary focus now that Survival Kids is out the door.
But it could be again—under the right circumstances. “We would love to find the right opportunity to partner with someone again and the right “story” internally about the technology we’re going to push on that next product,” Dennison said. “I would certainly love to explore that—what opportunities are there for us?”
