10 Chambers Developer Interview - Inside the Ulf's Den

After getting some hands-on time with 10 Chambers' Den of Wolves, we spoke with its creator and visionary...

Inside the hyper-secure Unity offices in Ginza, Tokyo -- an entirely perfect setup for our time with Den of Wolves, a game literally about high security, break-ins, heists and more -- we not only went hands-on with the game, but also spoke to heistmeister himself, Ulf Andersson, co-creator of both Den of Wolves and its development studio, 10 Chambers. What’s awesome about this whole thing is the team chose Japan as our meetup point, because… Japan (the studio is based in Sweden and is formed from peeps who once worked at Starbreeze and other notable studios), and because there’s no ‘traditional’ PR setup here -- so, devs’ choice, you know. The studio has basically set this up itself and it shows. Ulf is candid, our game handlers are open to all manner of questions and nothing is off the table.

In short, there’s no ‘messaging’ to speak of. Rather, 10 Chambers wants its game and its vision to do that on its own merits. The how we got here is the meat and offshore potatoes of what we end up getting with not just Ulf, but the larger team also here. It’s a refreshing change from the norm which traditionally sees devs being verbal-handled by PR and publisher lines. There’s no sense of ‘control’ here, despite the whole thing going incredibly smoothly, and if you’re on our side of the industry fence and get the point of this game at all, you’ll know that that statement has much, much more meaning behind it.

But to the interview opportunity at hand, because as we stated from the outset, it’s taking place from within the secure walls of Unity’s Japan base. The reason being Den of Wolves is shaping to be a bit of a poster child, or flagship title, if you will, for Unity 6 -- and that’s something Ulf serves up plenty of opinion around. Especially given the amount of tumult and poor press Unity has garnered over the past few years.

However, we’ll kick off where all good things do (well, sort of) -- the genesis point of Den of Wolves at all, from its mastermind creative director and creator, Ulf Andersson.

(We’ve kept this as verbatim as possible so some sentences from Ulf, just read/hear them in a Swedish accent and you’ll be fine!)

Den of Wolves

Genre: Techno-Thriller Co-Op Heist FPS
Developer: 10 Chambers
Publisher: 10 Chambers
Release Date: 2025
Classification: TBC
Author: Stephen Farrelly
Date: April 03, 2025

We'll just jump straight in. In the presentation it was talked about that you've had this idea in your head for a long time and obviously it's manifested to where it’s at over a period of time with some hurdles along the way. But can you talk, I guess, a little bit about what that original idea was? What were the bare bones of it?

I think it's a combination of things I like, specifically Blade Runner. I'm super into Blade Runner shit, and then we got Heat (RIP, Val), the old (and best) heist movie. So you take those two, you sort of have some idea.

And then you’ve got a bit of Inception in there … and there's a lot of different movies and games that inspire you over the years and this kind of thing. But then there's, like, mechanically and the psychology behind the cooperative gameplay that I keep evolving from title to title. There's things I want to try. We were able to try so many things in GTFO; like, [it’s a] ‘we don't give a fuck’ type of game, so we got to try a bunch of stuff there. And then those things are refined and sort of done similarly or in a very different way (with Den of Wolves), but triggers the same thing [here]. So yeah, I think the exact manifestation is depending on technology, timing, experience and this kind of thing. So the exact vision of it and the exact composition of it is whatever is the most modern take on it with all that in mind. But I think a futuristic heist game has been with me for ages.

And you mentioned that with GTFO, it was like you guys could do whatever the fuck you wanted to do. You’re rock stars. But now with Tencent on board, and obviously you've got stakeholders that you're beholden to in a capacity, has that impacted that ‘do whatever the fuck we want’ attitude? Or is it still pretty much an open slab?

“Rock stars”... I don’t know about that (laughs). 

Even when we did GTFO, we had a very clear ‘this is what we're doing’ type thing. Now, that thing we were making had a bunch of things in it that were things you couldn't possibly do with anybody else's money. They would just [say], ‘oh, that hasn’t been done before. It's too niche, it's too weird’. And this kind of thing. Or, like, ‘oh, player feedback is they hate this feature’. And I'm, like, ‘yeah, that's why it's there. They're supposed to hate it’. This kind of thing. And I think in this case, the reason why we're able to do it together with Tencent is that they don't fuck with us that much. There's always going to be economic scrutiny, date scrutiny, release [scrutiny], we're slipping or some shit -- these kinds of questions. There's always going to be, ‘oh, I thought the game was this and now it's this?’ kind of discussions. But in general, [we’re] just feeling that they have a confidence in us making something good has been there from the start. And if it wasn't there, we would never do this. 

I'm too fucking old to do this (laughs).

And then the other stakeholder is of course Unity in the sense that you've aligned with them, you're using their engine. And then you just recently talked about migrating to Unity 6, so this is a two part question: One is, how was the migration, what did it allow you to expand upon? And then two, did that put more pressure or ease on development because now you suddenly go, ‘well, fuck, we can add more if we really want to’?

Yeah. So what to understand about Unity 6, which I didn't in the beginning. I don't know how used you are to the Unity development cycle, [but] they've been going through a lot of, I think from 17 and up or something like this. It's been a lot of, like, ‘oh, we have new features, new features!’ And they just added and added and added and visionary stuff. And they never really honed in on the quality of the thing or stabilised things. And then they had a shift in the company. They moved some people around and they did some, I don't know the exact details of it, but they started looking at that Unity 6 thing and started stabilising everything. So our experience was that it was way more work to move from version to version before from the version(s) before Unity 6, but then moving to Unity 6, with a full project of this complexity, we moved it over in just a couple of weeks.

And then we had some issues. We were doing some stuff wrong, but it's mostly because we didn't understand how to use stuff and maybe the documentation was a bit weird or we used it the wrong way because it's such a special case game. It's doing weird shit. So they say, like, ‘oh, this is a feature’. And we're, like, ‘great, let's base everything around that fucking feature’. So for us, it is a nice move and it also enables us to, I mean it's not directly linked to Unity 6, but the ray-tracing stuff and this kind of thing, which we're sort of diving into now and we want to focus on as much as we can. But yeah, it's been a great move. In my experience, it was shit before when they kept throwing features at us, but [Unity 6] has been clean as fuck. I like it, it’s actually very promising.

Okay, switching gears: I want to talk about the world. It's the thing that I'm most keen on as a player; as a consumer of cyberpunk material, dystopian future stuff. I love it. The setting is what sung out to me. So, I didn't play GTFO and I don’t know if I need to... 

You don't need to. But do you have friends?

No, that's half my problem haha. I play pretty much single-player games, which I'll get to in a minute…

Go into the GTFO Discord channel and just ask for help. Tell them ‘I need to play this’. And if you say you’re  a journalist, [and] need to play this game, you're going to have people on your ass helping you.

Yeah, I'm keen. I'm keen as, because it's also aesthetically what I like, but the world here (in Den of Wolves), we talk about Midway City, which is fascinating to me. That it’s an actual island is awesome. So, I guess, how deep is the construction of the world from a lore perspective because it feels really deeply thought out right now. And then the overview map that we saw, I mean you can envision tons and tons of different districts. There's a lot of water, which I'm curious to know if that's going to play a part in Heists down the track as well. 

But I guess I want to talk about how deeply you've gone from a writing perspective in creating the world itself.

I think we've created about 400 brands for it. And we have people who make actual brands doing it. And then we have company structures and their stock value made by people that make stock value reports. So, fucking crazy shit. Real deep shit.

So instead of only going for some sci-fi writer, we outline the sci-fi writing stuff. I write most of it just as how it's supposed to feel, you know, this is what's happening; the gist of the story. And then I'll hand off companies to people or actual identities and be, like, ‘oh, you have 10 people. These are sort of their role in the story’. And I'll have somebody else write the actual backstory of that character. So that gives me a lot of room to focus on the actual experience instead. I would love to write that shit too, but I don't have time to do it. And then you get a lot of people that's super excited about it, especially people outside of the business I've found. They're, like, ‘we've got some branding people that's super into Blade Runner shit and they write’. And so I wanted to have 10 pages on the thing… I got 300 pages back! So I'm, like, ‘I can't even use this fucking material now, it’s too much’. 

So now I'm looking at can I build a database out of this fucking monster and harvest information from there? But the important thing is having it as a backbone so it's connected and you can pull references to things rather than spoon feeding the player with that. We don't want to create a game where it's, like, ‘oh, here's 300 pages of backstory you can read’. We'd rather just have it sit in the background and then say, like, oh, that commercial has a logo at the end that's related to another thing. And you can see that everything is planned out, but we don't need you to know everything. And that's not a requirement in any shape or form. We just want you to get into the cooperative and have fun or be challenged by the game, but we also want you to believe in the world, of course. So then we need to do that work.

So how static is the world? I mean, the world exists because it exists. And so you can play through it and then play through it again and then play through it again and again. Will the players feel that they've impacted the world in any way after each heist? Is there a progression?

So what we do is we call it Storyline. A Storyline in the game is basically a non-linear progression of missions where you can make choices and you can fail and you can succeed. And if I do a thing here that's connected to this security firm, that security firm also is watching these other missions, then that's going to heighten the difficulty on these. You have to pick them in the right order [where you’re] trying to get things to affect other things. And the extraction mission we played is ‘where's the end of a storyline?’. And it's just… there's a lot of things in there that we can do because it's sort of a crescendo thing that we can tell more. We can do more of a narrative thing inside of the mission because you're not playing that mission all the time. That would be very boring, doing that all the time. They've been boring because of the length of it and the amount of exposition and this kind of thing. And then you have the first mission you play is very low on narrative and more focused just on trying to solve the actual problem. You're stealing this thing, get the fuck out. So the storyline is basically a lot of the small ones and a couple of big ones and then interconnecting them.

But then [also] randomly seeding them a bit. So you see, you played this mission before, but now it's a completely different layout or you've never played this mission before because last time it wasn't in the storyline at all, or you didn't find a clue leading to it or the thing you're looking for you found in that location. Now it's not there, it's in some other location. So the idea is to try to make it as replayable as we can, but probably when we release the game, it's going to be quite thin and focused on delivering a good experience that's tight and then [we’ll] start to expand inside of the width of the storyline so you can play it again and again and again. We don't want to do a mediocre big game. We'd rather have it very sharp and thin and then try to expand out from that.

Is there an idea yet about how to have players returning from a character progression system?

Yeah, so the trick there is, let's think about games that are really hard. You have to master the game. So it can't really be about levelling as much because then you're just basically, it becomes a maths thing where it's, like, ‘oh, I'm doing 400 points in damage, so I'm just going to make this enemy take 400-800 points’. Now it's still two shots. So we're not doing RPG levelling in any shape or form, but we are doing equipment drops and a bit of crafting stuff, but we are still looking for the right pacing there and when to release that and this kind of thing. It's still sort of the systems are in place and the content is in place, but we're not sure of when is the perfect timing to do things like that for the player. You don't want to have players in the lobby going through inventories for fucking three years before you can get planned. So we need to find a good pacing for everything and then we'll roll that out. But yeah, so we're digging more into customisation stuff and trying to adapt to the missions. So you're playing a couple of missions, you beat them, they're okay, [but not too] difficult, and then you run into one of the harder ones and then you go, ‘okay, fuck, we just lost. How will we [succeed] exactly? I guess let's try again. What's our strategy now?’. And the more meta you can create around that and the more options you can have and the more curve balls that version of the Storyline can throw you, the more interesting it becomes.

Do you then start thinking about live events and moments that you can drop on players that have become so good at a particular point that the game isn’t overly challenging them anymore?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, so let's say you play a new Storyline or the same Storyline and then we give you an option to modify it a bit or we modify it for you, or we do a monthly thing or we are, like, ‘if you started this, there's these bonuses, but also these… factories basically’. So now you have to rethink all your planning or 50% of your strategy goes out the window. That's a nice place to be in. Yeah, it's, like, ‘yeah, I played this before, but now it's a different enemy or a different factory or setting, it's nice’.

No, I like it. I like that idea. The AI is really interesting to me, too. I found 'em really smart. They use cover as well as we were using cover. They're flanking mechanics are really good. I mean it's a stupid question, but a lot of these types of games, especially when you've got swarms or hordes, whichever word you want to use, they can just end up feeling like cannon fodder where it felt like we actually had to be really smart and use the environment here…

So the balance is always… if you make a smarter AI, and you can, and that's always the pitfall as an AI programmer myself, I've done AI for most of these games and this is one of them. I have to do this AI because we can fuck it up, but I don't want to go back to programming, but sometimes you got to do it, but it's always telling you you can make something that's super smart, but then they're basing their information on things that you don't understand. So if they go, ‘oh, they flanked you in a really nice smart way that's smart from a programmer standpoint’, then you feel cheated. So you can't make it too smart. It also needs to handle situations where there's nothing and they still have to do something. 

So sometimes it's just, like, ‘oh, I move a bit’. And it looks, if you look at, I guess, the latest DOOM, you can just plop one enemy down and they stray for a bit. That's all they actually do. And they base the whole gameplay around people just being static and standing and you're just running into them and they do a bit of straying, great game though, but the right AI for the right game sort of situation. So these dudes are based on the concepts, what I learned from games like Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Payday, but also GTFO in a way. It is horde stuff and what's fun in that situation, you know, and what's a good balance between the bigger enemies and the smaller ones. [But] you'd still need some popcorn dudes, you can just kill a bit of dudes. I think a good reference is like Virtua Cop or these arcade machines. [You look at] Time Crisis where it's, like, a lot of them (AI) are blue and you have some reds, and I was always just shooting all the dudes and [someone’s] like, ‘oh, you only need to shoot the red dudes, the blue, they don't do any damage’. I'm, like, ‘oh!’.But it's such a…  I'm not saying that's a brilliant solution, but it's such a fun way of seeing it because sometimes you just have to have a bunch of dudes to shoot. So it's like that's the real problem and these are the bonus things. But yeah, it's a balancing act. You can say you can always make something smarter. I made stupid smart enemies for GTFO. It was awful. It's the worst game. So I dialled it back quite a lot.

So are we locked in at this point that it has to be four human players?

It doesn't have to be four players. You can play one, two, three or four, right… So you'll have AI companions?It’s slightly different. So probably roleplay it a bit more and say you can get support from a stupider AI, like an AI that can be a bit of a tank. So you can get that in depending on how you play the Storyline. So that's sort of a resource for you to use. We're not intending to simulate the player, so we're not faking players. It is because that's a lot of work and it never really plays well and we think we should value humans instead. So the outreach to get humans in and the willingness to play with strangers should be the largest, like, ‘oh, I need some humans in here’. That's going to always be the most fun version of it. But then we really try to segregate who's owning the Storyline and who's just a drop-in player so they can't fuck up your Storyline, basically. They can't make choices to make you die out of grief playing or some shit like this. They will always be able to somewhat (grief), but there's no friendly fire. I mean if you play GTFO, there is friendly fire, but it's a different beast. It is a very different beast.

And then an obvious question, is there a console drop plan at all?

We are constantly working on console at the same time, but we also recognise that the Early Access stuff on Steam is super strong and we don't want to hit the console with some broken shit. And I think also, like, patching on console is way slower than PC, so we'd rather hone the game on PC for a while and then do the move to console. I don't want to, as a console player, I don't want to buy anything that’s [broken or not ready]...

I had that experience with Subnautica where they dropped it in Preview access on Xbox and it was as broken as it was in Early Access, if not more. And I played it so much. I loved the setting and I loved the game that by the time it was finally in its final state, I was, like, ‘I’ve played this too much in a borked state’, and so I left it alone for a year and then went back and then re-experienced it. But I wish I’d waited until it was ready in the first place. 

Working on Steam and being able to not have any checks or balances on you, you have to take care of that yourself. It's great. We can patch one day and just patch an hour afterwards. It's not, like, ‘oh, you have to wait two months to be able to create a new patch and pay for it’, or whatever the fuck they're up to nowadays. But it's… yeah, I just want console releases to be tight. I don't think it's good to do anything else at the moment. 

What console, or consoles… we'll see. 

Okay Ulf, thanks for your time and thanks for the preview access.

About the author

Written By Stephen Farrelly
Stephen Farrelly is a veteran journalist and editor with more than two decades experience in the worlds of gaming, entertainment, lifestyle and sport under his belt. He is a proud pug dad, loves art in all forms but particularly street and tattoo culture, and is the director of Swear Jar...
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