You see a shadow standing at a distance in the dense forest you set up camp in… is it a bear? A missing child? Just a tree? You approach it… it starts running towards you on two legs.

It’s a DEER. And you’re dead.

This was the summer we all tried surviving 99 Nights in the Forest with our friends, enemies, and anyone else willing to face the deer. The game was built in a sprint of three months and has reached a peak CCU of 14 million since launching in June of this year. Co-creators @Cracky4 @ForyxeV @Viridial chatted with us about how the idea came together, creating a solid game development workflow, what community support has meant to them and their most recent update! So keep reading to hear their story.

And Happy Halloween!

Night 1: How It All Began
A Trio is Born

After being introduced to Roblox in a math class, @Cracky4 couldn’t get enough of the world he had entered into. He met @ForyxeV and @Viridial through a war clan RPG group on Roblox and realized they were all from New Zealand. They soon began collaborating on other experiences over the years, refining their workflow, until one day the three decided to do a quick game jam that would later turn into the well-known spooky test of survival.

The Game Jam That Started It All

Their itch to make a game together for old-time sake started as a week-long project, which then turned into three months and now is an on-going effort they work on daily. As active players on Roblox for more than a decade at this point, they know what makes a “good” Roblox game and wanted to combine all of this knowledge into one experience. The idea started with combining the “survive # of days” trend with inspiration from Dead Rails and a cozy forest theme. You might be asking yourself, why “99 nights?” Well, Cracky4 just felt it had a better ring to it than 100 .

The trio started building in March 2025 and released in June. This was their fastest development process (compared to six months on previous projects) – and that was the point. They moved quickly, allowing for iteration and refinement as they built, while sticking to the core principles of Cracky4’s original idea.

Currently, Cracky4 leads game design and art direction, ForyxeV leads programming, and Viridial leads building and modelling. The team is quite lean, with just another artist and an animator.

Building A Scary Forest For Millions
Designing the Deer

“Somehow a deer standing on two legs landed in my notebook of potential ideas,” Cracky4 reflects. He knew that for this survival game he wanted a core mascot character as the face of the game. They wanted to hit a sweet spot of being scary without ostracizing younger users. There was some debate in the earlier development days on making it more horrifying, so the team wonders how it would’ve changed the game. Cracky4 found a screenshot from an old YouTube video of a character with an open mouth that felt particularly jarring and ran with it.

Snappy Gameplay

Foryxev’s philosophy for programming has been to push as much to the client as possible for responsiveness and snappy gameplay. When a player is using weapons and attacking enemies, he wants it to feel as fast as possible so it’s more immersive and fun.

Foryxev advises using every trick you can think of to make interactions feel instantaneous. He mostly leaves the server to handle verification, while pushing everything through the client. For example, if a player shoots a bullet, the client immediately creates it, fires it off, hits the target, and deals damage locally, dropping the health bar. It just assumes it can do all that. The client then tells the server what it’s done, and if the server rejects it, it can send a direct response back. This requires a lot of systems to roll back those changes, which can be tricky to get right. He does get feedback in-game, like people saying a wolf’s health bar kept going up and down. So, issues like that can happen, but 99% of the time, it works smoothly, and it really makes players feel like they’re not waiting for things to happen.

The Cultist Stronghold

Viridial got his start building showcase games and is excited to see his work used in 99 Nights in the Forest. In particular, he’s pretty proud of the Cultist Stronghold. The team wanted to build a repeatable dungeon that players could grind for diamonds while also serving as a cultist base of operations. The Cultist Stronghold was made to serve that purpose.

Viridial has perfected his asset making workflow so that the stronghold only took about 2 days to complete! The building process for structures like the stronghold typically starts with visual references, such as medieval keeps and small castles. Then, he blocks out the basic structure before adding shapes, aspects from references, decorations, and smaller details in a final pass. By generally relying on intuition when building or creating meshes and prioritized simplicity by keeping part, vertices, and instance counts low across our large map, he can ensure performance on mobile devices.

Double the Population of New Zealand

What’s both shocked and challenged Cracky4 the most is the sheer size of the game, both from a player standpoint and scale of the map. This is the largest scale of a game he’s ever worked on. When their peak was at 14 million CCUs, they realized that’s double the size of where they all come from. That alone blew their minds.

ForyxeV and Cracky4 work together to scale up the game system. ForyxeV will program part of the map or new NPCs, hand it to Cracky4 to design gameplay, who will then request that they scale it up to the thousands and it works. They push the boundaries of the system until something breaks and then iterate from there.

Community Support and Update Parties

Their love for games brought ForyxeV, Cracky4, and Viridial together, and now their work brings others together. That feeling of banding together with peers or strangers to survive and protect each other against all danger that lurks in the forest! To encourage co-play and making memories amongst friends, just like the ones they shared as children, is truly special to them.

Connecting with the community is put into practice every weekend when they run a 45-minute “sandbox mode” prior to the weekly update, coined the “Update Party”. Here they talk to players, give out items, find bugs, and create all types of chaos!

Halloween Update

Speaking of updates… With the experience already being on the spookier side, the devs of course had to go all in for Halloween. They released a three part update to 99 Nights in the forest that lets players explore, gain more items and unlock new classes.

Test your luck, trick or treating in the forest at night. Collect enough candy by lighting up houses around the map to unlock the “Trick or Treat” or Witch” class, customize your animals, and make potions. Special items are only available for a limited time.

Seeing all the positive feedback from players was extremely encouraging. Balancing the different player types is always challenging when making these events; some players take a slow casual route, but others want to use every trick in the book. ”Always surprising how dedicated players are to grinding for the event.” In the future, the team wants to lean more into thematic/ atmospheric updates with a wider range of items in the event store. And they’ve already got some ideas in mind…

Tips for Making Breakout Games

Feeling inspired? As seasoned devs, ForyxeV, Cracky4, and Viridial gave us some advice on how to make a successful experience.

Keep Scope Small & Work Quickly: No developer has a 100% hit rate. Be flexible with your ideas and iterate quickly. Who knows what the breakout hit will be? Don’t scope super high and follow the fun!


Make Something You’d Play: Understand the genres and make a game you’d genuinely enjoy. Envision your friends and favorite YouTubers playing it.


Get Feedback Early and Often: Playtest, playtest, and playtest again. It’s a skill to know what to ignore and what to listen to, but when enough people give the same feedback, you know it’s probably time to consider it.


Observe Unobserved Play: We all have different play styles because of our experience, interest and who’s watching. Developers play differently from casual players. Create situations where you can watch players when they don’t know they are being observed to see where they truly get stuck and confused.


Know When to Move On: Recognize when a game idea “just isn’t gonna work,” and move on quickly. You don’t know what new idea you’re missing out on, by holding onto an old one.

Thanks so much to @Cracky4 @ForyxeV and @Viridial for chatting with us. Be sure to follow them and their journey: Cracky4 (Roblox profile, Twitter), ForyxeV (Roblox profile, Twitter), and Viridial (Roblox profile, Twitter)!