Welcome back to another edition of IndieXP, our series of indie developer interviews where we try to spotlight as many creative minds and interesting projects as we can! Our latest episode focuses on a developer whose debut game, Through the Nightmares, taught us some very important lessons about never giving up. A precision platformer in the vein of Super Meat Boy, the game is filled to the brim with well-designed platforming obstacles that stay consistently diverse and surprising, creating an experience that, in our humble opinion, manages to be both challenging and accessible to newcomers of the genre. Don’t just take our word for it, though: Through the Nightmares was also chosen as the best Ukrainian indie game of 2025 by the GameDev DOU community.
So, without further ado: below is our interview with Kate Kovnir, the art director of Through the Nightmares developer Sandman Team. Enjoy!
First things first: could you please introduce yourself for our readers?
Hi everyone! My name is Kate Kovnir, and I'm a developer of Through the Nightmares. I worked on the game's visuals. Gaming has been a huge passion of mine since childhood. So I'm really excited it's become a big part of my life now.
In our opinion, Through the Nightmares did a fantastic job of being challenging without ever feeling overly unfair – as a designer, what were the creative obstacles of trying to craft levels that manage to offer a healthy dose of difficulty without potentially alienating players?
Thanks a lot for noticing that! We really wanted players to feel their own little mistakes, the kind they can fix just by getting better and more precise. In difficult games like this, failure shouldn’t feel punishing. It should feel interesting and give you the motivation to jump back in and try again.
During development, we noticed that many players would get stuck at certain moments, so we always tried to smooth those parts out to make sure the difficulty increased gradually as the game progressed. Sometimes we made certain moments a bit more forgiving, but in a way that the player wouldn’t really notice. That way, the gameplay felt a little less stressful and much more fun.
As a game developer, what does creative freedom mean to you, and how much importance do you place on it during the overall development process?
Creative freedom means everything to me as an artist. It’s like giving a bird the chance to fly. Many moments in the game were made with real soul, even if they might not be really noticeable, from small Easter eggs to the overall atmosphere, especially in the second and third chapters. Almost all of my ideas made it into the game, and the rest will find their place in future projects.
Did you ever have to abandon a certain idea (or ideas) during development because it either didn’t fit into the schedule, the budget, or you realized it wasn’t beneficial to the game for some other reason?
Originally, the game was meant to have five chapters, but only three made it into the release. We were simply too ambitious for such a small team (it was only three of us). The most important thing is knowing when to stop, because in game development, just like in art, there’s no real limit to perfection. You could keep polishing one game for your entire life, and whether that’s good or bad… well, that’s up to you to decide (lol).
As a follow-up to the above, is there something you’re proud to have kept?
Yes, absolutely. I’m really proud of the game’s ending — it took a lot of time and effort, but there’s a real plot twist there, and the story unfolds like in the best David Lynch films. The game is absolutely worth playing for the ending alone! I won’t spoil anything, but you won’t be disappointed.
Was the manual checkpoint system part of the original design concept of Through the Nightmares? Did this – in our opinion, quite crucial and very useful – mechanic change or evolve in any way during development?
Yes, this mechanic was actually one of the very first we came up with when we started designing the game’s core systems. At first, it was just a simple checkpoint — a way for the player to take a short break in the middle of a level. But later, we added the ability to place a checkpoint even in mid-air, which opened up new possibilities and even some fun “hacks” for players.
Overall, the checkpoint system was added to spread the player’s attention across the whole level, so it wouldn’t be like in similar games where the player has to replay the first part over and over just to reach the one difficult moment.
Have you ever found yourself pressured or influenced by gamers’ expectations in terms of what a game should be like/what elements it should have, etc.? How do you balance your own vision and ideas with these expectations?
Personally, I didn’t really feel any pressure from the players' side. We always tried to listen to their ideas — and many of them were genuinely interesting, some even made it into development. Of course, there were also things we knew we just couldn’t handle with such a small team.
We ran some surveys about visuals and different mechanics, and very often players’ vision matched our own, which was really inspiring.
A fun theoretical question: if you had access to unlimited resources, what would you do differently from a creative/artistic standpoint?
Thank you for such an interesting question! I really love to dream about things like this. Definitely, we would make an animated trailer in an anime style for the game — that would be amazing! We would also add different skins for the Sandman and create more professional, epic cutscenes and definitely animate the Memory Card. And of course, I would love to create a lot of art for different characters, with the hope of making an artbook in the future.
Finally, could you tell our readers where they can follow you and your work if they’d like to stay up to date with any future developments?
For your dear readers, we have our Discord channel where they can ask questions to our team or even directly to me. And of course, there is our email newsletter, which you can subscribe to in order to quickly receive notifications about game discounts and other big news from us!
Thank you for such interesting questions! I hope that some readers will laugh, some will find inspiration. <3
