Interview with Pixile Studios On A Super Addition to Super Animal Royale

3 days ago 8

Super Animal Royale is a Battle Royale game that takes the fun chaos from games like Apex Legends and turns it on its head with some additional cuteness. This major expansion to the original game, Super Animal World, isn't just free, but it's absolutely packed with all sorts of new things for players to enjoy.

I got to sit down with the minds behind this update and two big shots at the studio, Michael Silverwood and Ruben Grijalva. They had a lot to say about the update and all the super cool stuff they've got planned. I also got to go hands-on with the game before launch in this preview and see for myself, too.

We talk about all sorts of things, and try to get into some of the nitty-gritty of the update. This is a pretty long one, and there's a ton to cover, so strap in and get ready for all the information you could ever want about Super Animal World!

Q. It's really awesome to talk to some devs. I've talked to a couple of voice actors before, but never devs. So this is really cool.

Ruben: Well, you're talking to both, because I'm one of the voice actors in the game.

Q. Oh, are you? Alright, there we go. That's something.

Michael: One of his many things.

Q. Yeah, one of his many talents. A man of many hats, as many people in the industry end up right? Alright, so everything is going to be about Super Animal World. Let's just jump right into it. For starters, this is a pretty big expansion, from my understanding. It's a huge undertaking, which, in anything, is incredibly difficult. So what kind of inspired that sort of idea to do something like this?

Michael: Yeah, so it's actually an idea we had that goes back to almost when we launched Super Animal Royale, when we saw a lot of people coming into the game, seeing the cute, colorful art style, and expecting something cozy, and then it being their first battle royale. And we also just noticed in the lobbies that people were so much more social and wholesome and getting up to silly antics and stuff in the lobbies.

So we thought it would be pretty cool if we could kind of expand that area for them. But that was when we launched into early access. And so, we still had a lot to build for the core modes, like in the core battle royale at that time. So we didn't actually get to start on this project until later. But it's been about three years in the works now to build it, because it was a pretty big undertaking, kind of bolting on a whole new second experience onto the first one. And it basically gives everyone a place to socialize where they can be there as long as they like. And it kind of gets rid of the main menu entirely.

So the old loop of playing the game was that you would load into a match, win or lose, and then you'd be back at the main menu and try again. But now you just load into the world, and you can do everything from the hub world. So all the menus, all the features that you had from the main menu are there. And it's now a relaxing, cozy space where you can go fishing, bug catching, hamster ball racing, and do all the story content and quests.

Ruben: And before it was these two-minute lobbies, right? Like that's one big change, right? The two-minute lobbies and the inspiration that Michael was pointing to are like, in those two minutes, the amount of creativity and socializing that was happening amongst the players, the things they were doing. We didn't even have that much for them to do initially; they were just making things to do. And so, now we're trying to extend that space, and then also give them things to do to center their socialization around. But we're excited to see what they do with infinite lobbies, right? Given what they did in two-minute max lobbies for all those years.

Q. Of course. And given anything, players will do everything with any tidy amount they can get. So kind of playing off of that, were there ever times when you guys were maybe a little bit worried that what you were doing wasn't feasible? Or maybe you didn't know if you were going to be able to get it there exactly where you wanted it to be?

Ruben: Still am.

Michael: Yeah, it's probably the range of emotions across the team, whereas I'm the overly optimistic one. So it's like, we'll figure it out. And then we just keep hitting these really hard challenges along the way.

Ruben: We have a nice balance of ambitious people, and let's say more realistic people on the team. You're talking to the ambitious wing of the team. The realistic people are not represented in this conversation. So the scope creep is sort of our fault. But yeah, we were worried, I would say.

Michael: One of the things that is especially complicated about it is, it's a lot simpler to matchmake from a main menu into a mode and then go back there to have two basically different types of servers with different content, and then be matchmaking between two different game modes constantly was pretty technically challenging.

Q. And that actually leads perfectly into my next question I was really curious about. So, I've done some game dev stuff before. So I do understand. I actually have a degree in game design. So I totally understand where you guys are coming from. Feature creep, all that kind of stuff, it gets really difficult. I was wondering, you just brought up some of the difficulties. Were there any other really interesting ones that came up, maybe a bug or two that ended up becoming a feature, or anything of the sort? Anything that just really sticks out to you?

Ruben: I mean, one thing is, there are still some unanswered questions about it. We're going to have to have the game fully populated to know everything. So it's sort of like looming, the things that we don't know. The nice thing about being a live service game is we can respond to those, and we will respond to those as we've been responding to them in the Battle Royale for years.

But one interesting thing we've been exploring as we've added more story elements and more NPCs is, what are the interactions going to look like between talking to a real person, or talking to an NPC, which have existed in MMOs and stuff like that for a long time. But then we have this other loop where you go into another space to do competitive modes and all that stuff. And so this is more of a question of how all these things are going to interact.

They have been really fun in our play testing. So we're feeling really good about that. Let's just say we felt much better after having had our first play testers on the server and getting to experience that for the first time. Because you just don't know. I'm writing the story. I have no idea what people are doing in between talking to these NPCs. Like, how are people interacting? What order are they doing things in? It's an open-world kind of map. How do we lead people in a way that's going to get them to the things they need to unlock to progress?

None of which were things we had to consider in a Battle Royale game. I mean, these are old gaming considerations. We're not the first ones to do an MMO or these kinds of NPC storytelling. But I think the way that we're combining them all is actually quite different than anything I've seen before. And so it's still an open question, how it all lands at scale. But I know that in our play tests, it's been really fun. And that's been encouraging to see.

Michael: Yeah. And I think there will be different player types and ways that people interact with it. So that'll be really interesting to see. Because one of the things during play testing is we've been wondering, how long are people typically going to spend just doing stuff in the social hub and not hopping into a match? Versus other players, they might just be constantly hopping into matches and then just doing a bit of fishing while they're waiting for the next match to pop. So it'd be interesting to see how that balance looks for different players over time. How much they spend on each and how they balance it.

Ruben: But that is one of the goals is to support more different player types, right? Yeah. You know, as Michael said, it's a cozy-looking game that's also extremely competitive, right? Like very hard. I can say this, as everyone knows, I'm the worst player on the team, on the dev team. And so I suffer. I'm like, I'm going to enjoy the cozy elements a lot, like as a break from [the other elements]. Although I have gotten better in the process of it, but I like having those breaks in between.

Michael: I think he's just acting, because we have this character in an animated series called Super Animal Royale Tonight, and he voices Donk. And Donk, whenever he's in it, is like, 'Yeah, Donk can't shoot.' He's like a stormtrooper, like always missing, and stuff. So I think when he's playing in-game, he's just acting as Donk.

Ruben: Well, or that aspect of Donk is based on me. I don't know.

Q. It could be two things. It could be both, you know. So I've now spawned a question that I don't have written down, so I'm going to ask it anyway. So you guys have brought up kind of moving between both the battle royale version and the actual cozy sort of exploration. Are all the menus going to be like UI menus, or is everything going to kind of be diegetic in a way, like you'll go see like an NPC, and they'll send you to the battle royale or vice versa, whatever the case may be?

Michael: Yeah, that's a good question. It is a bit of both. So a lot of it is in the world. You talk to NPCs, they give you quests, and they send you to go do something in the battle royale. We also have, like, when you're customizing your character. Now you actually go to these MTN station holes. which is the Mole Tunnel Network.

Ruben: It's like a subway system. It's also the fast travel, and that's where you go into a hole in the ground. And that's where your customization takes place, rather than going back to the main menu as you would in the current game.

Michael: Yeah. And then, you can pop in and out of the same hole that you went into, or you can fast travel. So, you're unlocking animals and customizing your animal in there. And then we also have this: for all the stuff that was more UI-like from the main menu, we created what we're calling BananOS. So the animals all worship Banan in the game. And so, basically the...

Ruben: Which is short for banana, by the way.

Michael: Yeah. And so, basically, we created BananaOS so that the animals, who didn't get a choice to opt in or not, all got augmented reality installed in their eyeballs so they can pull up the different features that they need wherever they are. So you pop that open, and you've got your milestones and animal paths, settings, and managing your social party with your friends and all that stuff.

Ruben: It's funny that you bring this up, because I think of all the aspects of building a whole story mode and different mini-games and all that stuff. I would say that this question of UI, like, how do we get in and out of these different things, has been one of the biggest lifts for us to figure out, like how to just basically remove the main menu. It's still there for functional things, but we want to keep you in the world, right? That is one of the main design philosophies behind this expansion. It is that, rather than having you sit in a menu by yourself, you still have menus, but you're in the world while it's happening. We even have a custom animation that shows when you're looking at BananOS, so if another player comes across you, they can see that you're in your menu, right?

Michael: You're in like an augmented reality interaction.

Ruben: You're wearing Vision Pro or something. And so, like, how to integrate them, because, to your point, it probably would be tedious if every time you wanted to play a battle royale, you had to go talk to a particular character. But there are characters all over the map who will give you specific tasks and quests to do that require you to go into not just the Battle Royale, but our Blocking Dead, our Infection Mode, and our SVR Control Point Mode, S.A.W. VS Rebellion, or hamster ball races, right? The quest system is really a way of introducing you to and moving you through the varying aspects of all our different game modes.

Q. Oh, I always love when things are more involved in the world, and it's always important to keep players, you know, actively playing the game. The fewer menus they have to sift through, the more time they're going to spend having fun and enjoying themselves. So it's always awesome to hear. We're going to come back to the eye implant stuff. We're going to get to some story stuff, because it's messed up. Y'all have got me freaking out about it. But I was wondering if you guys ever thought that you'd really reach a point where you could expand the story and the world as much as you were planning to?

Ruben: Well, I mean, I could speak for myself and say that, like, when Michael first invited me into this project, what seven years ago now? Something like that. I thought, 'Oh, this will be a fun thing to do for a month.' I mean, because just the odds on these things are never the best, right? When you're launching something fully from scratch. The fact that we're here eight years later, and even at the time, the fact that he brought me in as a story and narrative director for a multiplayer battle royale game, it was like, 'Do we actually need this yet?'

I understood why he was doing it, but what it did was we started laying the groundwork immediately, right? Almost at a prototype stage. For the lore and the world, so that we were ready to make this by the time we hit this. We had two seasons of Super Animal Row tonight that we'd put out. We had tons of environmental storytelling that we've been doing. You know, every update, where we updated the map. We're integrating all these little clues into the story. You know, all of our trailers and stuff are kind of telling a story. If you're following us, we've been telling a story this whole time.

And so by the time it was time to actually sit down and create a kind of more fully featured story within the game, I mean, of course, we invented tons of new stuff for this, to do it at this scale. But it wasn't like we were like, oh, now we have to figure out a story. It was like, it was there, right? It was there for the players to discover, and now it's just going to be more explicit and more... nuanced and varied, and we've got all these NPCs to, hopefully, in a fun way, take you through it. I always have to couch it with a 'hopefully.'

Q. There's always going to be some kind of, like, 'maybe not,' but that's the goal.

Ruben: That's the goal. Yeah, we're at the stage now where all we have are goals. We'll see what happens.

Q. On the subject of story and the beginnings of everything, you guys have made note in some of the Q&As about some of your inspiration for various things in the update, like Animal Farm and other things. But I was really curious about what kind of inspired the whole 'Kit and Caboodle' as it were, just kind of what inspired the overarching story, or kind of the direction you guys are going with it, if that can be said.

Michael: Yeah, it's a lot of things. Yeah, I'm curious to hear what you'll say, too. Because at the beginning... we first had a prototype for the game that was just like a Battle Royale prototype. And we had to decide what the world for the game was. What are the characters? Or what's the story going to be? And as Ruben said, that was from the beginning, we wanted it to feel like a living, real place. Even if we weren't telling a story in the game yet, we wanted everything on the map to have a reason and to tie back into the history.

So some of the origin of that was just taking the mechanics and asking ourselves the question, like, 'why would this world exist?' like, 'what would be the reasons that this would be happening?' and then just kind of coming up with reasons from there. We came up with the art style pretty early on, and we just enjoy animals. So, we thought it was very funny seeing colorful animals fighting to the death, and so the next thing that we did from there was basically asking ourselves the question, 'Why are they fighting to the death?' We pulled inspiration from a lot of different places. There's a little bit of Jurassic Park with the genetic modification.

Ruben: Maybe even more West World, because they're more sentient. Well, so what I was going to say is the game is obviously like in look and feel, and in our style. It's very humorous, right? It's absurdist humor. But underpinning that is not hard sci-fi, but definitely, we take the science fiction aspect of it seriously. Like, you can go, you can go talk to characters about what CRISPR is in the game, like CRISPR is a part of our lore, right? So we're trying to take as much as we can.

The surface layer is very, very silly and humorous, as it should be for a game where silly animals shoot each other. Like, we tried to think about each aspect of the world, as in, well, okay, if this was really happening. If there were a corporation that bought some private island and started doing genetic experiments where they created human-animal hybrids, which is what the Super Animals are. Then we came up with the idea of the theme park, right? This is sort of like Disneyland, but the characters aren't people in suits. They're actually genetically modified creatures for you to come and interact with. And then, how does that go wrong? What are the sorts of ethical implications of that? That situation.

And then when it does go wrong, and the animals attack, how does the corporation respond to that from a PR's perspective? All of which, you know, led to this. So, sort of the world we've created with the different factions and all that stuff, but we take each piece of that puzzle quite seriously. I mean, it's exaggerated, it's absurdist, but we try not to do things just to be funny, right? We try to ground it in, like, how would that work? What would that work? And even gameplay mechanics, I think we kind of irritate some of the people on the team because Michael and I are always in the camp of, 'how do we worldize this game mechanic,' right? They're like, 'it's just a game.' We're like, 'no.' We have so many things in our lore and in our world that have a sort of explanation, an in-world explanation.

Like, the BananOS thing, 'oh, it's just a menu.' No, it's not. They have an augmented reality device inside their eyeballs, put there by the evil corporation to control them, but also to give them handy features, much like we've all been given devices that both control us and give us handy features, right? Yeah, there are a lot of parallels to the kind of dystopia that we're going through. It's just somewhat exaggerated and more on the genetic modification side than the digital side, although there is that as well.

Q. Awesome. Ah, and a perfect little segue into kind of the darker undertone of the game, which you can see clearly in the trailer that you guys have put out. A lot is going on there. I thought it was very, very cool to see. It was really interesting. It's funny and humorous, but there's definitely something going on, and you could get a good sense of that. On the subject of darker undertones, how do you guys kind of walk that line of 'this is really messed up and awful, but it's presented in a way that's not necessarily going to break the age rating' per se? You're tackling harder subjects, but not in a way that's just doing that, like there's sort of some fluff around it.

Ruben: I mean, this is where the cartoon logic helps us a lot, right? I mean, if you take Looney Tunes seriously, it's quite grim, right? The coyote is dead many times over, right? And so I think that's one thing. One thing we're doing there is a meta layer to what we're doing, which is every video game that has action and in it where you kill things and things kill you. We sort of take it for granted, but there's a darkness at the heart of the kinds of games that people find fun, which tend to be games with high life or death stakes, right? And games where you shoot each other. You know everything from the more mature titles, but even in E-rated stuff, right? You have death, and it's just in the end, the sort of idea that you come back— you have extra lives, right? Mario has extra lives.

With our sort of idea of an army, you have an army, or a pantry full of clones waiting to replace your character when they die. We're just taking something that has been existing in video games for the entire duration of the art form, and coming up with, again, a sort of in-world explanation for how that works. How is it that we can keep replenishing this battle royale, right? And so I don't think we're doing anything, especially more violent or dark than kind of exposing the darkness that is native to the format, right? Like, Fortnite is also dark; you're killing each other. All these different inspirations, all the things that have led to what we do, there's a darkness. People die.

Actually, there is an optimistic side. It's like, 'Oh, you die, you get respawned, there's another clone waiting for you.' There's always another you that can be. Then we kind of try and leave it up to the players to interpret whether that is dystopian or utopian. From S.A.W.'s perspective, Super Animal World, the corporation that runs the battle royale, this is utopian. Infinite use, what could be better? It could be dystopian as well. That's kind of on you, Shane, if you saw it that way, to be honest.

Q. Oh, wow. Alright. Well. That says something about me.

Ruben: You know what I'm saying. I think that's what we're trying to do. We're kind of playing with these dark themes, but they are just native to the format. We're just kind of exposing them.

Michael: Yeah, it's funny how just making it explicit is what brings a lot of that darkness. And we try to also have it play well on two levels. It can be extra dark if you're really thinking about it as an adult playing, but you can also just kind of skim across the surface and enjoy the cartoony silliness of it all, too, as a kid.

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Q. Yeah, absolutely. I think you guys have done a great job with that, by the way. I think it's always fascinating to kind of have games sort of present these things in a way that is funny, but also really messed up if you stop and think about it. But that's, you know, like you said, that's kind of how games work in general.

Ruben: How a lot of life works in general. Honestly, yeah.

Q. Based on the trailer, it seems like there are a lot of things going on. I noticed a lot of military-esque personnel in the trailer, especially in the actual gameplay portion. They're sort of walking around with weapons and everything. So I was wondering if there is a sort of possibility of danger from them in the social hub version of the world? Is that something that could happen?

Michael: Well, those are the Super Animal World Security Forces. So they're mostly keeping the peace in the social hub to keep it safe.

Ruben: You're really toeing the line there, aren't you, Michael?

Michael: Well, there are also two factions that you meet in the game: the Super Animal World Security Forces and then the Rebels, still in the midst of their sort of uprising.

Ruben: The Super Animal Super Resistance or SASR.

Michael: Depending on who you talk to in the game, they'll have a different view on what the security forces are doing. But when you're in the social hub, it is essentially a cozy space. And then that kind of contrasts against the action and the violence in the main zones.

Ruben: Yeah, they are a reminder that you are living in a kind of totalitarian corporate state, but they're not everywhere. Get away from them. But yes, different characters indeed have different perspectives when you talk to them. I mean, that's one thing we're doing with the storytelling; there are no reliable narrators in the game. Everyone you talk to is talking filtered through their perspective, both their factional perspective and their very specific perspective, like what their job is and how it interacts with the ongoing conflict between the Security Forces and the Rebellion. And then, throughout the course of the story, you have an opportunity to join both sides and kind of learn, get into the details of both sides a little bit.

Q. That's always interesting. I always think it's more fun to have unreliable narrators. So you're sort of going around piecing information together. For example, okay, well, this person said that, and they said that. So that's kind of similar, but not exactly accurate. So that's that. That's really cool. On that note, speaking of NPCs and how you'll interact with them, I did see that you guys posted a nice, humongous flowchart of some NPC dialogue. I'm sure that's not the biggest one there is. Could you maybe elaborate on some of the difficulties that you guys ran into when writing all of these? I mean, obviously, there's the coordination and getting everything set up, but maybe some of the more difficult aspects that you ran into personally or as a team.

Ruben: Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll speak about that because that was mostly my role in this. Yeah, that's my crazy spreadsheet or flow chart you saw.

Michael: How much do you think that actually represents? Is that like 20% of the final?

Ruben: I actually think the version that got posted in that video got scrapped, and we kind of reorganized. Actually, this brings me to my answer. What was actually the hardest thing to figure out was what the structure was going to be. This has something to do with the idea that we want people to have a kind of open world experience in which they can see things in the order they want to, to some degree. I think the first version of it actually gave a little more freedom, and it ended up feeling a little overwhelming. It's a nice hybrid where it took a lot of iterations of that flowchart to get to where we landed now, where there is a sort of main branch of the story that you follow, and you do your basic unlocks.

If you stay on that path, you'll eventually touch all the different activities we have in the world, but there are also tons of side quests you can just discover by roaming around, so it's this nice combination where the core stuff happens on a kind of core branch, and then as you go along that core branch, you open up more like tributaries of different quest chains and stuff like that. One focused on fishing, and one focused on bug catching. The different activities, right as you go.

The challenge was that I'm trying to write a story that's like, what's the story going to be, how are we going to do it, and it turns out it's not a hero's tale where there's one main character, because we don't know who you are. You're playing as whoever you want. You're cloning yourself as whatever kind of animals you like to play as. It's not like we have one single character that you're following around the game. We have a map full of characters waiting for you to discover them. Then we also need to kind of lead you through if you've never played before. Right? We're really aiming at new players—those who've never played even the old SAR (Super Animal Royale) before. We want to make an easier onboarding experience for them.

And so this was a huge challenge: how do I both tell a compelling story about the Super Animal World, making the world itself be the sort of main character? Right? And, like you said, all these unreliable narrators and piecing together, kind of what's really going on in this place, while also tutorializing all the different modes. How do we lead you? How soon do you need to get hamster ball racing unlocked? How soon do you need to get your fishing pole? Like, in order to dig into those experiences, as well?

And so it was a lot of just organizing these two layers. Well, who are you meeting in what order, and what does that tell you about the story and the world, and how does that give you access to the different gameplay features that we're trying to present, the different modes, and the different loops that we're offering? Does that make sense? It's the synthesis of those two tracks— the story track and the tutorial introduction to the game track. Making them feel good together was probably the biggest challenge and the thing that took the longest to get right. That's why we have many, many iterations of that flow chart that you're referring to.

Michael: Yeah, the result of this, too, is that Ruben wrote over 140,000 words of dialogue.

Ruben: There are over 200 NPCs in the game. Some of them are kind of like clones of each other. There are over a hundred fully unique characters, and then the factions. There's, I don't know, 50 dogs walking around, but every single dog has a unique dialogue. If you keep talking to them, you will get a little mini-story with every single one of these dogs and beavers, and the various company workers. As well as the more fully defined NPCs who give out the quests and that sort of stuff.

So, that's why there ended up being so much dialogue. There are a lot of quests. But there are just a lot of little fun things for you to discover in just talking that are not even quests. If you talk to this character, because the main character is Super Animal World, everybody in Super Animal World needs to have a perspective, and for the most part, that is the case, and that's why I wrote a novel this summer.

Q. I always think that's a great way to do world-building, because you don't just have a sort of thing that players go through and do, and then they're done. It sort of makes the world alive in a way, which is awesome. And it makes the world the main character. I think that's really awesome and really important. So thank you for that. But on the subject of activities you guys have covered, I think only three have been officially talked about. That would be fishing, bug catching, and then hamster ball racing. I was wondering if any other ones are coming that you might be excited about or want to talk about, or anything like that. Anything really stick out to you about any other activities?

Michael: Well, those are like the core mini-games or mini-modes that are in the social hub itself. And a lot of what you're doing is, in addition to those, the questing, and the quests have quite a bit of variety as well as their storytelling. There are a few more things to discover in the world. We have some things, like when you're exploring around, making the exploration interesting and fun, some fun stuff to find, but probably mostly that stuff is best discovered in the game itself when you're playing. Which is kind of why we focused on these as the pillars. These are the activities that you're doing, and those are the main activities. The other stuff is kind of extra stuff filling out the world.

Ruben: Yeah, in addition to the three combat modes, of course. We've got three combat modes and then kind of three mini-games. The other thing that's probably good to point out is, just like SAR 1.0 was sort of a foundational thing, and like SAR 1.9 has a lot more going on than SAR 1.0. This is SAR 2.0, right? Or SAW 1.0, whatever you want to call it. We're seeing it as a foundation. We have other ideas. We had to talk about scope creep, and we had to punt on some of the ideas. Some of those will come to fruition in future updates. So we're not done. I'd say that's true both on the questing and story fronts, as well as on the activities front. We have a lot of things that we're excited about that we didn't get to. We think there's a lot of content that's going to keep players busy for now. But like, I think it's important for us to point out: this is a foundation to build on in the coming years.

Michael: And I think, like, when you open up the new menu to matchmake into the game's different modes, that's our idea. We have this hub world that will keep expanding. Then we also now have this place where you can matchmake into all the existing modes. We have room there to keep adding more modes and things to do, so that you can launch out of the hub world into new experiences and back.

Q. On that note, you guys are just feeding into my questions. It's just crazy. You've said, obviously, that there's going to be more. I'm assuming probably not right after, but in the coming months or so. Is there anything you guys have in the pipeline that you're particularly really excited about, or maybe some sort of idea that you guys have had that you really want to try to expand on for the game?

Michael: So we do have some other things outside the Social Hub coming in this update. We actually just announced this morning the respawn tanks. So, in the Battle Royale mode, you'll be able to respawn your squadmates. So we do have a very long list of other things as well that we want to build in the future, but this has been such a humongous three-year project that we kind of have this internal joke when we're managing all this scope creep.

Everything's bumped to 2.1, and now 2.1 is bigger than 2.0, so this is going to be a job for us, like over the holidays and into the new year, figuring out what of the super long list of things that we want to build next gets into the very next update. But in general, it took us so long to build this one, and it was such a big expansion that we're really looking forward to getting back to regular updates. So we're planning to get back to regular every quarter, every three months, doing a new major update. And so we'll be able to chunk all that new stuff into each one of those throughout the next year and not have such a long wait between the next stuff.

Q. Very nice. And you guys totally deserve a break. So take a well-earned breath afterward.

Ruben: It might be a four-month cycle to the next.

Q. That's okay. I don't think anybody is going to tell you otherwise. I think anybody coming for you guys after that is crazy. You guys deserve a break. We just talked about some updates and stuff coming in the future. I was wondering if there are plans for anything in the world to change. So obviously, the focus going forward is going to be more on the story and expanding, and that kind of thing. If the world were to change, maybe a lab experiment explodes, and it creates this new sort of area that's covered in ooze or whatever the case may be. Is that going to be reflected in both the battle royale map and the social hub, or would that be something that's just one or the other?

Michael: That's a good question. I mean, typically it's reflected in both, like with the way that we're approaching it right now. Because one of the things we like is that, and this is especially for new players, making it friendlier to get into the game is that when you're in the social hub, you're able to explore the same island, the same world, without the danger, so that you can get acclimatized to the controls, get acclimated to the world. And so, it actually is pretty important that the two do match up for that reason, so that you have a consistent experience between the two when you're exploring.

Ruben: I think, given our history, if and when we expand the map in some way, it will be done in a way that is, as you say, very tied into the lore, right? It will be a moment, an experience we'll think about. Well, why would this happen? Right. We're going to go through all the same processes that we do for everything else. Yeah. Stay tuned, I guess.

Q. Going to navigate a little away from the story since that's what we have kind of primarily been talking about right here. There are only a few questions left. I did notice in the trailer that you guys show off a pretty interesting photo mode. It's not one that I've ever seen before in a game like this. Maybe it's because of the kind of game it is, but sort of that whole taking time, setting everything up, and like making your own little picture. That's really interesting. What led to including that? Was it just sort of spur of the moment? Like, hey, this would be really cool. Or was it something different?

Michael: Oh, I'm trying to remember now what the original— do you remember?

Ruben: I think, like so many things, it was very community-inspired. We have a huge community of people, we call them Super Artists, but we have these quarterly or twice-a-year art contests where people do fan art. We have a really engaged community of people who like to take the characters of the world and do their own stuff with it, and so creating a tool in-game to do that felt like a natural extension.

It's one of the more, I don't know if 'underrated' is the word. I think it kind of flies under the radar. But I love that mode. I consider the fact that, when I first played around with it, I couldn't believe how fully featured it was, like another kind of mini-game. It's another one of those things that, right now, it's in the main menu, but it's been around for a while. The photo booth is going to be now, you walk until there are little photo booths in the different sorts of hub areas around the world that you walk into, and you can do it and stuff like that.

But it was very community-inspired. It was like, how can we give people more places to express their creativity? And I think in the hub world now of Super Animal World, you're going to be able to do that without fully disengaging from the social environment because you pop in, you do a picture, and you pop back out. You know, I think there's a difference between being on the main menu. And there are fun things in it that are social too. You can get your friends' loadouts and put them in the picture as well, which was an important aspect, and then it gives you something you can share on Discord or wherever you're hanging out for you and your friends.

Q. I saw it, and I was like, 'Oh, that's really cool.' That was what really grabbed my attention, especially because you can see that it's you guys who are the subject of the photo, because one of the characters' names is Michael. I was like, 'Okay, well, that's them, they're messing around with it, that's cool.' That was really interesting to see. It looked really in-depth, just from the short instance you guys gave of it. But that was really, really awesome to see. So I was really curious about that I just have one sort of last question. I had a question about the way you guys have sort of run your studio in a way. It's really rare to see studios engage so much with their community and be as open as you have about information. Usually, everyone's very tight-lipped. They don't really want the judgment. They don't really want to deal with what the community might think about something because the studio knows best. But for you guys, I mean, I tracked through, I don't know, like 10, 12 posts of you guys giving information about this upcoming update. And I've got to say I've really wondered what spurred that sort of community engagement. Was it just a thing that sort of ended up happening, or was it a conscious decision that the team came to, like, we need to include our community in our decisions going forward?

Michael: Hmm-hmm. Yeah, definitely a conscious decision. Also, it just happened very organically. Before we launched the Battle Royale, we created the Discord. I think maybe nine months before it came out in early access. When we started, my co-founder Chris and I had created one game before, but it was many years before, and we were working separate full-time jobs. So, we quit our jobs to do Super Animal Royale.

We were just kind of totally unknown indie developers at that time. We just created the Discord, invited people, and more started flowing in. We were doing tests every week. So it kind of started with a very small group at the beginning, and just talking directly to everyone. And then, as it went into early access, we just saw so many interesting things the community was doing, and they would tell us about it. We started weaving a lot of that into the development. Like the cult of Banan that's in the game, that got all woven into the story, inspired by a community member, because we had bananas in the game, and they were just throwing them on the ground and going 'Praise Banan', and it started this whole funny, like, community cult. So we thought, 'Okay, how can we actually create a real lore story reason for why this Banan cult exists and kind of bring it into the world?'

Ruben: Yeah, that's the most conspicuous example, but in a lot of ways, this game has been co-created with the community. Like we started out saying, the inspiration for Super Animal World was the way that the community played and engaged in those two-minute lobby sessions together, including things like founding the Banan cult, which is now a whole Banan cult quest in the game. So, it got integrated very organically.

The photo booth was a response to community artists and those sorts of things. So, the fact that we are engaged with the community in the way that we are is in the DNA from the start, like Michael said, right? There's a co-creation going on where, you know, we read all the feedback. On our Discord forums, you know, we don't always do it all. But our community team is really listening. They're really sensitive to it, and we try. The other thing is, we're gamers, we like doing this. We want it to be cool. We want to make something we want to play. And so, engaging with the community in that way. I say this as one of the people who engages the least with the community. But I see everyone. I'm trying to do it more because it is fun to talk to them. You know, sometimes. And just that transparency is something that we appreciate. We don't want to get out over our skis and say something, and then it turns out that's not what we're doing. So we try to be, we are being somewhat cautious, but, you know. There's definitely a feedback loop that's been really, I think, throughout the history of the game.

Michael: Yeah, they give us a lot of inspiration to do different things in the game, too. So another one is all the artwork. Like Ruben was talking about, we built a physical museum in the game that showcases a bunch of fake Super Animals art that we created to be like famous artwork parodies. That's one of the wings of the museum, and the other wing of the museum is all fan art. And so when we do those fan art contests, the walls are all the winners of that.

Ruben: You can go and look at your art, and you can actually walk it up to it on the wall and push E, and it pops up. You can see all the art full screen. It's kind of cool, it's called the Super Museum of Modern Art or SMOMA.

Q. Oh man, you guys are good at acronyms, that's for sure. I'm eager to play the game. I'm eager to see more of it. I think what you guys have done is really cool and unique in a lot of ways. So I'm really eager to kind of get my hands on it and really get a good sense of all the sickly-sweet craziness that you guys have seemed to come up with.