A Wild Staycation & half year review

Wild staycation is here and it’s time to do a half year review! Two weeks ago we celebrated Midsummer in our home country Sweden. Usually it’s a holiday where you get together with friends and family to eat, drink, sing and dance around the maypole. This year is not like others in so many aspects. Large public gatherings are still not allowed, and we celebrated only with our closest in a much smaller scale than usual.

Another thing that is out of the norm here in Sweden is that we actually had nice weather for Midsummer. So even though we can’t go abroad we have enjoyed sunny and warm weather here. We will all do staycations this year and if the weather stays like the Midsummer weather it will be like a dream!

With June starting we are also over a half year in on our Wild Journey. We have hit some important milestones as a studio and it’s been a really exciting winter and spring. If we would summarize our year so far it would look like this

January

• Our first real month in our office and we filled it quickly with hardware to build games!
• In December we made a small game just to quickly get up to speed working as a team. This game was silently released on Google Play in January. It was audited, got age rated in Australia and was finally approved for release and launched. We pulled the game quite quickly though; we just wanted the experience of releasing something.

February

• Our webpage was finally launched and with that we went public with our investment from Supercell both in a blog post and in articles at GamesIndustry, PocketGamer and Breakit.
• We went to Helsinki and visited Supercell. One important document that came out of our trip was what we currently call our Playbook, and it came about on our trip back to Stockholm inspired from discussions with Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen. Our Playbook defines why we do this, how we behave, what we do, how we will succeed and what is most important right now. It is a living document that we have revisited many times since then and continue to use (for instance at our Jobs page). At some point we will share it in a blog post like this.

March

• The COVID19 pandemic hit Sweden, and we quickly decided to start working remotely as a team. We wrote a blog post about our decision here, and we will do a follow up on that later with some of our learnings (for us it has actually worked really well!).

April

• We finalized our first playable for our first “real” game. This playable focused on proving a specific part of the game.
• We grew our team with Artist Mikael Andersson who joined our ranks as a Wildling.

May

• May was pretty much heads down working on our second playable for our upcoming game. This milestone has been about getting a vertical slice of the full experience so we can focus on quality raising iterations.

June

• Just before Midsummer we finalized our second playable and we achieved our target to create a vertical slice. We now have the fundamentals of the game in place but it is still lacking polish and more content.

Finishing our second playable is a nice way to end this first half of the year. Now we will take some staycation and rest up for the last part of the year. Our goal is as we have stated before is to have something ready for soft launch early next year.

We hope you will get a restful summer as well, and we leave you with this concept exploration tease of our next game.