Call of Duty: Warzoneand other battle royale games take the traditional first-person shooter mold and crank them up by dropping a large number of players onto the field at once. While they can be gritty and realistic, games likeFortniteare more cartoon-y in design, while games likeApex Legendsutilize the hero-shooter formula seen in others likeOverwatch.Super Animal Royalestands out by twisting things into a top-down, 2D perspective, but coming up on the end of its Early Access period it’s clear the game still captures the genre’s emphasis on large communities.
Game Rant spoke with Pixile Studios co-founder and CEO Michael Silverwood aboutSuper Animal Royale’s development, upcoming Version 1.0 release, and its active community. Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: Why did you decide to start Pixile with Chris Clogg?
A: Chris and I have known each other since we were three, we grew up on the same street. While we were growing up we played games on the computer a lot, so we learnedFlash animationtogether in elementary school and made funny videos. Eventually we got into map making and modding, made some maps inWarcraft 3. A funny one we made was an RPG based on our street.
We also made some that became a little more popular, Chris especially. He made someStarcraft 2andTeam Fortress 2mapsthat was pretty popular - a few of them were in the top 10.
So we’d been playing around with game stuff together through high school, and we went to the same university. I did business and computer science, Chris did computer science. While we were there we built websites and apps for companies freelance, and then decided we wanted to try and build our first game.
We built our first game together while we were in school, and it took us about two years. It was aniPad gamecalledStratosphere. After that, I moved down to San Francisco and worked in venture capital for a little over four years helping tech startups. Chris worked with me at a lot of those companies building apps, helping design and launch products. The whole time we were thinking about what we might want to do for a future game, prototyping ideas. That’s how we came up with the idea forSuper Animal Royale.
Q: Well tell me aboutStratosphere, and what its reception was like as a test for working in games.
A: Sure, soStratospherewas acompetitive tower defense gamethat two people could play against each other on the same iPad. Essentially each player defended their side with towers and would send monsters against the other player, so you had to balance your spending with the income you’d get every 30 seconds on offense and defense.
It was inspired by a lot of theWarcraft 3tower defenses we loved playing, but designed very specifically for iPad. All the maps fit perfectly on that screen, it was like a real-time board game you could put between two people.
Apple really liked it, and they featured it a lot on theApp Store. We got the big featured slot when we launched and it was included in a lot of roundups, plus critical reception was good. The thing was we supported it for a couple of years and continued working on it, but the business mistake was it was only on iPad and it was a paid game, for $2. We couldn’t really turn it into a full sustainable business.
Q: Was that desire to make more of a full-time business what led intoSuper Animal Royale?
A: We thought we love making games so we’ll make them either way, but withSuper Animal Royalewe did see an opportunity where we could both build something fun that people would like and want to play. We also figured if we did it on more platforms than just mobile and removed the up-front price, we could potentially build something that would grow a lot more thanStratosphere.
Doing that would potentially allow us to build it full-time as a business, have a larger team, have higher production values, and also reach more people. That’s the big challenge for anyindie studiois that if you’re a big company you already have a built-in audience and attention. For us, we’re unknown at the beginning, so you have to find out how to reach a lot of people.
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Q: So you decided on a battle royale game. Why that genre specifically?
A: We were really big fans ofbattle royale games early on likeH1Z1, and laterPUBG. We were prototyping game ideas and wondered how battle royale would work as a top-down 2D shooter.
When we first built a prototype, it wasn’t that fun because a lot would happen at the edges of the screen and you wouldn’t have the same sense of danger - you could always see the other players. So we shelved it for a while, and then came back to it with the idea to create a fog of war system.
Once we created the line-of-sight fog of war, that’s what made the game fun. At that point we were having a ton of fun playing the prototype because you couldn’t see into a house until you looked in the door. You could have the same exciting moments aslarger, 3D battle royales.
After we figured that out and the prototype was fun, we started thinking about what would make the game unique and stand out in the market as not anotherPUBG. The 2D top-down feeling was one thing, and we also thought that made it more accessible for people to get in. It’s a little easier to play a top-down game than a 2D shooter. We also made match length shorter, so you can win in about six minutes.
Q: In that interim where you shelved the game, what other ideas were you toying with?
A: We thought about tower defense and otherstrategy-type gamesbecause that was our first game. We were testing a lot of prototypes in this top-down perspective, especially since it was just the two of us. Using 2D allowed us to do a lot as a small team.
Q: How much didSuper Animal Royale’s art and humor play into making it more accessible? You said you have experience with Flash, and to me the art design gives off similar vibes.
A: The story idea and characters evolved in an interesting way. I’ve always been really attracted to minimalist, colorful art styles like that and I love animals. I’ve been fostering kittens for the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) for about five years.
We wanted to approach the game where the whole world had consistency. When we were first designing it, we wanted to design a backstory and make that conducive to the type of game we were creating. A lot of the themes worked really well for gameplay, but also we found it was funny to have cute animals who were surprisingly angry and vicious - inspired by games likeConker’s Bad Fur Day, orHappy Tree Friends.
Once we had the nuggets of its art style, animals fighting, and the silly juxtaposition of cute and violent, we started writing a backstory for why these animals are fighting on an island. Everything we designed from then on is all linked to the backstory so when you’re exploring you can put together what happened.
When there’s a reason for everything, it makes everything feel a lot more real in a subtle way.
Q: Where do you find the balance between having this backstory and keeping it on the backend so players don’t need a lot to get into the game?
A:Games are unique as a storytelling medium, so we’re kind of trying to play to the strengths of that. Lean into the idea that they’re interactive and let the player explore and discover for themselves.
The world is set up so you get the simple concept of animals being cute but angry, and that’s funny. Then the more you play, you discover more about the world and backstory through exploration without us having to linearly tell you that much.
Q: Going back a little, you said you fostered kittens. Where was that for again?
A: When I was in San Francisco I fostered them for the SF SPCA, now I foster them for an organization in Vancouver called CTRS (Cat Therapy and Rescue Society). I’m up to 69 kittens now, and kitten season is starting soon so I’ll probably start to get more again.
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Q: Does anything from your studio go toward supporting these kinds of organizations?
A: Not yet, but it’s something we’ve talked about. Hopefully it’s something where now that we have a publisher, Modus, we’ll be able to get more support on running that. When we were a small indie team, figuring out how tointegrate a charity with taking donationsand handing those off was something we didn’t have the infrastructure for. It’s definitely something we’d like to do.
Q: That’s a good segue. What was the process like getting to this point where you have a publisher and are releasing Version 1.0?
A: WithEarly Access, so much has happened in the last two-and-a-half years. When we launched it had all of the foundations, but there was so much more to flesh out. We started with 50 animals and now it’s like 345 in terms of raw content. The map itself has much more density.
Rather than building new maps, we’ve spent the whole time adding more detail and locations to explore on the same island. We’ve added lots of guns and modes, and last year we did a big overhaul of the progression systems and redid a bunch of the menus. Its been a lot of iterative development.
We’re alwayschatting with our community on Discordand getting feedback to integrate into the game. For a while early on we were doing updates every two-to-three weeks. Now we’re doing bigger updates a little more spread out, and we just added in the concept of Seasons and Animal Passes. We have the pipeline so that once we hit Version 1.0 we’ll be doing new seasonal content.
We also just added a tutorial which the game didn’t have before, so it’s a lot of putting the pieces in place to make it feel like a full game with everything you’d expect.
Q: For the Season Pass system, did you pull any ideas from particular games using a seasonal platform?
A: Yeah, we thought a lot about how we wanted to design those systems and looked at a lot of the examples that exist. I wrote a blog post about our approach last year while we were designing.
First of all, we wanted to deeply understand all of these systems and not change anything for the sake of it if things aren’t broken, but there were a lot of areas I figured we could improve upon. One thing we’re doing for the Version 1.0 release with Seasons and Animal Passes is that we’ll have an archive system so you may purchase or finish older passes to take away some of the ‘Fear of Missing Out’ and incentive to play a lot at the end of the season.
We believe in it being healthier to play the game however much is a fun amount over time, rather than having that incentive to play so much at the end of a season. This will allow you to play at your own pace to complete those while we continue tocome out with new seasons.
Q:Super Animal Royalefocuses a lot on cosmetics rather than gameplay changes. Will seasonal content reflect this? Or are there any kind of “pay-to-win” elements involved?
A: There’s nopay-to-winin the Animal Passes. They’re just cosmetic or involve currency you spend on cosmetics.
Aside from thecosmetics you get in the Animal Pass, we also do map updates and have the theme of each update go with the Animal Pass. This next pass we’re releasing June 1, it’s called the “Beach Party” pass. Along with beach-themed items and cosmetics from the musical trailer we just released, we’ve also redone the shorelines around the island. They’ll have shallow water you can wade into and generally look a lot nicer with a variety of building types for better looting. We’ll have giant clams you can open with items in them.
The last thing we’re doing for each season is releasing new episodes of ourYouTube show. We did a Season 1 of the show that’s complete, and then when we released our first Season Pass last year we started a new run ofSuper Animal Royale Tonight. Now new episodes will be synced to each season.
Q: Are those videos purely for fun and lore? Or do they include direct benefits for players as well?
A: They’re for fun and for lore. Basically, the show is set up like a parodyesports showhosted by a donkey and monkey who commentate over the battle royale - likeThe Hunger Games, it’s televised.
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Players can submit their top clips to the show and there’s two segments, “Super-est Kills” and “Blooper Scooper,” where the top clips that are either the funniest or best gameplay get featured. However, it’s also a show-within-a-show, because it’s part of the lore thatSuper Animal Royaleis broadcast for people to enjoy.
You actually see the rebellion happening behind-the-scenes against the show being produced, and how the animals are being forced to fight each other. They consistently attack the show and capture some of the cast members. So you’re seeing a combination of the backstory for what’s happening on the island with players participating in the show.
Q: Having played a bit of the game leading up to this, that explains a lot.
A: Yeah, in a lot of portions of the map you can actually see changes when significant things happen inSuper Animal Royale Tonight. Wechange the in-game islandto reflect what happened on the show as well.
Q: You’ve talked about community contributions a few times, and there’s also a fan art gallery on the island. How much of an impact has the community had on the game, and what more are you looking to do with it going forward?
A: We started the Discord when the game was inPre-Alpha, early spring 2018. By the time we got to Early Access in December 2018, the Discord was over 7,000 people. That grew out of running weekly tests like tournaments with the community for feedback. Once it launched and the Discord kept growing, we just kept taking what they were doing that’s fun and finding ways to integrate it.
The fan art was a good example. People love drawing their animals and were posting art in the Discord, so we created a new character, Rabbita Smith, who’s an art critic that runs contests. Playerssubmit their artand it gets featured inSuper Animal Royale Tonightwith the art critic showing off winning pieces, we have a website built for it, and you also find them in-game.
We have a content creator program in the Discord, too. All the stuff that naturally comes up in the community, we find ways to try and support it.
There’s a cult of banana in the game, and we sometimes adapt the story to stuff from the community. We thought it would make sense of the animals had some sort of cult, and as we played with the community, players started saying “praise Banan” when they dropped bananas. So, we wrote a whole backstory about the cult of banana, and now you can find shrines to Banan.
The player who kind of started it was named Raven, so we created Super Ravens as an in-game animal and the Prophet of Banan is a statue of a raven.
Q: For the 1.0 update you’re doing a larger console release. Tell me about how that has come about, and how much you expect the audience to grow.
A: That’s one area where it has been a lot of help from Modus. They have an internal development studio, so they’re handling theport to consoleswhile we’re working on the core game build. We have a really good relationship with their team now where Chris is able to work back-and-forth.
We also got this great opportunity withXbox Game Preview, since they have a program just like Steam Early Access where you may release early and get feedback. We’re going to do basically the same thing as on PC, putting it into Game Preview first to gather feedback. Then, once it arrives with Version 1.0, it’ll have all the console builds ready to go with feedback implemented and cross-play matchmaking. Also cross-save so you can take your profile wherever you play and keep making progress.
Q: When is the full launch expected to happen if the Xbox Game Preview release hits June 1?
A: So far we’ve just said later in 2021.
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Q: Once you’re through with Version 1.0, what are the plans to keep expanding?
A: One of the bigger ways in the near-term that we’re looking to shake things up is with new gameplay modes. We’ve done two so far. One of them is Super Animal World versus The Rebellion, a 32v32 mode withflags to capture and controlwhere you may win by defeating the other team or capturing three of the four flags.
Then we did Mystery mode more recently, which is still battle royale but randomly changes one of seven mechanics. It might be one-hit kills or a banana mode where every bullet is bananas. We’re going to be doing more modes like that, and potentially modes that change gameplay even more since we have a good foundation for the map and weapons - which will continue to progress iteratively.
In modes we can experiment with more unique game mechanics.
Q: How much has the Pixile team also grown from its humble beginnings?
A: We’re at 11 people now. We grew the most early on, and then the team has been relatively stable for the last year or more. Basically, we hit a point where we were considering the publishing deal and had to decide whether we would expand to do more in-house orwork with a publisher. We made the decision to work with Modus so we could keep the core team roughly the same while doing a lot more.
Q: You’ve talked about moving between California and Vancouver. How spread out is your team?
A: The Pixile team has been fully remote from the beginning, we work out of Discord together. We have people in Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia. Lots of time zones, lots of different places. We’ve figured out how to work well asynchronously across time zones.
Q: I imagine COVID-19 didn’t have a huge effect on your workflow then?
A: Yeah, I think it impacted our personal lives more than our working lives, because ourwork was already remote. We were fortunate in that respect, we didn’t have to adjust from working in an office.
Q: The battle royale genre has grown a lot with games likeCall of Duty: WarzoneandApex Legends. What has it been like seeing that growth, and how has it affectedSuper Animal Royale?
A: One thing we’ve tried to do from the beginning, which is probably healthy for any game studio, is to make the best game we can without being too distracted by what everyone else is doing. When you see other studios do great stuff it can be inspiring, but we don’t just want to compete to be the thing people choose to spend their time on. We need to make something that’s as good as it can be, and that’s fun regardless of whatever is the trend.
When we first launched, it was in the middle of the battle royale hype. Now I think it’s settled down intobattle royale being just another genre of games. We’ve ended up in a nice spot that we’re quite a bit different than the other big battle royale games. The feeling of a 30-to-40 minute match in a 3D game is quite different than a six-minute match in top-down 2D.
There’s definitely things there that wouldn’t even work in a 1:1 translation because of match length and perspective. I know a lot of 3D battle royales now havemechanics for bringing teammates back to lifeso that when there’s a long match you don’t have people waiting. That’s a mechanic that isn’t needed in our game as much. Your teammates can get knocked down and you pick them back up again, but if your teammate fully dies they’re unlikely to wait more than a couple of minutes before you win or die yourself.
Q: Have you pulled any kind of specific inspirations from the games which have come out sinceSuper Animal Royale?
A: I don’t think recently. Early on, one of the cool thingsFortnitepioneered was storytelling in a multiplayer gamethat happened for everyone as a shared experience. We do storytelling a bit differently than they do, but in principle we’re doing something similar where the island is evolving, the story is continuing with the show and everything else. You do get the shared experience, which I really like as a way to approach storytelling in games.
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Q: Outside of what we’ve discussed for Version 1.0, are there other project ideas in the works at Pixile?
A: We’re really focused on this big release, it’s going to be a big moment for the game. Version 1.0 is laying the foundations for future content, but for now we’re building all of that out and focusing our attention. Once it releases we’ll be in a good place because it’s putting in systems to naturally support ways the game can evolve.
Q: Have you discussed anything beyondSuper Animal Royale?
A: We’re all-in focused on this. I think it’s an interesting way the industry has shifted with thismodel of live-service gameswhere as long as players want to continue exploringSuper Animal Royale, we’re building the systems to add content for a long time to come. With our small team, we don’t have another team to devote to new games or anything like that.
Q: Is there anything else you want to add?
A: It’s really exciting to bring our first game to consoles. Chris and I had done our iPad game, then this one was PC and Mac, but we never brought a game to Xbox, PlayStation, or aNintendo platform. On top of that, the trailer we created to announce that was a project we spent over five months of production time on last year.
We’re able to produce these videos ourselves in-house, which is why we can do the show and integrate it, but this trailer was a creative risk. We decided to do it as a musical that fleshes out a bunch of the backstory of the world. We were so excited to release it because as a creative project it was one we were really proud of.
The moment in the trailer when animals take over the theatre has been hinted at a lot in-game, it’s known as “The Incident.” Super Animal World was a safari theme park in the past, and the animals were the attractions. Eventually they decided they were fed up and took over in a rebellion, which triggered the damage you see around the park. When Super Animal World was able to take back control, that’s when it pivoted intoSuper Animal Royaleas it is today.
It’s a big storytelling moment in addition to being the exciting console announcement and musical.
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Super Animal Royaleis available now in Early Access on PC, with an Xbox Game Preview release for Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S coming June 1. Versions for Switch, PS4, and PS5 are in development.
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