Looking Back On A Year Of Animalkind, A New Creative Adventure By Uncommon Games
We did a lot this year! We pushed the metaphorical big red button on all socials for Animalkind, allowing our awww-dorable mech connoisseurs with big island-building dreams to reach broader audiences of like-minded gamers looking for a new cozy adventure to dive into. We also launched our Discord this Summer where we made a ton of new friends and experienced quite a few firsts for our team alongside our growing community. So far, our Discord has allowed us to have some hilarious “break the game, do your worst” challenges, meme goodness on those days where a laugh is the best medicine, and - to the surprise of no one - talked about some of our favorite games together in a very–um, passionate way. As yes, Dragon Age has come up far more than we thought possible. We blame our marketing and community team (hi!).
Some of you may know but for any new indie lovers that may be reading, Animalkind also launched its first ever public Alpha! For our first time with Animalkind out in the wild, we wanted to keep it simple: introduce players to the world and give a taste of what building your own island community looks like with the in-game crafting components. Because of this simple goal to see how players felt about the introductory and foundational gameplay experience, we wanted to ensure that no major issues could impact that experience as this play period also worked as a stress test for our servers. Because of that, we kept our first Alpha as a closed experience where interested players were chosen after signing up for the playtest via our Steam page or from our Discord. It turns out that this was absolutely the right move and we were able to not only showcase the game but also see how our internal team was equipped for when servers are live to make sure we were at full force behind the scenes. We got a lot of solid information from Alpha 1 with the help of some thoughtful feedback from players both with the email survey and in our Discord. We’re excited to show everyone the fruits of those learnings in the near future with another upcoming chance to play Animalkind early!
Some Quick Takeaways From Alpha 1 (Because Everybody Loves Bullet Points)
- Valuable feedback on what was wanted from an in-game tutorial and progression
- More insight into what is wanted regarding in-game customization
- Physics are weird and fist fighting the ocean was inevitable
- Y’all were even more creative than we thought, which was impressive
- If given the chance, y’all will break the game in the most chaotic way possible (and we love that for you)
- The moon is scary
- The Animalkind engineering team is legendary, handling the small issues that did pop up like champssome text
- Player feedback and alerts were crucial here, so massive thank you to all of our Alpha 1 players!
Though the end of the year is nigh (that word sounds so cool, people should really use “nigh” more often), the team is still hard at work continuing to expand the Animalkind experience. From player customization to real-time night and day cycles–a brand new area to explore with the Wilderness and a fun new Stop-and-Go game mode to enjoy with friends, the past year has done nothing but inspire the entire team even more during development. Our community is new and growing, but there has been no short of inspiration derived from it. Your thoughts, your enjoyment, your ideas–it’s been inspiring and has us excited for what’s next. Which brings us to…
Well, what’s next?
We will have more info on the next early playtest period with Alpha 2 next year with some more details on what you can expect before that next play period arrives. Right now, the team is hard at work making their way through some dev goals before the holiday season arrives, but when we all come back, we’re hitting the ground running and will share more then. This will include more about what sort of new features will be seen in the upcoming Alpha, what concepts we’re experimenting with, sharing some of the challenges when creating a game - especially with a smaller team, and a developer Q&A livestream that we’ll talk more about later. This year was big for us as a team but next year will be even bigger as more and more gamers looking for a cozy, creative game join our incredible community filled with cozy vibes, creative building, and fun with friends if co-op is more the vibe. Making an island is fun and all, but building something with others adds a whole new element when curating the perfect cozy space. To carry on the feels, studio head Steven Jian also has a few words to share - as well as some helpful advice - with our growing community before the team heads off into the festive sunset for holiday:
After 20 years of building games, here's the best piece of game dev advice I've received: if you're scared of doing something, the solution is to do it more often. Letting players try Animalkind was scary - we had so much more to build, so much content to add, and so much polishing to do. We had those thoughts, the thoughts every studio has: “What if players didn't like it?” On the other hand, we were also excited to share the game. We're absolutely in love with its premise and vibe, and that love had us itching to share it with the world. Our social media videos have been getting lots of love, but would that translate into genuine interest in playing the game? So we followed that piece of advice and pushed to release our first Alpha.
Shipping a game, even in alpha state, was no simple feat. We had UI flows to clean up, tutorials to build, and infrastructure to set up... but I'm incredibly proud of our team at Uncommon for getting it all done. I'm also deeply thankful for all the players who showed up to try such an early version of our game! The playtest results were super encouraging. We learned exactly what to focus on for the next alpha and confirmed we're heading in the right direction.
The heart of the advice is that everything in game development is like a muscle—repeated use makes future attempts easier and smoother. Alpha 1 was our first rep... I'm looking forward to Alpha 2 and beyond, and I know the rest of the team is just as excited!
From new socials to our first public reveal of Animalkind, 2024 was a good one. We can’t help but to reflect and feel proud of what the team has accomplished and excited about what’s to come. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of the journey this far, we appreciate every single person so much! There’s more to go but for now, we hope you all have a rejuvenating and safe holiday. And don’t forget to drink that water, practice that self-care, and always put your coziest and kindest paw foot forward.
Until next time, friends.
🐾Uncommon Games
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