How a hardcore survival game morphed into an open world town-builder where you play as a corgi mech pilot

You wouldn't know it by looking at Animalkind, a cozy and colorful town-builder where you play as a cute little corgi driving a mech, but it got its start in a different genre altogether. The game about building houses for a bunch of adorable forest animals was originally a hardcore survival game.

I met with Steven Jian, CEO of Uncommon Games, at GDC in March because I was curious how the game went from hardcore to cottagecore during development.

"At the time, we were super into survival games, because it kind of pushed you to work together," Jian said. "Valheim was huge at the time, and so that's kind of where we got started. And what we found as we started developing was that the power curve started to separate people. There's some challenges in design of how to keep people playing together over a longer period of time, if people are playing different amounts."

That's definitely an issue I've seen happen myself in games: if you miss a few sessions with your friends in a co-op survival game, they might progress so much that when you rejoin you feel like you've fallen far behind. It's not always fatal to the experience, but it can definitely cause a rift and make it more difficult for players of different time investments to have a smooth experience together.

"So we went back to the drawing board and thought about what we really liked about base building and everything that was in the survival crafting realm. It really was about the creative investment into the base that was wonderful. That's where I felt the most joy playing with my friends, whether doing it together or asynchronously," Jian said.

"So we paused, and we were like, 'Why don't we just do that?'" he said. "Just the base building part, and strip out the combat?"

There are still a few similarities between the cozy world of Animalkind and hardcore open world survival games: You explore, you harvest resources, you craft things, and you build. But in Animalkind, in place of combat, "The loop is finding and recruiting these villagers," Jian said. "They're gonna have lots of wants and needs, and you're crafting houses for them, and then furnishing those houses for them and getting resources that they want."

In addition to playing alongside friends in co-op, there's "another area that you go to called the Wilderness, and that's where you play with strangers," Jian said. "And that's where you get unique resources to bring back to the home island."

The world of Animalkind is voxel-based, so while you're piloting your mech you can hack down trees and smash rocks, dig caves, and make changes to the terrain. But Uncommon Games wants to make sure you're not turning the cozy world into a nightmare of ruined landscapes and unsightly holes in the ground.

"There's this concept that we're trying to push, which is 'beautiful by default.' We want to help players make something really pleasing aesthetically. I think with a lot of tools, you could really mess up the world, like you can make it full of holes, and it would just look bad," he said.

"So we're spending a lot of effort trying to smooth that out, make it work intuitively and feel good at any point. Because the goal is that players will spend time building this thing up over a long period of time, but be able to step back, look at what they've built together, and just really be proud of what they've built."

There's no release date for Animalkind yet, but Uncommon Games is planning an alpha in the next few months and considering a beta or early access later this year.