Super Animal Royale has been around for right about seven years now, which is a pretty big accomplishment for indie studio Pixile. Not only have they been delivering a great experience, but they also always try to put their players first.
Having just recently launched their Super Animal World update back in December, the team isn’t slowing down at all. They’ve got a new seasonal update coming that promises to bring some serious changes to the game and address some player concerns.
This indie battle royale game broke into the cozy gaming sector with its last update, and based on my conversation with Michael and Ruben, there are a lot of great things coming soon. You can find the interview below, along with a link to the new seasonal video.
Interview with Michael Silverwood and Ruben Grijalva
Q. Let’s get into it. So, with the update coming out on March 31st, how big of an update can players expect for it, especially given the size of Super Animal World, which was just a few months ago?
Michael Silverwood: Super Animal World took a little over two years, so it’s not as big as that. But it’s going back to the quarterly updates that we were doing before Super Animal World. So, it’s similar in size to some of those, but I think it’s actually bigger than most of those because there were so many things that we were trying to fit in for Super Animal World. So, a lot of stuff is just like polishing things up and adding things that we wanted to do for that, and incorporating community feedback. And then we also wanted to give a whole lot more love to the battle royale mode and competitive stuff. So, we added a lot of new content for that. And then, because of Super Animal World, now that we have the NPC quest system, we’re able to do storytelling in these patches, which we weren’t able to do before. So, it has a whole new storyline in the update. So, it’s a pretty big one overall.
Q. I had heard there was a response to community feedback and some quality of life improvements coming. If you can talk more about that? What can players sort of look forward to with those quality of life improvements?
Michael Silverwood: So, we wanted to do some things to make the new flow between the competitive modes and the social hub better. So, we’re adding a play again button at the end of the game so that it’ll just requeue you right once you get back to the social hub to continue playing the same mode again if you want to just play again, and we also have auto-accept as well, so that you don’t miss the queue as easily. You can switch it on or off. So, you can choose if you want to use it, but it’s a way to just like once you’re matchmaking, the second that match is found, it’ll pause for a few seconds to let you wrap up whatever you’re doing, but then it’ll just hop you right in without having to accept. And then, we also have a hot matches feature. So, the idea is it’s like a featured mode system. It’s got a flame icon, but it basically rewards extra XP for a different mode each day. So, the idea is to get the players to flow into a particular mode at a given time so that mode’s more populated because one thing that did happen with Super Animal World is we added the social hub as a whole new space that people can be in, and we made the two modes that were previously rotating every other week. We made them both available. So, we did split the player population more ways. So this is meant to directly address that and have people incentivize them to flow into a particular mode if they want more populated matches, like a better player-to-bot ratio.
Ruben Grijalva: Or if you’re a crappy player like me and you don’t want so many humans, you can go to one of the not hot modes, and you’re more likely to get more, a higher ratio of bots than you will in the hot mode. It works for both competitive and sucky players.
Michael Silverwood: And our thinking was to try to create a way that you can get those modes that are packed with more people without having to make the wait times too much longer. Although that’s something we’re considering experimenting with too, just what should the max wait be since we actually keep it pretty short right now, just so that games start pretty fast. But yeah, a way to not have to disable or take away any modes or something like that, but still get people focused on ones with, if you want to play with a whole bunch of people, especially for times of day when not as many people are playing.
Ruben Grijalva: We kind of introduced a bunch of new matchmaking conundrums with Super Animal World, and so some of this is trying to smooth that out. Yeah.
Q. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. And that actually covers one of my other questions, because that’s been a big complaint on everything I’ve seen. So that’s a really creative way around it. A lot of companies would typically just go back to sort of rotating modes or something like that, but introducing a way to say “hey, you should do this because it’s extra rewards” is definitely a better way to do it. I think I would say at least. So, on the timing for how long it takes to get into a match, I know in my experience, especially when I play solos, there are usually a few more people, but when I was playing duos with a friend of mine, it ended up like I think maybe there were only one or two other duos that were actually real people. That being said, we did queue in pretty fast. I was pretty surprised because we only got, I think, 60 seconds to maybe two minutes. So I was trying to show them how to do quests, or catching stuff, or where to find things, and it was just like instantly I was halfway there, and I’m like, “Okay. I guess we’re in a game.” So you talked about how’s that going?
Michael Silverwood: We haven’t started running tests on that yet, but it’s something that we’re planning to test is what is the right max weight length and so we’re just going to run a few different tests and see quantitatively how that shakes out in the data and then also let the community know about it when we’re doing and then see what they like and how it feels. Cuz yeah, there are two types of player categories there where one might want to just play again really fast again, but a lot of people in the community have actually just been telling us, “I’m doing all the social hub stuff like it doesn’t need to start quite so fast. I’d rather just have more people in each match.” If it’s starting so quickly, it’s segmenting the people online, which is bad. So yeah, we’re planning to actually run tests on that.
Ruben Grijalva: Yeah, I think there are two tensions, one is the tension between getting fuller matches and getting faster matches, right? Those are always going to be in conflict, and the other is what Michael kind of alluded to. We do have different player types all existing in the same world, and there’s tension between what they want. There are those who are super into the social hub and those who just want to play BR. The play again thing is trying to address the latter group, and so it’s like we have a lot of reconciliation to do between holding these tensions together. But that’s what’s nice about a live service game, like the hard thing is that you’re never done, and the great thing is that you’re never done right because you can always address these things as you go.
Michael Silverwood: And I think with some of these features, we’ll roll them out. We’ll see how they all go, and then we’ll keep iterating from there, seeing what we can do. Yep.
Q. Perfect. I think, in my opinion, as a player, that’s what I always like to hear. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, so you might as well at least try to hit the target right. Even if it’s not a bullseye, it’s still close. Let’s talk a little bit about the upcoming story because it sounds like that’s kind of a big deal. So, I’m not sure if expansion is the right word, but this is your first big story change in a way now that the questing system is all there and everything’s there. I’m assuming it’s going to be based around aliens or super aliens or something. I’m not quite sure about that. So, what does our upcoming quest look like? Is it something really big that’s going to really shake up, like the map or anything like that?
Ruben Grijalva: I’d say there’s a small shakeup of the map. There’s just a shake-up part of the map. It’s not like 300 plus new quests like what we launched with, it’s an extension, and I think we’re going to try and, continually, just like we’re iterating on the battle royale, we’re going to iterate on the story front, we’re going to iterate on the other modes as we go. The big thing is that a meteorite has hit the island and created a big crater in the place where it hits, and you can kind of see the meteorite sticking out. And two, a bit of a race to define what this meteorite means for the island. So, there are three different factions that we explore, or the player can explore how they’re interpreting what this meteorite means. We have our new super chimps and super gorillas, and they are embodied by Ham and Enos, who are two super apes who are very excited about the arrival of this meteorite and what it means for the interest in space exploration. Of course, apes were in space before humans. Ham and Enos were the names of the original chimpanzees who went to space. So, our characters are named after them, and they have their interest in the meteorite. Thomas Sledison, who’s the weapons guy on the island, is interested in the meteorite for kind of more functional purposes, building weapons using the minerals from the meteorite. And then the meteorite has a very convenient banana-shaped carveout on one side of it. And of course, this attracts members of the Banan Cult, who, if you’ve played the quest at all, you’ve probably encountered the Banan Cult leader. We meet a few new Banan cult members who are using the ore from this meteorite, which is called Bananite. It’s a bright yellow ore, and they’re using it to build these altars all around the island that have a use in the battle royale. So yeah, it’s sort of like three little story chains, and you kind of explore how each of these three factions are, thinking about this thing that fell onto the island. And then thematically, we have our animal past, and all that stuff is sort of like retro future. It’s got a very 1960s space race thing. That’s when the apes went to space after all. So, that’s how it all ties together in terms of the cosmetics and all that. Yeah.
Q. That sounds awesome. I love that. The creative writing here is always so much fun. I just love meeting people and them being named after this or that or whatever. It’s always just freaking hilarious. So mad kudos on that. It’s always fun. So, we’ll talk a little bit about some more gameplay stuff. I know there are a couple of new weapons. Double Uzzies are cool, but the thing that caught my eye was certainly the X-ray cannon, I suppose, is what it’s called. Do you think you could walk me through how that works, or maybe talk a little bit about kind of the design philosophy behind it as well?
Michael Silverwood: Mhm. So it looks very sci-fi, the weapon, and you hold it low, kind of like the minigun, and it has a charge-up shot. So you hold down and release, and it shoots a big single blast. And so you end up mostly using it like a sniper because you have this one big powerful blast. But the unique thing about it is that when you hold control to crouch, which is the same way that you use scopes on a sniper, it triggers the X-ray mode, and you can see through walls and barriers and everything like trees and all that. So you can actually see where enemies are and kind of prepare your shots for when they’re going to come around the corner. but you really have to hit your shots because you just have that one big blast and then it takes a bit to shoot the ne to charge up and shoot the next one. And you’re pretty slow while you’re moving around with it. So, it’s a pretty unique gun in its legendary tier. So, it’ll be rare to come across it. You get it in mole crates, but it’ll be a pretty fun one when you do find one.
Q. That was kind of my anticipation, but definitely a little bit more interesting than I was what I was picturing. So that’s really cool. On that note, can players expect more weapons like that? And like the BCG, big clucking gun. But is that kind of going to be the design philosophy going forward, that things are going to get a little weirder, or will it be more stuff, kind of like the double uzzies, where it’s variations of kind of typical things?
Ruben Grijalva: Yeah. They want even weirder. That’s what the people want.
Michael Silverwood: It’s actually going to be interesting with both the Uzis and the X-ray gun, because they’re very different. One’s a traditional type of gun to see which people end up having fun with cuz the Uzis are actually the fact that you can dual-wield them is very fun. So I think we’ll probably still do a bit of both, but we tend to theming them in fun ways where it makes sense. But we actually are adding a rotating weapons system to the game in this update. So the Uzis will stick around for the beginning. The event starts with the Responding Day event. So it’ll be around for the duration of the Responding Day event, which is a little over 3 weeks. And then the guns are going to go into a weekly rotation. And so, because we have a few other guns like the blunderbuss that shoots you backwards, that we did last was it last year? I’m losing track of time.
Ruben Grijalva: I think it was last year.
Michael Silverwood: Yeah, last year.
Ruben Grijalva: And we did one more last year, too. What was the other one we did that was special last year?
Ruben Grijalva: It was a Sparrow launcher.
Michael Silverwood: It’s no…
Ruben Grijalva: No, no, I know.
Michael Silverwood: no, no,…
Ruben Grijalva: Bwocking Launcher.
Michael Silverwood: No. It was the Bwocking launcher.
Ruben Grijalva: Bwocking launcher.
Michael Silverwood: So, basically, one thing before these different weapons, we didn’t want to bloat the weapon pool too much. We wanted the weapons to still each have a defined niche and easy clarity for new players, and have defined roles. And so we hadn’t been adding as many new weapons back then, but then we had the idea, what if we just create a rotation? Then we can get a lot more creative and wacky with these guns because we don’t have to worry about them permanently disrupting the meta as much. So that’s the idea now for being able to add new weapons. Since the Uzi is our third of these weapons, we now have enough to start doing rotations. And then the X-ray laser is just going to be a temporary first test. And then we’re going to decide if it goes into the rotation or not cuz it’s even crazier than some of the others, being able to see through walls.
Q. Okay. That’s really cool. You guys are all about the creativeness. I love it. It’s a very interesting kind of way to get around the sort of issue where there are a hundred weapons to choose from, and you’re like, “Yeah, I’m only going to use five of them at a time.” Will it always be on a three-week rotation, or will it be like a month, seasonal, or what are we looking at there?
Michael Silverwood: It’s something that we can potentially tweak. So, we’ll see how everyone feels about it when we launch. We were planning to start with weekly, but we could do shorter than that, too. We could do something like daily. So, we’ll see. And then see what people prefer. I could have even gotten this wrong. We were just discussing this about whether we’re going to do daily or weekly. I have to double-check.
Ruben Grijalva: If a weapon earns its place in the meta, then we could see some of them becoming permanent and then new ones going to the rotation, that sort of thing. I mean, thematically, it’s like Thomas Sledison is testing out. I think he even has some dialogue in this about you should test out new weapons. Sometimes I throw new stuff into the mix just to see how it goes. So, yeah.
Q. Yeah, that’s awesome. And I love the kind of lore center for it because you’re not just doing things to do them, like everything sort of exists. The banana OS system was really cool because it’s diegetic technically, so it’s a part of the world. It’s not just something you’re doing. Okay, so there is a new hamster ball map coming, is my understanding. So we got to talk about that. So with that coming up, I’m assuming based on this meteorite thing that it’s going to be around the meteorite. It may be wrong. So, will it be another sort of overlaid spot like some of the other ones, or will it be like this part of the map is now not modeled around it per se, but it’s more like the actual hamster ball racing map rather than the other ones?
Michael Silverwood: It’s actually not by the meter. It’s in the swamp. So, it’s called the swamp water breezeway. So you pass through Crocodile Club and over all the little narrow walkways in the swamp, and then it goes through Super Animal Farm and then loops back to the crocodile club. So it’s actually a pretty fun and unique one to navigate across those narrow bridges.
Ruben Grijalva: Because of the piers. Yeah.
Michael Silverwood: Yeah, they made some challenging corners. Mhm.
Q. That’s really cool. I was really curious about that because I know the only official Hamster Ball map is the one for it at Hamster Ball Stadium. So, with Hamster Ball, I know that you guys are trying to build on that as well. How often can players expect maybe not updates to hamster ball racing, but maybe new maps or new are they pickups? So, is that going to be seasonal? Are we going to try to do that every season, or is that going to be like a, “Hey, we did this. We thought it was cool. Here you go.”
Michael Silverwood: I don’t know if it’ll be every season. It’s something we still kind of need to decide now that the game has so many different things. One of the things we’ve talked about internally is just whether we should pick different updates where we’re focusing more on certain areas of the game. And we’ll probably still always do a little mixture of things, but give each update a bit of a focus area.
Ruben Grijalva: This one has a lot more new BR stuff, the new weapons, the banana alters, and stuff like that. Yeah, there might be a future one that’s more focused on social hub stuff, racing, or whatever. Yeah. probably wouldn’t commit to every update is going to have a hamster ball thing, but there’s a lot more we want to do with it. I mean, all these new systems, we got to a certain point, we had to launch them, and we had a pretty good list of ideas and things that we wanted to do to improve them; those are now in the mix every time we’re working on an update as potential. It’s just a matter of prioritizing, really.
Michael Silverwood: And for hamster ball racetracks, it is also a question of where they’ll work well in the map, since we’re fitting them into the natural map. Whenever we do new points of interest, we’ll definitely be planning those a little bit with all the new features and stuff in mind. But yeah, for now we’re not planning to build a second hamster ball stadium. So, it’s like giving the different biomes themselves, like the natural routes that work through them. And so, that’s why Swamp was just one where we found it worked really well, so we decided to add it. Mhm.
Ruben Grijalva: Yeah, I think Swamp we were talking about doing in the original release, but we were worried about difficulty, and we wanted to make the first ones pretty friendly. And this one’s a little harder, I think. So, people have had some time to practice now.
Q. So you guys did add a whole awful lot with Super Animal World. So yeah, I know you just brought up kind of organizing updates and stuff like that. How has that been going? I know I’m sure you guys aren’t on a formal schedule. I know you’re talking about going back to sort of quarterly updates, stuff like that. I’m sure players would be kind of interested to know maybe what they’re looking at, whether it is going to be Ruben brought up maybe for battle royale, this update is for, The Bwalking Dead, or Rebels. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit on how that’s going, and maybe what the current plan is, even if that’s not going to be maintained
Michael Silverwood: Yeah, the current plan is basically to do them so yeah, quarterly by the seasons. So this is our spring update. Have another one in the summer, fall, and winter, and then there are sometimes holidays in between. So sometimes we’ll do a smaller update to do a holiday event in between. We just finished the Lunar New Year event, the Year of the Super Horse in February, because that one kind of falls between major updates. So yeah, that’s the plan going forward. And it is nice to get back to it because it does create a better feedback loop of getting the player feedback, seeing what everyone’s doing and asking for in the world, and then being able to bring that into the game without too long a wait. Mhm.
Q. I totally get it. because players are hungry for content. My god. I’m gonna call them super aliens because that’s just kind of the theme that you guys have going at this point. So, for super aliens, I have a vision in my mind of kind of what they look like, but could you maybe talk about how you went about designing them, or kind of what the thought process was in kind of getting to super aliens, if that’s what they’re called? If not what they’re called, I need to think about some things.
Michael Silverwood: Yeah, they are still bio-engineered by Super Animal World Labs. So they are not actual aliens, but Super Animal World is capitalizing on the arrival of the meteor to create alien-themed animals.
Ruben Grijalva: Yeah, they’re not actual aliens. Yeah, gave them some ideas. It’s all labs.
Michael Silverwood: Yeah. An alien-themed bat, an alien-themed chinchilla, and an alien-themed cow are our three alien breeds.
Q. There’s always got to be a cow with aliens. Yeah, that’s really awesome. So that opens up a lot of weird availability for stuff, doesn’t it?
Ruben Grijalva: We’ve always had breed variants that are not based in nature. We’ve always had cotton candy deer, and all these, we do the crazy colors and stuff like that. So, this is kind of a natural extension, right, of that, where we can SAW Labs have precise control over their crisper processes, and they’re able to really dial in kind of whatever look they want. They just all have to be 5 foot one and 3/4, and I forget what they all have the same basic build.
Michael Silverwood: 5’2 and 3/4ers.
Ruben Grijalva: 5’2 and 3/4ers. I’m sorry. I should know this. But yeah, 5’2 and 3/4 and have the same basic frame that is a constraint because for the battle royale, but other than that they can be as playful as they want, which means we can be as playful as we want and stay within our lore.
Michael Silverwood: And I missed one. We also have the super alien cat. The starter pack breed is alien-themed, and it comes with a space suit; it’s a fun one.
Q. Gotta have a cat because everyone knows cats can’t be from here. Is there anything else coming up with it? So, I’m always curious about the things I didn’t get told explicitly about. So, is there anything else interesting that you could maybe chat with me about?
Ruben Grijalva: I mean, so around the map now, there are these shiny made with the aura of the meteor banana altars similar to the one that’s in the cave now, but more shiny, made with this new gem that they have access to. And during the Super Animal Royale, you can leave an offering to these altars, and in most cases, they will give you a blessing. Occasionally, they will curse you. The more bananas you offer, the better the blessing or the better the chance of the blessing. There’s a random aspect to it. Am I missing anything there, Michael?
Michael Silverwood: And then you can also sacrifice giant emus on them. So, you can ride a giant emu into them, and they get smited.
Ruben Grijalva: Yes, they accept thrown bananas or dead emu.
Michael Silverwood: So, you can get rare weapons, but random chance.
Ruben Grijalva: But functionally, it gives you this other means of getting interesting weapons, and you have to, so you can either find one in a mole crate or whatever, or save up your bananas and take your shot at the alter slot machine. Should I not say slot machine when I’m talking about the game? Is that bad? Yeah. Not a slot machine.
Michael Silverwood: Probably not.
Ruben Grijalva: It’s an E10 game. It’s not a slot machine, but more crates.
Q. That’s a really cool sort of mechanic to introduce because I know there are a few ways to get interesting stuff, but it’s mostly like puzzles around the map or through the Mole Crates. Where do you guys go from here? What are we pushing for, maybe next, or because I know by the time this is out, everyone’s going to have I’m assuming seen the YouTube video at minimum. So what are we looking for, not right away, but maybe in the next season when you guys are pushing for another update? What are you guys most hopeful about, probably putting in there if you can?
Ruben Grijalva: You’re asking about the next season’s going to be about after this one? You think we know that? I mean, we obviously have a lot of ideas, but the problem is we have too many potentials. We have an idea, but if we say it now, then now we’re committed to something when we don’t know which of this giant list of things is going to make it into that. So, we’re just trying to get this one out the door right now.
Michael Silverwood: We do have a lot on the list. Got to sort it all into which updates it comes out in.
Ruben Grijalva: I have my guess, but I’m not going to give it to you because the community will see that and they will hold us to it. We love them.
Q. Was there anything else you guys wanted to tease for people to look forward to, other than the great quests, and some of the more interesting weapons and Animal Royale updates? But yeah, was there anything else you guys wanted to maybe tease or jingle some keys for your players to speculate about?
Ruben Grijalva: I’ll leave that to Michael. I’m not going to speak out of turn.
Michael Silverwood: I mean, there will be some more things. Not everything is in the trailer. We highlighted a lot of fun stuff, but there’s definitely more. So they’ll be finding out more in the patch notes and leading up to the release. So, one thing that’s not in the trailer, but I’m sure we’ll put it on social media and stuff sometime afterwards, and show off what it looks like. But another big player requested thing for a long time has been a search bar in the cosmetics section for customizing. And so we finally have a search bar so you can search through the more than 2,000 items in the game now. So it’s definitely overdue to have a search bar. So I think people will be excited about that one even though it’s a small thing.
Ruben Grijalva: Yeah. It seems small, but I can see that causing a lot of conversation among longtime players.
Q. That’s a big deal. People are like, “It would be nice to have.” And it’s like, yeah, but then you have it, and you’re like, “How did I ever live without this?”
Ruben Grijalva: Exactly. Yeah.
Q. I don’t really have any more questions. It sounds like a really interesting update, so it’ll be really cool to check out when it does come. But yeah, thank you, guys, so much for this opportunity, and I look forward to playing the update when it’s out on March 31st. Such a long time.
While they couldn’t share too much of what’s coming in the future, what is coming in the newest update, Bright Future, seems aptly named. Hopefully, you enjoyed reading this interview as much as I enjoyed conducting it.
Don’t forget to check out the YouTube Video and get a first-hand look at all the upcoming stuff. It’s rare to have a studio put their players and community first, so this is worth checking out for sure.
