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Camp Spirit developers on changes from Switch

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Gamers can return to the “Cozy Grove” universe this week with the launch of the sequel game, “Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit.” The new title, which launched Tuesday, is an exclusive mobile-only game for Netflix, which acquired “Cozy Grove” developer Spry Fox as an in-house studio in October 2022, setting it apart from its predecessor, Apple Arcade. was released on Nintendo Switch (the most preferred platform for gamers), Xbox, PlayStation and PC in 2021.

But says Spry Fox co-founder and studio director David Addery Diversity Nor has making the game for Netflix affected the title as much as fans of other platforms first assumed.

“Obviously, we’re not on the Switch at the moment – but we still had to make the game compatible with controllers, not that we’d forget that part,” Eddy said. “So it hasn’t changed as much in the scope of the game as you might think. One thing I can say transparently because I knew 100% of people will be playing games on a mobile device, we care about mobile more than ever. Not to say we didn’t care about it before, because it was an Apple arcade game first. But we’ve gone the extra mile to make sure it’s fun to play on any screen, no matter the size, whether it’s a big iPad or a small phone.”

An example of an additional feature for “Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit” is its new zoom in and zoom out button, which is “something I’d like to think we’d put in without consideration,” Eddy said, “but given that the game Now 100% mobile, we are going to put.”

“Otherwise the stuff hasn’t changed as much as you might think,” he added. “And our ambition is still to have games available on TV at some point and some things like that. So we don’t want to walk away from investments that enable us to do that.

According to Netflix, “Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit” is described as a game “about the healing power of helping others”: “In it, you play as a spirit scout who is stranded on a mysteriously enchanting island after a bus accident. While you When not looking for the rest of the squad or decorating your campsite, you serve as the caretaker of the island, tending to the ghostly troubles of its spectral inhabitants, bringing peace and friendship to the adorable bears and other animals suffering from past traumas. When the restoration work is complete, proceed to explore, fish, craft and decorate to your heart’s content.”

Two aspects of being a Netflix Games title that the “Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit” team values ​​are the absence of microtransactions from the game and the broad reach they can reach on the streamer, which reported 269.60 million subscribers as of March.

“What’s great with Netflix is, if you want to try to monetize your game, you have to do something to get people to give you money,” said Alicia Fortier, “Camp Spirit” lead game designer. “And that can be the complete opposite motivation of wanting to do good for people’s lives. And it is opposed in various ways. So it’s really nice not to have to worry about being on Netflix, so we can focus on giving players a great experience.”

Fortier also noted her excitement about being on Netflix due to the fact “we can reach people who don’t have a Switch, because there are people who think, why am I going to spend hundreds of dollars on a console?” “If more and more people can have access to the games, that would be my dream come true,” Fortier said.

The team of Edery, Fortier and Spry Fox set out to make a sequel to the wildly popular “Cozy Grove” not just as a splash project for new owner Netflix’s growing slate of original video games, but because of some “major, major problems.” With the original game.

“To clarify, ‘Cozy Grove 1’ worked really well. We were really happy with it. People played it for a surprisingly long time; There are people who are still playing it, even since launch day, which amazes me. But there were two fairly significant points,” Addery said. “One of them was just technically, we didn’t architect it in a way that made it easy to develop in terms of adding new land masses, adding as many characters as we wanted in the future. And there are various reasons for that, but it wasn’t technically designed to scale that way. Even people who liked ‘Cozy Grove 1’ who played it on Switch commented, ‘Wow, once you cut your island with decorations and animals and stuff, you start having performance issues.’ And that’s despite the fairly significant amount of work we’ve done to make up for it. So one of the reasons we wanted to make ‘Cozy Grove 2’, ‘Camp Spirit’ is because we wanted to rebuild the game from the ground up, so we no longer had those limitations.”

Now, the “Camp Spirit” designers are looking forward to all the updates they have in the works moving forward, while still leaving plenty of room to develop features in response to gamers’ reactions at launch. (An example from Fortier: “Let’s say the community becomes obsessed with a certain effect that appears in the game—we should probably make that impression a more interesting part of the game.”)

“We have planned the next fair. We have some Easter eggs in the launch scope that may lead to content that people can find for the first updates, and we want to build out all of our seasonal content,” Fortier said. “We’re looking to the community’s response to see how we develop it. One of the features I’m really excited to see is asynchronous multiplayer. It’s all new to ‘Camp Spirit’ and changes the way people can customize and interact with their friends It’s very important to us, but still, I think it’s great that you can see your friends on your island and everything.

While Netflix has been increasingly transparent about engagement and viewership numbers for its TV series and movies, gaming is newly charted territory for the company, and as such, it’s unclear how they’ll measure success for their prized originals like “Cozy Grove:” will measure. Camp Spirit” and will mean development on future games and overall strategy. But Eddy has some insight into what to expect from the game.

“The short answer is, I think Netflix is ​​still evaluating, what are the right metrics for games? What defines success? Because it’s still a new business for Netflix, and so I don’t think there’s any It’s difficult, for sure, this defines success, this defines failure,” Eddy said. “But I can tell you that for ‘Cozy Grove’ in particular, we all know what success is, and that’s people deciding to play the game for a long time, because that’s what it’s built for. And that was true before Netflix. If someone only wants to play the game for three days, we’ve done something wrong. The whole point is to be on this journey for at least months, getting to know these characters at a very leisurely pace, one day at a time. So I think it works well for Netflix next and they’ll be very happy if we get it done, and as a studio, that’s the only thing that will make us happy.”

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