It’s rare that a game can replicate the quality of a fully produced show or cartoon, but that’s precisely what the team over at Studio Drydock managed to do with their latest release, Wylde Flowers.
Wylde Flowers is a fun, heartfelt journey where you play as Tara, a 20-something-year-old who returns to her hometown of Fairhaven to help her ailing grandmother. When you arrive, however, you find something more mysterious afoot.
Gameplay-wise, you’ll be drawn in and immersed by the story, musical score, and voice acting in Wylde Flowers. There are farming and gathering mechanics, but the game’s heart is truly centered around the story, personal growth, and relationships you form with the people in Fairhaven.
Initially developed for the Apple Arcade on mobile, Wylde Flowers will be coming to PC and the Nintendo Switch on September 20, 2022.
Just as inspirational as the story in Wylde Flowers is the team over at Studio Drydock. Awarded the Apple Design Award for Inclusivity, this mainly woman-led team created a game that has a diverse cast of characters that many can relate to.
Earlier this month, we asked Amanda Schofield, the Managing and Creative Director of Wylde Flowers, about what their journey was like creating a game and how it is navigating a historically male-dominated industry.
Wylde Flowers Developer Interview
Gamer Digest: What inspired the story in Wylde Flowers?
Amanda Schofield: The inspiration for Wylde Flowers came from a lot of places. Through working with simulation games like The Sims, we noticed people who like these sorts of games really love having the freedom to express themselves and tell their own stories. However, we also noticed there was also an appetite for engaging with story-rich worlds, as long as they still have the freedom to play it their own way. We started thinking about genres that had elements of both – story and self-expression – and we thought about the farming sim genre, which has always had elements of story in it. We wanted to see just how far we could push the narrative to make a really enticing world full of fascinating people.
GD: What were you trying to achieve with the gameplay when developing the game?
AS: We’ve built into the ethos of the studio that we want to make games that are non–violent. We found the ‘cozy’ space appealing for helping to determine how the art would look and what kind of story we wanted to tell for Wylde Flowers. Even the sound needed to be cozy. The first time we talked about our goals for the sound design I said “Imagine there’s a baby asleep in the next room”. What kind of sound FX would you design for that?
Another thing we wanted to achieve is to make a completely bingeable story for a farming sim. As I said, they are always in there and there’s usually romance and many of the things we have, but we wanted the story and characters to be one of the main things that had you coming back for more.
GD: What kind of gamer do you think would enjoy Wylde Flowers?
AS: When we set out to make our own games, we wanted to create experiences we felt underrepresented markets were looking for. For this game, the beginning target was young women, but the more we built and thought about that, we realized there are a lot of tough choices that come into a young adult’s life. Around identity, sexuality, self-confidence, and the more we leaned into these themes, the more the game became something for anyone who really craves a space of acceptance.
GD: We love the diversity in the characters in Wylde Flowers. Can you tell us how that came to be?
AS: When the game was in its most rough, prototyped form and we just had little jellybean people wandering around giant planes in space, Kim still had they/them pronouns and there was a married couple named Angus and Francis running side-by-side businesses. We wanted to make sure that every person who came onto the team knew as soon as they picked up the game that it was a game for everyone and that they could really build that up and it would be supported.
GD: How has it been navigating the gaming space with such a diverse team led by women?
AS: I think it’s important to be super intentioned about growing diversity in games. It starts with how you’re approaching recruitment and making sure you have an open mind about how prior experience might be applied to your game, but it needs to continue all the way through to the culture you develop inside the studio and even rethinking processes around how people give and receive feedback.
It doesn’t just help women, it helps all historically underrepresented groups, because you’re statistically more likely to be hiring people who are a bit outside their comfort zone. Making them feel safe is a huge part of making them productive and that leads to incredible teams who build amazing games.
GD: Can you expand on why you think diversity is important in gaming?
AS: We believe that you can’t build a game targeting a diverse audience without reflecting that in your team, so that’s the practical aspect of it, but also, I want to work in an industry surrounded by incredible people and think it’s our responsibility as leaders in the industry to make that happen.
GD: Can you tell us a bit more about the team and what other games the staff has worked on?
AS: When we founded the studio, it was just a few of us who had all worked together on The Sims FreePlay for a decade over at EA Firemonkeys, among other titles there. We were building a prototype and didn’t think we had the time to hire locally, so we put out a few ads for some international freelancers just to get them in to finish off the prototype.
We were completely floored by the level of talent we were able to bring in! We had people who had developed characters for Overcooked and animators with 15 years of experience across film and games. That was the main reason we decided to be a fully remote studio forever, but then the pandemic hit and gave us a few more great reasons.
GD: How has it been making the transition from mobile to PC? What has been most challenging?
AS: The thing about mobile development is that almost all games are developed on PC and so you sort of end up with that as an unofficial launch platform since in many ways it gets as much testing as your phones do. Alongside that, by the time you support every incredibly high-resolution phone and tablet, you’ve covered most resolutions. So a lot of that work was a bit easier than you might think.
The most critical challenge becomes making sure a PC player has everything they expect in the game. There are subtle differences to the settings to add more support for graphics adjustments, UI to bring it more inline with industry standards and controller support all to make sure it feels exactly right
GD: How has your inclusion in the Apple Arcade went? Do you feel like it was good for the game’s exposure?
AS: Apple Arcade has been a true joy for so many reasons. It’s no exaggeration to say that we wouldn’t have been able to make a game like this without Apple’s support. Alongside that, we were able to build the game for Apple TV and Mac which are similar to Switch and PC. This meant that the game was never really “ported” to PC and Consoles, since we had both form factors at Apple Arcade’s launch.
On the exposure side, we’ve had more than 470,000 players experience the game and those passionate players have developed a massive community around this game on discord and reddit.
GD: What was the balance between mechanics, graphics, and gameplay vs. some of these more cinematic elements in terms of bandwidth and time investment?
AS: When we set out to make Wylde Flowers, one of the key goals was to bring narrative to the genre in a big way, so in that regard, the game mechanics and art were built to harmonize the narrative. The thing is, there was an incredible amount of passion on the team for this game and making it as special as it could be. So we’d turn up to work and the character artist, Soo-Ling would say “Oh, so how does this look for the characters” and it’s about 1,000% more amazing than we could’ve imagined and a week later the animator says “I have this idea for making all the hair animate beautifully” and it all just grows from there.
GD: Why should people be excited for Wylde Flowers?
AS: There are so many incredible reasons to be excited for Wylde Flowers!
Our fully voiced story with a cast of incredible voice actors like Valerie Rose Lohman (What Remains of Edith Finch) or Erika Ishii (Apex Legends). Every line of dialogue in the game is voiced from the ~30 hours of main quest to the relationship story arcs for every character.
We have witchcraft like you’ve never seen in a game before. You can transform into your cat familiar, you can hang with your coven or you can cause some mischief and play pranks on some more unsavory characters.
The music of Wylde Flowers is incredibly special, too, with all our narrative music being performed by an orchestra, it’s such an incredible backing to the story.
GD: Is there anything you want people to know about Wylde Flowers?
AS: If you love playing games on Nintendo Switch or Steam, you can get your hands on Wylde Flowers on September 20! Following that release, there will be new content to look forward to! We have tucked in some things to our plans that players have been enthusiastically asking for!
To learn more about Wylde Flowers, visit their Official Website. You can also Wishlist the game on Steam.
For more exclusive interviews with game developers, bookmark our News Section.
