Daily Trivia:

Daily Trivia:

A game that not supposed to work - Palworld

Palworld just break the most player online record all time in Steam. (Beating Cyberpunk 2077 and Elder Ring)

Palworld is created by a indie japan game studio called Pocket Pair and this is their 2nd published game (first game can’t even published). When they first decided to develop Palworld, the whole company only have 10 staff and only 4 people is assigned for the new game.

they spend 3 mkonth make a trailer back in 2021 and gotta a well received response, and the team decided to go all in. They realize with their manpower now, the modeller will spend 1 month to make one animal/pal and this is not going to work. So they start find weird talent outside. In the end, the boss borrow more than 1 billion JPY for this project, spending every single dime on this game.

So the CEO went on twitter and search for talent, he found one 20 years old guy who quit school and work in FamilyMart, self learn how to make 3D video on youtube. He is now the main sound and 3d animator. He was original a FPS nerd who make FPS gun video on youtube. It turn out is actually very hard to find a japanese developer who know how to design a fun FPS gun game and he was the weird fit for the company who basically building Pokemon with gun.

One of the key developer they hire later only know how to use Unreal Engine 4. They make the call to switch the whole project from Unity to UE4 even thought at the time no one in the company had any UE4 experience. In the end the key developer build up the whole UE4 developer team.

Then he found a weird 3d action modeller who is using plugin to model the animal motion gesture. He and the team created over 100 animal/pal motion with the team that have zero experience in motion modeling.

One of the key hire was a fresh graduate girl artist. She apply for over 100 jobs and was get rejected. In fact, she was rejected by Pocket Pair too, but she apply again 3 month later and get hired. She proven to be the main workforce as she work 4-5 time faster in character design and without her, they can’t finish all 100 pal design so fast in 3 years.

Palworld is really really fun game, and the fact it was build by passionate indie game studio make this even better. It a shame that GameFreak only rely on its IP rather than build really good game nowadays.