If a spider in the game behaved exactly like a spider in the real world, it would run a thousand miles an hour, grab things and furiously wrap them up in half a second, which wouldn’t make for a very fun experience as a player. And while we do try and stay as true to the real world as possible, you do have to gamify how it works a bit. They’re a mechanically complex creature with their eight legs, and various joints on each leg. The creatures, in particular, are difficult: everyone’s used to seeing spiders, for instance.

So we have to emphasise all of those things to say there is something here you’ve not noticed before in something that you see every day. You might not think about the detailing on the handle and the way that the metal flattens and twists in places. In Smalland, it’s as large as a two-storey house, so we have to think about the intricacies of showing off the mechanics differently. Everyone knows what a can-opener is, but everyone’s used to seeing it at a scale where it’s in your hand – it’s a very small tool. Take something like a can-opener, for instance: it’s a very recognisable silhouette. That’s a core of building a game with this scale: we want things that are recognisable exclusively through their silhouette. Is there a challenge there, when you’re recreating things that people see all the time in real life? That sort of feeds into the creatures and the backgrounds as well. So it’s about building a world where it’s designed to almost always be bigger than the player. Almost everything is taller than the player, and that’s clear from every perspective. And that’s generally not so much done through the camera itself – it’s more done through intelligent level design, to make sure there are things on the ground, dressings in the world, to make you feel like you’re very small. So we do have to make sure everything reinforces the sense of scale. Then we have to consider interiors and exteriors. It’s difficult, because we provide both first- and third-person views to the player, so we have to make sure that the scale works in both perspectives. Is camera positioning pivotal in a game like Smalland, because you’ve got to sell the player on the idea of scale – that you’re a very small character in a huge world. And really, that’s the driving factor behind the game… it’s about forging a home in this entirely new environment. And so, the small folk decide to venture out to see whether there’s a new frontier out there on the overworld, to try and claim and expand into. Something’s happened on the surface of the world, and humankind’s no longer present. I don’t know if that’s going to be their official name, but we call them! The idea is that they’ve lived underground for a long time in the darkness, sustaining themselves on the roots of trees and fungi and whatever they could find.

We affectionately call them ‘small folk’. So they’re not humans that have been shrunk down – they’re these incredibly small humanoid people.

You’re a small, sprite-like race of creatures. Over a refreshing cup of tea, then, Averley told us more about Merge’s plans for a very different, more whimsical take on the genre.Ĭan you give us an idea of the backstory and lore behind the game? There are PvP battles, but this is an altogether less competitive, in-your-face kind of survival game. There’ll be quests to go on and a story to follow, but you can just as easily spend your time exploring, foraging, and building your base. You can tame and ride grasshoppers and leap across canyon-sized puddles. So we dropped all of that, all of the original assets, and we pulled in entirely new assets for everything from the characters to the world dressing… in the background, we updated the engine version a few times.”įundamentally, though, Smalland remains true to what was pitched back in 2017: it’s a multiplayer sandbox where you can craft and wield weapons to fend off attacks from wasps the size of Shire horses. A lot of the art was in a very different style to the direction we felt the game needed to take. It was a process that, Averley says, required the team to pretty much throw out everything that was built before. In the four years since, a team of around seven or so ‘decentralised’ artists and designers – among them a couple of members behind the original Smalland prototype – have been working away at turning those initial ideas into a workable reality. One IP acquisition later, and Smalland got a second life at Merge.

Smalland vs grounded