“We want to tell a story with heart and a wholesome character dynamic” — A Look behind the Scenes of DreamWorks Spirit Lucky’s Big Adventure

In January, we learned of a new upcoming horse game based on DreamWorks’ Spirit franchise and the upcoming movie Spirit Untamed. If you haven’t heard of that yet, I recommend a look at the game announcement right here. 

As soon as the game was announced, The Mane Quest reached out to publisher Outright Games in order to learn more about the game’s development. Santiago R. Bedate from the development studio aheartfulofgames has kindly taken the time to give us some interesting insight behind the scenes of Spirit Lucky’s Big Adventure. 

The Team

Santiago R. Bedate is a Producer and Game Designer at aheartfulofgames, currently working on Spirit: Lucky’s Big Adventure.

Santiago is the Producer and Game Designer at aheartfulofgames, located in Madrid, Spain. He has taken charge of the project’s production in January 2020 and coordinates the efforts between his own team and publisher Outright Games. 

“I am not a ‘horse person’ myself,” Santiago admits when I ask about his relationship to the animals. “But our 3D artist Carolina loves horses.” Santiago explains that Carolina is in charge of giving life to Spirit himself, as well as the other horses in the game. In doing so, she can draw upon her own horse riding experience: Carolina used to have a horse named Benjamin and started riding dressage when she was seven. 

“We’ve been very lucky to have her on the team,” Santiago says. “Her insight into horses has proven to be extremely valuable.” Fortunately, Carolina is not alone in her interest: One Senior Producer of Outright Games was involved in the horse racing business for years, and one of his horses will even make a cameo in the game itself. 

If you’re a regular TMQ-reader you’ll know that we’ve all asked ourselves “didn’t they ask a single horse person about this?” when we see some of the more baffling equine mistakes in video games. Knowing there’s a few horse-lovers involved in the process is definitely a reassurance.

Focus and Audience

The game’s promotional material promises a variety of different features from exploration to customization to a quest for hidden treasure. At the game’s core however, stands the relationship between protagonist Lucky and the mustang Spirit, Santiago tells TMQ. 

Grooming Spirit boosts his sprint abilities.

“Caring for Spirit really helps the player advance,” he explains. “As time passes, Spirit gets visibly dirty, which reduces his ability to sprint. This is symbolized by ‘horseshoes’. Players can groom Spirit at the stable, give him hugs and water to drink in order to boost his stamina and regain horseshoes.”

When I ask what feature Santiago is particularly excited for players to see and try, he names the photographic camera. “I’m a fan of exploration in video games, and I really love to discover places and take loooooads of photos,” he says. “We made sure that the world had a lot of interesting spots since we knew from the very beginning that we will give Lucky a camera. I’m looking forward to the players getting out and finding all the cool places we’ve created for them.”

Like many horse games before it, Spirit Lucky’s Big Adventure targets a very young audience. 

“We’re aiming at a 6 to 9 demographic,” Santiago tells TMQ. “Though we think the game will be especially popular with 8 year old girls. This allowed us to focus on fun instead of difficulty or complexity. Our main concern was to provide an easy to play, easy to follow adventure with tons of narrative so kids can see Spirit, Lucky and their friends in action. Kids at this stage of development need to play seamless, wholesome experiences with a very well adjusted amount of challenge.”

Lucky can take photos of places and animals she discovers.

In order to align the game with the target audience’s needs, aheartfulofgames conducted remote playtesting sessions. “The objective was to evaluate the overall player experience and uncover any usability issues,” Santiago explains. “We pulled out the key themes and insights from the report and these were tasked up and added to the development backlog and then implemented for our Alpha production milestone. The game has really benefited from this exercise.”

The importance of playtesting and its potential benefit are not a secret in the industry. But especially in small projects with very limited budgets and development times, it’s not to be taken for granted. Many of the horse game developers I’ve posed similar questions to have told me of individual anecdotes of one or two kids who happened to try the game sometime, without more systemic approach. That Outright Games and aheartfulofgames are taking this aspect more seriously definitely bodes well – for the people in the relevant target audience, at least. 

But what about horse loving players of other age groups or genders? As I often do in these dev interviews, I asked after the potential of a horse game for adults. 

“Ultimately, it boils down to the profit and loss of a project,” Santiago says in response. “Publishers keep a keen eye on Steam for success stories.”

He suggests that there is not enough established precedent of horse games turning a profit, at least not outside of the usual very young target audience. My takeaway is that we cannot wait for publishers to suddenly take a chance on us adult players as an audience: someone will have to show them how it’s done, and publishers may follow once passionate indies have proven the market’s existence. 

Development

Horses are notoriously difficult to animate, and those of us who like to look at them more closely will notice faulty movements. I asked Santiago for insight into their process for bringing Spirit & co. to life: 

“Our artists have been studying horses for quite a while,” Santiago says, “especially our 3D artist Carolina. We were very lucky to be in constant contact with our producers at Outright Games and DreamWorks’ parent company Universal, who happen to be massive horse fans. We talked a lot about the movements, sizes and behaviors of several different horses in oder to make them realistic, but also plausible for our game’s style and aesthetics.”

The team studied reference footage of racing, dressage, wild horses and more, then adapted the learnings to a special rig that had been prepared in Maya. “After that initial hard step, the team got all hands on deck and started working on the timing, iterating until everyone was pleased with the results in Unity. That process took us a whole month, but I believe the result is extraordinary.”

Another core challenge of the development has been the behaviors and interactions of the over one hundred animals that can be photographed, all of them with daily schedules and influence areas. 

“We knew what we wanted to achieve, but there’s always some hilarity in the implementation because the task is so big and complex,” Santiago explains. “The whole game map is about 2 square kilometers big!”

The loudest laugh during development happened when the team started to work on populating the town of Miradero with non-player characters: “For some time, and every single time we walk near the town, the screen almost turns white for a split second. We spent hours trying to understand what was happening, because it was very annoying and we knew for sure something was amiss. We ended up recording a video and revising it frame by frame.”

And what was the problem? “We eventually discovered, that for a single frame, all NPCs ‘travelled’ from a distant origin point in the virtual space to Miradero, adapting their scale and putting themselves in their respective position in town. The result was a single frame with 10 or so gigantic NPCs blocking the sun and approaching Miradero at the speed of light, which was hysterical.”

Inspiration and Market

Spirit Lucky’s Big Adventure came to be as a result of the new movie’s announcement, Outright Games tells me. Among multiple potential development partners, aheartfulofgames convinced the publisher with their passion for the project. 

Once the project was underway, the dev team did their research: Santiago names Red Dead Redemption 2 as well as the two Windstorm games as references.

“We wanted to imprint Lucky and Spirit with a certain character in their interactions and the portrayal of those interactions via gameplay and game camera. Showing said connection in our game was something we looked at closely.

“We decided that the plot was important in showing that relationship,” Santiago continues. “We included a couple of deliberate story beats for this, where you get to recreate a very important moment of the original film.”

Speaking of that original film, I asked Santiago about what sort of relationship he and his team have to 2002’ Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. “I went to see it in theaters when I was 17!” Santiago reveals, adding that others of his team were barely newborns by that time. “I’m quite fond of the animation style of the original movie, which I studied back when I was interested in a more art focused career.”

In the comments for the announcement trailer for Spirit Lucky’s Big Adventure on the Nintendo and Playstation YouTube channels, one can find numerous comments on the discrepancies between the core theme of the original film – a wild horse that cannot be broken – and the more “domestic” relationship between this modern Spirit (or “Spirit Jr”, the horse canonically being the son of the original movie Spirit) and his rider Lucky. 

For those who have not been following the Spirit: Riding Free TV show, this trailer is the first exposure to the franchise since 2002. 

“Our game is based on the upcoming movie Spirit Untamed,” Santiago clarifies, “which will be released in theatres this year.”

“In our opinion, every element of the Spirit franchise – the original film, new movie and series – share a common theme: Connection, and the bond between both generations of Spirit with each protagonist. We took that as a cornerstone while developing the game, not just in order to be faithful to the IP, but to tell a story with heart and a wholesome character dynamic.”

Indeed, the latest trailer for Spirit Untamed shows an interpretation of the character Spirit that seems closer to his 2002 predecessor than what I’ve seen from the TV show. 

Is there anything in Lucky’s Big Adventure that might particularly resonate with fans of the original Spirit movie? Santiago believes so: “Our art and design team have done a fantastic job in capturing that sense of vastness and nature that was so present in the original film.”

Into the Untamed Wild

Between the producers and artist’s interest in horses and Santiago’s obvious appreciation for the Spirit franchise, there is a lot that sounds promising about Spirit: Lucky’s Big Adventure. As a game aimed at young children, it won’t be able to check all my boxes, but considering the quality of even the kids’ games we often get in the genre, a game made with care is more than welcome. 

Whether Lucky’s Big Adventure delivers remains to be seen of course, but Santiago’s insights definitely make me want to give it a try when it releases this summer. 

Today, Outright Games released a brand new gameplay trailer that shows some of the features Santiago has told me about in this interview. Have a look yourself right here:

“The team at aheartfulofgames is very excited about what we’ve created,” Santiago tells me for parting words. “We’re really looking forward to what people will have to say about Spirit: Lucky’s Big Adventure.”

Spirit Lucky’s Big Adventure will be released on June 1st 2021 on PC, Xbox One, Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch.