July 30th, 2024 | Dinosaur Polo Club, the award-winning studio behind best-selling traffic management sims Mini Motorways and Mini Metro with nearly 12 million combined players, spotlights the development and previous work on a now-canceled project code-named Magic School.
The team sees this as an opportunity to transparently discuss learnings from the recently canceled Magic School project.
Though Magic School will never be released, Dinosaur Polo Club wants to champion the hard work team members poured into it, celebrate their contributions, and encourage them to share their work with the broader gaming world and provide some insight into the game development process.
The studio is grateful to be in a position to retain the varied talent of the Magic School team and plan to redirect their skills to the new projects within their celebrated Mini series.
The goal of the Magic School project was to explore something new outside of the minimalist simulation games the studio is typically known for.
Designer Zala Habib comments on her experience working on the project. “The Magic School team was an absolutely incredible group of people. Everybody was so inspiring and driven throughout the project's life, and it was a joy to collaborate with such talented folks.”
However, over the course of development, it became clear that the expanding vision for the game was leading the team towards a much bigger project, one that would require a far larger team size than the studio could sustainably support.
Although the team were excited by the breadth of visual exploration and specific game systems, the prototypes felt overly complex, which is very much at odds with the intuitive, quick-to-learn gameplay that our community has come to expect from a Dinosaur Polo Club title.
“Ultimately, we simply did not see a path forward for Magic School. However, we still wanted to share the amazing work the team had produced over the course of prototyping,” said Amie Wolken, newly appointed CEO of Dinosaur Polo Club. “So much great game development never sees the light of day because studios are often shy about sharing when things don't go as planned. Instead, we are choosing to celebrate what we learned along the way and the incredible work from our team.”
For more information and to follow the celebration of Magic School on our pages, please visit the studio’s new Artstation, the Dinosaur Polo Club website, the YouTube page, and follow the studio on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
About Dinosaur Polo Club
Dinosaur Polo Club is an independent game development studio based in beautiful Wellington, New Zealand. Founded in 2013 by brothers Peter and Robert Curry, the studio first made waves with their award-winning and BAFTA-nominated debut Mini Metro. Created in collaboration with Disasterpeace and Jamie Churchman, Mini Metro explores relaxed and minimalist subway design. The second game developed by Dinosaur Polo Club introduces a brand new type of city management with colorful road-building and resource management found in Mini Motorways. Combined, Mini Metro and Mini Motorways make up two parts of an expanding Mini Collection.
With an inclusive and supportive culture that believes in giving back to its creative community, the studio has grown and is now home to nearly 30 dinos as it works on new titles with relatable simplicity.
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