Prøve GULL - Gratis
THUNDER LOTUS
Edge UK
|January 2025
How Spirit farer's developer tripled in size without tearing itself apart

After the release of Sundered in 2017, Montreal-based developer Thunder Lotus conducted a post-mortem of its side-scrolling Roguelike. “One of the things that came out was that I couldn’t be creative director on a project any more,” studio founder William Dubé says. Despite the success of Sundered and Jotun before it, with the demands of the studio growing, Dubé had, as he puts it, “become a bottleneck for the team.”
The studio had grown from four full-time staff members in 2014 to eight, along with numerous additional contractors, and during Sundered’s development Thunder Lotus also released Wii U, PS4 and Xbox One ports for Jotun. The team, especially Dubé, was getting pulled in different directions. Before getting too deep into development on the studio’s next title, Spiritfarer, Dubé stepped back, and former Ubi man Nicolas Guérin was hired as creative director.
Early in his new role, Guérin realised that the team was focused on the wrong side of the vision for Spiritfarer. “He was the one,” Dubé says, “who said, ‘This isn’t a management game. This game is about the spirits. That’s where the magic is’. Spiritfarer became much more focused on character and narrative – and for the better.” At GDC in 2018, Thunder Lotus pitched its afterlife management simulator to investment fund Kowloon Nights and it agreed to fund the game’s development and marketing entirely.
With Guérin directing Spiritfarer and the deal with Kowloon Nights providing financial stability for the first time since the studio’s founding, Dubé decided it was time to move forward on a plan that had been at the back of his mind for a while. “We wanted to open a second production team in the studio,” he says. “That decision felt as big of a risk as starting the studio; so many studios try to go to multiple production teams and end up crashing and burning.”
Denne historien er fra January 2025-utgaven av Edge UK.
Abonner på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av kuraterte premiumhistorier og over 9000 magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
FLERE HISTORIER FRA Edge UK
Edge UK
Titanfall 2
The rise and Titanic fall of the live-service game that wasn't
6 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
Rematch
Rocket League without the wheels — what will they think of next?
4 mins
September 2025
Edge UK
Splitgate 2
The edges have been softened, and it threatens to fade into the omnipresent haze of live-service shooters
4 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
STALKER 2: HEART OF CHORNOBYL
How GSC defied closure, the pandemic and an invasion to realise its most ambitious project
8 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
DIGITAL ECLIPSE
The California company with an expert eye for repackaging game history
7 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour
Like us, we imagine that your first goal on setting up a new console is not to sit and read about its features but to play with them. And yet the first exhibit we land on in Welcome Tour is a series of information boards explaining the ins and outs of Switch 2’s new mouse control, followed by a quiz in which we regurgitate the information just fed to us.
2 mins
September 2025
Edge UK
Mario Kart World
Has the Mushroom Kingdom ever made sense as a coherent world? Certainly that's never been the priority of Nintendo's designers over the previous decades, laying its foundations over various series, genres and generations. So it's a joyous surprise to drive from one end of World's incarnation and discover how natural it all feels to have this place, these places, presented as a single landmass.
6 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
Hitman: World Of Assassination
When your job is bumping off terrible people with too much money and power, you'll never be short of work.
2 mins
September 2025
Edge UK
The Alters
Sometimes your life changes in a moment, and as much as you want to pause time and retrace your steps, the world moves on into the following hours and days, and takes you with it. This is the world builder Jan Dolski finds himself in when he is the only survivor of a crash on a mission to find the world-changing element rapidium. It's his job now to operate the mobile base and return to Earth — and hopefully finish the mission, too. There is no time to lose: come sunrise, the intense radiation will mean game over.
4 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
Date Everything!
Perhaps this is what Marx meant when he talked about the commodity fetish. Date Everything is a game in which you more or less do as the title says. A mysterious benefactor grants you glasses that transform every object in your house, from the microwave to the smoke alarm, into a sort of human being. Then you get to know them and influence them to like, love or hate you. There is an overarching plot, detailing the motives of your benefactor, but you'll spend most of your time talking to objects (and solving a few puzzles in the explorable house).
1 mins
September 2025