For the last year, our studio has been exploring making an entirely new game. This new game would be an exciting departure from our Mini titles, offering a new world for players to explore and develop their strategy simulation skills in an exciting and enchanting environment. The game’s working title was Magic School, and it was set in a painterly fantasy world where the player’s job was to manage an ever-expanding school for young magical students. Recently, we decided to cancel Magic School, and we’re here to tell you why.
First things first, ‘Mini’ will always be our jam. We have loved working on Mini Metro and Mini Motorways over the years, and we’ve been thrilled to work on the next installment in the Mini series while we’ve continued supporting our existing titles. In fact, we just gave the green light to our next Mini, but more on this later! While we continued to expand our Mini-world, we wanted to provide our team an opportunity to explore something entirely new in parallel to ‘Mini’ development, which is how we arrived at Magic School. This new project was an opportunity for our artists to step out of the minimalist beauty that is iconic ‘Mini’ and get out their oil paints, canvas, and cloth to concept stunning characters, unique magically-minded tools, and castles set in impressionistic meadows and snow-capped cliffsides. It allowed our programmers and designers breadth and time to discover and iterate on entirely new ways of creating management simulation games with unique character interactions and exciting resources, with the intention of giving our existing Mini community a chance to see what ‘Mini’ could look like in a totally different universe, through the lens of our dino eyes but still wholly different.
While we most certainly achieved so much during our prototyping of Magic School, we ultimately arrived at the conclusion that, while the game showed much promise, it was not for us to make. In order to showcase the features we’d crafted and the ideas our team had produced, the scope would need to be greater than we’d anticipated, and our resources as a small indie studio were limited while we tried to support two existing titles while developing a third title in that franchise alongside the development of an entirely new monolithic game.
We’re sad to say goodbye to Magic School, but we’re incredibly grateful for all that it’s taught our small studio. We know that amongst a never-ending cycle of industry layoffs, it’s rare to see a studio cancel a project and not let any of their team go. This is one of our pillars as a studio: support our dinos and support our industry, ensuring that we retain our incredible talent. While none of our dinos will be leaving due to this project being canceled, we’ll be waving bittersweet goodbye to Magic School, and we encourage you all to check out some of the amazing art that was created from this project.
If you’d like to read any more about this project, what our developers think about it, or see more art, check out the resources below!
Looking to the future, we’re so excited to fully direct our efforts towards the next installment in the ‘Mini’ series, and we can’t wait to share what our team has been working on. We are endlessly grateful for the support from our community over the years, which has allowed us to explore new projects while continuing development on our existing titles. Stay tuned for exciting announcements about what’s to come, and we hope you enjoy going on a visual journey through our work on Magic School!