Cozy Grove - out on Steam/EGS/Apple Arcade/Switch/Xbox/PS!

edited in Projects
Welcome to Cozy Grove, a life-sim game about camping on a haunted, ever-changing island. As a Spirit Scout, you'll wander the island's forest each day, finding new hidden secrets and helping soothe the local ghosts. With a little time and a lot of crafting, you'll bring color and joy back to Cozy Grove!
I've been spending the last while working on Cozy Grove at Spry Fox and thoroughly enjoying it. I know some folks like to know what other South Africans are working on, and while I've been working with Spry Fox from SA, most of the team is international, so it's hard to know that any locals are involved from first appearances. The game is in active production, gearing up for a release next year. I don't have much to share here and don't plan to keep this updated all the time (this isn't a marketing channel), but if anyone has any questions about how we're making the game or anything related to the process, please feel free to ask me :)

If you're interested in the game:

Comments

  • edited
    Steam says it's single-player, but it sort of looks like the kind of thing my partner and I would love to play co-op. I love the aesthetic.
  • Interesting thought! It's intended to be single-player, and we don't currently have official plans for co-op at release, but it might be something we look into down the line :)
  • Looks cool AF <3
    Thanked by 1francoisvn
  • This looks so great! High fives to you and your fellow foxes!
    Thanked by 1francoisvn
  • Happy to announce Cozy Grove is out on Apple Arcade, and coming to basically all other platforms on 8 April (Steam, EGS, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation): https://cozygrovegame.com/
  • And it's out now, on all the platforms! Things have been going well so far, but it's still early days. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the game's development or its launch. Can't promise I can answer everything (some stuff is NDAed) but I will try!
  • Hi @franciosvn,

    Congratulations on creating your game and launching on multiple platforms. Could you please share some insight on any of the following for aspiring game developers?:

    1) How did the game originate. How was the prototype first conceived in your decision to pursue production?
    2) What metrics did you use to decide it was worth pursuing beyond a prototype?
    3) How did you advertise the game during early stages of development? Did you go the itch.io route to determine interest or some other means?
    4) Did you grow a following in any medium such as Discord and how many people were involved?
    5) Did you seek outside assistance with production and publishing or is it completely in-house?
    6) What is the size of the team that developed it and what is the role break-down (engineers vs artists vs other)
    7) How long did production take?
    8) What was your biggest challenges in building the game and getting your product to store.
    9) What was your biggest challenges in working as a team? We're you local only or distributed?
    10) What facets were easiest to accomplish and which were the hardest?
    10) Are there any interesting caveats you can share with aspiring game developers to learn from your journey?
    11) Which were your easiest channels to get to market and which were the hardest?
    12) From a cost perspective, which is the costliest in creating a game? Art, Code, Marketing, Other?
    13) How did the team dynamics go? Were there any conflicts and if so, where did they occur and how were they resolved?
    14) In a team context how did you manage source control and collaboration?
    15) How did you manage the project development and features, did you use some form of DevOps/Agile/Backlog and a source code repository?

    Lots of questions, haha. Thanks for sharing your game dev journey with us, it looks amazing and I wish you success in the launch and beyond.
  • konman said:
    1) How did the game originate. How was the prototype first conceived in your decision to pursue production?
    2) What metrics did you use to decide it was worth pursuing beyond a prototype?
    I wasn't very involved in the early parts of the project, and I'm not sure if I can publicly comment on some of the specifics here. Spry Fox has a number of resources and opportunities that we could leverage here and wouldn't be available to most newcomers to the industry, so most of what we did wouldn't be super helpful.
    konman said:
    3) How did you advertise the game during early stages of development? Did you go the itch.io route to determine interest or some other means?
    We didn't advertise or publicly discuss the game until much later in the process when it was more developed. That was an intentional part of the plan because of our situation (which unfortunately I can't fully elaborate on). We did internal playtesting throughout and we did some limited private playtesting during most of production, but we would also have liked to get more done sooner.
    konman said:
    4) Did you grow a following in any medium such as Discord and how many people were involved?
    Yes, we have a Discord server with more than 7000 members now. We started it around the time we publicly started discussing the game. We added an in-game link on platforms where that makes sense, and we added it to our web and social media presence. I'd say our growth has been mostly organic.
    konman said:
    5) Did you seek outside assistance with production and publishing or is it completely in-house?
    We produced and developed the game entirely using in-house resources. We used a partner (Quantum Astrophysicists Guild) for porting/publishing on consoles, and we handled the other platforms.
    konman said:
    6) What is the size of the team that developed it and what is the role break-down (engineers vs artists vs other)
    The team started quite small - I wasn't involved, but I think it was 2-5 people - and it grew to be about 20-25 for a big chunk of the process leading up to release. The roles overlapped a lot (some people did multiple things), but at peak we had roughly about 8-10 engineers, 6-7 artists, 2-3 writers, 3 game designers, and a few other roles like management. We've scaled down the team quite a bit since release.
    konman said:
    7) How long did production take?
    About 1.5 - 2 years (I don't know the exact dates for when we started)
    konman said:
    8) What was your biggest challenges in building the game and getting your product to store.
    It's quite a sizeable game over a long-ish production timeline (at least for me), so there were a lot of challenges. Off the top of my head: developing all the necessary systems (there are a lot!), testing a game that's designed to be played over many months, adding loads of content while handling performance, designing a game that is quite different from most games.
    konman said:
    9) What was your biggest challenges in working as a team? We're you local only or distributed?
    Spry Fox is entirely remote-based, so you'd think we were well adapted to handle a pandemic (and to some degree we were), but it was still tough. The size of the team also necessitates various systems and processes for communication and management that a smaller team wouldn't need.
    konman said:
    10) What facets were easiest to accomplish and which were the hardest?
    I can't think of anything more to add here, sorry! Making games is hard and it feels like making Cozy Grove was a long and hard process without many shortcuts.
    konman said:
    10) Are there any interesting caveats you can share with aspiring game developers to learn from your journey?
    Spry Fox has been around for like 11 years now and has access to resources that most aspiring game developers don't have, so I would caution against trying to follow in our exact footsteps. I would advocate newcomers pick much smaller and less risky projects to work on. If I wasn't with Spry Fox that's what I'd do :)
    konman said:
    11) Which were your easiest channels to get to market and which were the hardest?
    Consoles are harder than Apple Arcade which is harder than Steam.
    konman said:
    12) From a cost perspective, which is the costliest in creating a game? Art, Code, Marketing, Other?
    I can't share specific financials, but with most games the overwhelming bulk of the costs are the human resources, so the breakdown just depends on what your project needs. For Cozy Grove we had a lot of engineers and artists, so I imagine those were the most costly. We also localized a lot of text into something like 15 languages, so that was also very costly.
    konman said:
    13) How did the team dynamics go? Were there any conflicts and if so, where did they occur and how were they resolved?
    Dynamics were fine I guess? There were conflicts and we resolved them, but I can't really speak to specifics. When you have 20 people working on a project for more than a year, then conflicts are inevitable. What I can say is that communication skills are almost always the key - practice and improve yours!
    konman said:
    14) In a team context how did you manage source control and collaboration?
    15) How did you manage the project development and features, did you use some form of DevOps/Agile/Backlog and a source code repository?
    We use Slack for most communication, Google Meet for voice/video calls, Google Docs for notes and documentation, Trello for task management, self-hosted git server for the code and assets, and a self-hosted build server setup. Our process is probably closer to Kanban, but honestly we just adapt to our needs and try stay agile.
    konman said:
    Thanks for sharing your game dev journey with us, it looks amazing and I wish you success in the launch and beyond.
    Thanks! I think it's fair to say it's been a success and we're in the lucky position where we can keep working on it more, so that's very exciting :)
  • Thanks francoisvn for taking the time to respond. Very insightful and much appreciated.
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