PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
We are Sunny Lab, an indie game studio from Paris founded in 2022 by Charlotte Gailledreau (former OhBiBi, Gumi) and Hugo Sahuquet (former Ubisoft, Asobo)!
After some months of creating the foundations of our IP and fundraising, we started development on our first game “The Witch’s Bakery” in 2023! ☀️
TELL US ABOUT THE WITCH'S BAKERY.
In April 2022, Charlotte and Hugo left from their previous studio and decided to found Sunny Lab. We started by pondering the question: what story do we want to tell and why? We initially focused on ensuring that our story had depth and meaning. We were particularly keen on exploring emotions and how vulnerability and a complete emotional range, including sadness and anger, can be our greatest strengths.
We shared numerous personal anecdotes and discussed our experiences and passions. We love magical worlds and wanted to offer a twist on the uprising trend of witchy games. We dreamt about witches and smartphones and on how they could interact. We knew we wanted our first game to be an Urban Fantasy setting. And because we love food, we wanted to integrate this in the equation as well as the city we live in. Emotion, Witch, Modern, Food, Paris => A witch baker in Paris, mending emotions with her croissants! 🥐
One of our core drive is to talk about modern society, its challenges and successes. We add a touch of magic to bring an original take on social topics, we use strong images and allegories to represent deep emotions and modern questioning. Through this combination of elements, we hope to bring out messages of hope as well as catharsis, comfort for some people who will play our game and smile at the end!
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
We set out to build the world first. A world of modern magic, where witches, wizards and creatures are rare, but a known element of the world. It may be unconventional but our team's greatest strength lies in creating worlds that players will want to explore. And so, that's how we embarked on this journey!
Though we’ve been in the industry for over 10 years, building a studio is an entirely different job! It’s a lot about administration, accounting, legal work, etc... that, on top of making the game! So there was a learning curve, and now we (mostly) understand monthly declarations and taxes! 🤣
We established our social presence very early, in fact even before the studio was officially founded. We hired the team gradually and kept making social posts about our work in progress and dev questions. We also built our characters by creating doodles of them, showing their personality and interactions.
One of these doodle bounced off a meme that was created by Cult of the Lamb, and we went from 1k followers to 30k followers in a few days. So that... kind of changed our development context! 😅
Today, we are blessed with a wonderful and wholesome community and they are our greatest motivation driver. We have just announced our Kickstarter launch date and it will be on September 3rd! We hope it works out well for us!
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
We chose Unity because we had worked on it on previous projects and it’s a very popular engine for 2D games. We also know we would then be able to hire experienced Unity developers. Well... we didn’t expect Unity to change their policy mid-way though, and we might have made another decision had we known beforehand. But we’re set on shipping “The Witch’s Bakery” with Unity.
We are now 9 at the studio, and we feel very lucky to have such a wonderful team. We have all gathered to create colourful games with deep messages, and we feel we couldn’t be in better company.
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
Finding funding, probably like most indie developers. It is publicly known that the industry has been in crisis since 2023, where so many lay-offs happened. In parallel, publishers and investors became extremely demanding, sometimes asking to see a final product to “minimize risk”.
The issue then in this context is that you need funding to create a game version that proves the concept, and then get the funding. So, in short, you need to have the money to develop the game in order to get the money to develop the game. 😢
We first raised funding from family and friends to create the prototype and demo. We’re very lucky they were here for us, as they made the foundations of The Witch’s Bakery possible! We still have a long road ahead to fund the complete game but our Kickstarter and Steam announcement give us hope! They have opened new partnerships opportunities for us, and by the end of 2024 we are confident that we will secure funding for our game, and hopefully beyond~~
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
It takes time, but we’d say it’s always worth being active on social media. Turning your work into a way of interacting with players, showing how you work, your breakthrough, your struggle... we think it creates a proximity that’s well worth the time.
It will also give you energy to keep on! As whatever you are making, there will always be someone who will be touched by it! 😊
Also, if you are planning on building a team for your game, it is essential to spend time in recruiting the right people for you. Technical skills are only a small part of what you should consider. It is even more important for you to know what team culture you want! What are human values that matter to you, and how those values translate into a way of working and organizing development!
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
-We really hope people will connect with our world and characters. Of course, getting a commercial success would be nice ha ha, but as long as we can continue creating stories and sharing them with players, we’ll be a happy team.
It’s not always very bright these days and we hope our teams and games will bring a bit of light into your day!
On that note, here’s a croissant 🥐 and some ☀️, have a lovely day!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2967950/The_Witchs_Bakery/
❤️
