In late July, Mini Motorways and Mini Metro developer Dinosaur Polo Club did something other studios don’t usually do: Announced a new game on its website and social media, then in the same breath, explained why it was canceled . Magic School was in the works for years, and went way beyond the minimalist style of the studio’s first two games. The name tells you a lot about the concept: Magic School was intended to be the opposite of Mini Motorways or Mini Metro — a “maximalist simulation game,” Dinosaur Polo Club co-founder and Magic School designer Robert Curry called it in an interview released alongside the announcement and cancellation of the game.
And what’s more complex than a boarding school for teaching magic? There are systems upon systems set up for classes, housing, meals, and general living — and that exists not only on a day-to-day level for both students and faculty, but over years. If this were another studio, Magic School may have come and gone without any peep of public information about it; the conversations around the game and its end would remain inside the New Zealand studio’s walls. But Dinosaur Polo Club chose a different path as a way to celebrate what its team created, and to enable its staff to use what they’ve created in their portfolios.
This is often an issue with canceled games — a team spends years on a project and when it’s canceled, there’s nothing those team members can show for it due to strict non-disclosure agreements. Though Magic School won’t come to fruition, Dinosaur Polo Club showcased the game because it wanted people to see it. Magic School was exciting for the team, but ultimately, they weren’t the team to make it, a group of Dinosaur Polo Club developers (studio co-founder Robert Curry, art director Blake Wood, community and engagement manager Casey Lucas-Quaid, and lead game designer Zala Habib) told Polygon in an interview in August.
[ Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.] Polygon: What’s Magic School ? How did you get to that idea from Mini Motorways and Mini Metro ? They look quite different.
Robert Curry: We were working on Mini Motorways when we were talking about wanting to do a different type of game. I don’t think we got there as a logical progression from Mini Motorways . It was more like, What other games can we do? I wanted to provide different opportunities for folks in the studio, so just kinds of things like characters and animation — things like that, which the Mini games don’t typically have.
I’d read all the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. And then as a kid, I read stuff like In the Name of the Wind , which gives us this functional magic school. I just found the school stuff so interesting, with all the interlocking systems and things like that.
After Metro we were thinking about doing an airport management sim. That was one of the ideas we had. But there was a studio we were friends with in New Zealand that was doing something like that.
But I had this management sim itch. That was where the idea came from. When did you realize that something wasn’t working? What were the conversations like that led to the cancellation of the game? Curry: I think it started last year when Josh came on board.
He was our lead programmer. He’d been with us for a few years. He didn’t actually see the project much.
But when he joined in, he was a little bit surprised at where we were at. He kicked off a phase of self-reflection of us being like, Is this the game we want to make? Is this where we’re heading? It was a good catalyst for us to have some discussions that we were overdue for. That led to a really long time — like six months — of ideation, just going all the way back to, Let’s just ideate about what [ Magic School ] could be and what we’re aiming for .
We had more and more discussions as the year went on. Ultimately it was just a bit of fatigue and a lack of sight about us. Zala Habib: Something that was consistent was scope issues.
Often, the clearer the vision got, the bigger it got at the same time — finding a way to shrink that without feeling like we’ve lost the game a bit was really difficult. Blake Wood: One of the things I appreciated, when we were going through discussions [about] whether or not to go ahead with the project, was that it was handled at the team level, rather than a top down. It was sitting with the team and seeing how people are genuinely feeling about it, and having a lot of discussions: What’s the level of excitement? Are people feeling tired of the idea? I think that was one of the things we ran into as a result of trying to re-scope the idea and figure out what the bones of the game are, because that took place over a long period of time.
Doing that long enough you end up with a pretty tired team. Habib: We had newer people experiencing fatigue as well. It wasn’t necessarily a long life span, but it was just being able to work on something for too long that was too large to be feasible for our studio.
That alone can be quite exhausting. That level of transparency and honesty within the team and with the public typical feels rare in game development. Curry: I always wanted to open up about the game that we’ve done, just because the main thing from me was I wanted to make sure all of our artists and designers and programmers could share everything that they’ve done.
It’s particularly hard for artists, if they rely on a portfolio and everything’s hidden by NDAs. If it’s all under NDA, you have to be very vague. It becomes quite hard to actually describe what you’ve done.
We wanted to make sure that everyone here who spent the last few years of their professional careers on this thing could say, “Here’s what I did,” and it would be completely out there. Wood: Selfishly, speaking as an artist and for my art team, it’s being able to show work that I’ve done and letting them show work that they’ve done, especially when you have artists in junior positions. [.
..] When they don’t have a big portfolio of work yet they can use for their next job, and this job is often a big chunk of the work that they’ve done, It’s really nice being able to let them show their work.
Habib: Because of the stage that the project was in, and that the project was very much the kind of game where that art was just as important as the systems, the whole team needed to want to continue to solve the problems and design the game for it to even be possible [and be] a game that we would be proud of releasing. We wanted to make sure that the team had the energy, had the will and the want to continue to work on it and to continue to problem solve. Because we also knew that if we went ahead with it and people were too burnt out, and they didn’t feel like working on that project, you’re just not going to get the right solutions to the problems that you have.
We didn’t want to push people to make a game that they didn’t really have passion for. Wood: I find that this approach is very focused on what’s good for the team, because I think the general gaming audience — because this stuff isn’t necessarily shared — can have some misconceptions about it, and can approach it with frustration: “Why did they cancel this thing?” I think that’s why I was like, this is good for the team, letting them be able to share stuff and also offer some insights to the general public as to what the reality is. Casey Lucas-Quaid: The other thing that we really wanted to do is to make sure that our community and our fans and the people who have played and really enjoyed our first two games got to see this stuff, because we think they’ll think it’s really cool.
It feels like such a duh thing to say, but it’s something that I think you can forget when you work on a project for long enough, or when you’re not someone who is a community-facing member of the team. You forget that there are people out there that are just like, Oh, I love everything you guys do. I want to see even more of it.
We’ve always been grateful for the support that our community has shown us and for how enthused they’ve been about our first two games. So it’s really good for us, because we we’re able to give people a glimpse under the hood and to see the inner workings of stuff, especially because we’ve got other stuff in development that we can’t talk about yet. Having something to show them is cool because people feed off of others’ excitement.
What did you learn from this project that you’re going to take with you? Curry: For me, it was that vision holding is really hard. The process of having to get an idea from your head into other people’s heads, and to find all the gaps you don’t have to solve until you have to explain it to others, is a really important skill. I’m not some kind of auteur who just has this amazing, fully formed idea, and all I have to do is to explain to everyone what they have to do.
That’s not me. Even if I could just give everyone a list of what they have to do, when the game would be done, it would be an awful game for everyone to have no input into it at all. I think you need that.
The thing I can compare it to, of course, is a Star Wars reference. Episode IV was good because it wasn’t what George Lucas wanted in his head. He had to make compromises and he had to get other people in.
And then Episode I is what happens when he got to do exactly what he wanted, and it’s not as good. Wood: We found it surprisingly difficult to get a baseline sense of what the game was. When you’re building a game, there’s a lot of little systems that are interlinking, and you almost need to build all the little systems, at least some of the way — not all of them, but a healthy amount of them — to then be able to test out the core loop.
If you’re not fully defined on what the core loop is, and you’re not fully defined on what those systems you want to test out are, it can be very difficult to get to the prototyping phase. The more little things you have, like with a simulation game like this, which is more complex, it’s hard to get into that initial prototype stage. Whereas with other games, where there’s a more simplistic or more pared down loop you could build off of, you can get to a prototype point where you can test out early, quickly.
But with this, you have to invest the time to reach that point. It’s probably a good idea before you reach that point to have kind of defined at least roughly what that looks like, and try to figure out how you could do that in the most economical way possible. How can you prove this out in a simplistic manner that lets you actually test that part of the gameplay? That was really difficult for a game like this.
Curry: I had a talk with others in the industry and the general consensus is that it’s very hard to get a strategy game up and running early. You need heaps of interlocking systems. A platform game or action game can take hours to days to mock up, but a strategy game could be months before you’ve actually got the game along how you want it to be.
It’s hard when you start small and iterate. You have to start big and iterate off of it. In some ways, Magic School is a more advanced version of the games we’ve done, but I guess we’ve done them so stripped back, we can get the game ideated on and spec’d out in probably days.
And this took us a lot longer than that. Habib: One thing for sure that I would recommend is to have a really solid grasp on your restrictions. Something that we’ve spoken about already is scope.
But the reason that that was such an issue was because we — it’s a very fortunate thing to complain about — were very flexible. At the time, we didn’t know exactly how big the team could be, so we were very flexible. We were like, Maybe we could do this if we had one or two or three more people .
It was the same with timelines. Having restrictions that are really wobbly lets you have too much fun. If you don’t have restrictions, you’re inclined to change your mind throughout building that.
And then if you build a prototype without a whole bunch of systems that are interconnected, and you change your mind throughout it, you’re going to extend that over and over, because you’re going to have to start redoing things, mostly from the design side. Having restrictions early means that you can solidify things quicker and quicker, because you know exactly the bounds that you can work with. You can find your best version of that.
What are some of your favorite moments from development, or things you’re proud of from Magic School ? Habib: It’s less of a moment and more of a way of working. But something that I think was just fantastic about the entire project was that everyone, I mean everyone, really cared. Everybody wanted to take part in designing.
I think different studios do it differently, but it was very much like anyone who wanted to design was welcome to join in. And we got some ideas that we would not have gotten otherwise. Lots of people from different disciplines would have ideas, and they would go on the board just like anything else, and you’d mix and match and combine things.
And people would pace around, like, walk around a table, being like, What about this? What about this sort of music playing? We would have these sessions where we would just think about, What is your vision of Magic School ? What do we think it is? What do we want it to be? Even if there’s just an emotion or a feeling, it was very cool that the studio lets us hold it all. You could feel that feeling that everyone really, really cared, even in those difficult meetings where everyone was really honest. They did really care about the game and still do.
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