THUNDER LOTUS

How Spirit farer's developer tripled in size without tearing itself apart

- JULIAN BENSON

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.”