The devs behind Revenge of the Savage Planet, the sequel to the 2020 hit Journey to the Savage Planet, have a lot on their plate. After Typhoon Studios was shuttered as part of Google’s Stadia closing, some of the dedicated members of the original game’s team bound together to form Raccoon Logic, setting out to make a sequel.
In a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Reid Schneider, co-founder of the studio and its current head, explained that he didn’t want to make a game that everyone expected.
“With the first one, when you make a new IP, it’s kind of like catching lightning in a bottle,” he explained. “The whole time we were making the first game, we were like, ‘Is anyone gonna care about a space game with fart jokes?’ Turns out people actually do care about a space game with fart jokes, so we said, ‘Okay, how could we go much bigger and broader on this?'”
The upcoming sequel will keep the original’s sense of humor and colorful world, but also seeks to shake things up in multiple ways, including switching to a third-person perspective.
“We felt like there’s a lot of opportunities that we could take, especially with comedy, by pulling it into third-person,” Schneider explains. “There’s more physical comedy now – slapstick is a big touchpoint for us – and it just felt like we wanted to go do something much bigger, better, unexpected, surprising.”
Raccoon Logic is made of many former triple-A developers, including creative director and co-founder Alex Hutchinson, known for his work on Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 4. This has further boosted expectations from the original game’s community.
“In the modern market, each game has to stand on its own,” Hutchinson said. “This is a standalone game. If you played the first game, you’ll get a lot of in jokes and you’ll get some extra content, but you don’t need any information from the first game.”
Journey to the Savage Planet was released in 2020 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. Despite its small budget, it garnered positive reviews and met all sales expectations by Typhoon Studios.
