How Xsolla Funding Club helped Happy Juice deliver its vision for Lost in Play

gamesindustry.biz:

You're playing catch with your sibling, running after them in the street in front of your house. For everyone around you, the pavement is just concrete, the trees are just trees, and you're just a child.

But for you and your sibling, the road beyond the pavement is most definitely lava. The trees are hollow and a little terrifying, and gnomes surely live in them. And you're not a child; you're a terrible monster roaring around.

What happens in a child's imagination is the exact feeling that developer Happy Juice tried to capture with Lost in Play – and it did so very successfully.

With the support of Joystick Ventures and Xsolla Funding Club, the title was released on Nintendo Switch and PC in 2022 and on mobile last year. Lost in Play won the iPad Game of the Year award in 2023 and was nominated against industry powerhouses, including Mario + Rabbids and Disney Dreamlight Valley, for Family Game of the Year at the 2023 DICE Awards.

But Lost in Play was only made by Happy Juice co-founders Yuval Markovich, Oren Rubin, and Alon Simon. And the successful launch and the positive reactions were the consecration of years of work.

"All three of us came from a background in animation [and] have been working in the games industry for a long time," says Markovich, who formerly founded and ran mobile games company Nitako Games. In contrast, Rubin and Simon previously worked together on 2018's point-and-click adventure The Office Quest. "When we opened the studio, we talked about our strengths and what we liked when playing games. We all grew up playing adventure games and loving cartoons, so that's what we brought into the game: to get a more cinematic feeling in story-based and puzzle-based gameplay.

"We all have young children and love playing games with them. But it's hard to find games that are not violent, that are nice, not too scary, and that I would enjoy myself playing with them and not just be [bored]," he laughs.

So they set out to create exactly that: a game they could