Making Revenge of the Savage Planet an unexpected (and expected) sequel

gamesindustry.biz:

As we watch a member of the Raccoon Logic team hop, run, shoot and splat their way through Revenge of the Savage Planet at Gamescom, the studio head and co-founder Reid Schneider tells us the goal "wasn't to make the expected sequel."

That's a tall order, given that Raccoon Logic was formed by folks who had previously been at Journey to the Savage Planet developer Typhoon Studios before it was closed as part of Google's Stadia shutdown. The team announced from the off that it had managed to reacquire the Savage Planet IP from Google – and confirmed back in April that it was indeed working on a new title in the series.

Like Journey to the Savage Planet, Revenge's players find themselves on a colourful alien world, exploring and scanning life forms, blasting hostile creatures, gathering resources, and using them to craft or upgrade items. The game also retains its predecessor's wacky humour, with more than a few digs at the types of corporations who think it's profitable to colonise space.

So in many ways, it's very much an expected sequel. How, then, is Raccoon Logic attempting to subvert expectations?

"It's tough," Schneider admits. "With the first one, when you make a new IP, it's kind of like catching lightning in a bottle. 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?'"

In Schneider's view, the expected sequel would be "a couple more planets and staying in first-person." Revenge of the Savage Planet lets players loose on four planets, has a whole new colony area they can customise between expeditions, and most notably shifts 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