Interviews

Ruby Solomon, Digital Producer at Dinosaur Polo Club — Interview Series

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Dinosaur Polo Club, the creators behind the highly anticipated yet ill-fated elemental “maximalist simulation game” Magic School, has recently spoken out to shed light on its reasons for canceling the project—a game that was originally set to blend the likes of whimsical academia with countless other life simulation nodes. To learn a bit more about the title, as well as establish a clearer understanding of what the next steps are for developer Dinosaur Polo Club, we caught up with Digital Producer, Ruby Solomon.

We appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Please could you tell us a bit about yourself? How did it all start for you, and what brought you to Dinosaur Polo Club?

Ruby: Sure thing! I’m Ruby Solomon, and I work with our amazing Community & Marketing team as a Digital Producer. I’ve been with the team for nearly half a decade now, so it’s been a unique experience being able to see a very small indie studio grow and expand, try new things and all the while be a part of a very positive and enthusiastic ‘Mini’ community that’s been there for us through it all. I’ve always been in awe of creative industries and the diverse talent the games industry brings together, so working with the amazing talent at Dinosaur Polo Club was appealing from the get-go.

Speaking of Dinosaur Polo Club, could you please tell us a bit more about it? When was the studio founded, and what are some of the core values that you aim to achieve as a team?

Ruby: Technically, the studio was founded in 2013, but at the time, it was a very small team of just four. Over the last 11 years, we’ve grown to over thirty dinos, moved studios twice, and been granted many incredible opportunities.

We’ve taken a slightly different approach to game development. While some studios crank out game after game, we’ve taken a ‘proud parent’ approach to both of our titles, nurturing them with several updates throughout the year based on what our community wants to see next. We constantly aim to make our games the best and most polished versions they can be, a value that sits at the forefront of most of our decisions. Alongside this is our aim to support our devs and the wider game development scene, allowing for more diversity and stability which can be difficult to find at times. This was a huge reason for us deciding to share our Magic School work.

Of course, I think I speak for everyone when I say that Magic School, even though it’s no longer in the works, is still going to be missed. Could you tell us the reason for removing it from the chalkboard?

Ruby: That’s a great question, one that we anticipated most people to be curious about! I asked one of our Co-Founders and our Art Director for their take on this.

Blake Wood – Art Director: One of the core ways the founders have always wanted to run Dinosaur Polo Club was to ensure we never bet the studio on a single game, which started becoming a problem with Magic School. We knew we would always have to hire to a reasonable degree to pull a project like this off, but part of our exploration, prototyping, and testing was to see if we could reduce the number down to reduce the risk to the studio. As it turns out? Pretty hard to do!

The more time went on, the more it started to feel like it ran the risk of being that single game that the studio was starting to bet upon, and that was a strong decision-maker in us realizing we weren’t the right people for the project.

Additionally, every project seems to have a kind of energy and motivation that exists around it. The longer you spend in the exploration phases, the more you run the risk of expending this energy. There exists a fine balance between striking while the iron is hot (and, in some ways, being brave and a little gung ho about it all) while also having to ensure you’re doing your due diligence to plan appropriately.

In some ways, you can protect against this with different teams or individuals. As we found, though, within a small team, it’s harder to split out the team to protect them from a protracted exploration phase or keep that motivation going over time. You can then end up expending that energy almost team-wide as everyone becomes somewhat involved.

Robert Curry—Co-Founder | Designer: The scope was daunting and always in the back of my mind. We have a vision for the scale of the studio, and no matter how we scoped the game, we could never quite rationalise it against that vision. That wasn’t a sudden realisation, more of just a creeping awareness that I gradually had to acknowledge.

It must’ve been a difficult decision. Still, there are plenty of things to celebrate! Could you tell us a bit about some of the main things that helped to shape the game, as well as some of the things that allowed you to flex your joint creative wisdom?

Ruby: You couldn’t be more right about that! To answer these questions, I’ll hand the proverbial mic over to some of our incredible developers:

Poppy de Raad – Artist: I think my silly alternate class ideas were some of my favourite things I contributed to the Magic School project. Exploring some more ‘out there’ concepts for a class for teaching magic and truly getting as creative as I wanted was a really fun exercise. I think I’m the most proud of those concepts because they were something that helped direct us in terms of what mood we wanted to head towards and was a piece we referred back to a lot.

Svend Hansen — Programmer: I’m quite proud of the behaviour trees I implemented for the Magic School AIs. These trees controlled when teachers and students would undertake different activities based on their respective schedules, needs, and moods.

Ian Shephard – Programmer: I’m particularly proud of the unique construction room combining system that was created and used for a number of the prototypes. It was a particularly fun exercise to blend grid-less rooms to create unique room shapes in real-time and then allow the players to separate the internal rooms using walls into definable custom internal sections. Getting the whole system running smoothly and across rooms that had their own custom-defined shapes and number of stories was extremely satisfying to complete and playtest.

Robert Curry – Co-founder | Designer: Quite a few standout moments! In the very early days, working with Poppy de Raad (Artist) and Niamh Fitzgerald (former COO and Designer) on interesting concepts like having the school fold out like a sewing box was particularly special. Hearing the first sample music by Dan Golding was another memorable moment. Ian Shephard’s (Programmer) groundbreaking building placement technology – I still haven’t seen a game use that kind of tech. The whole art team produced some stunning slice-of-life storytelling snapshots. Seeing the team come together in the last year and produce so many great gameplay prototypes that explored a huge variety of possible directions. And who can forget Svend’s beautiful Programmer art! There’s nothing quite like art made by programmers.

Tell us, what do you think you’ve managed to learn from this whole experience? Moreover, are you likely to transfer these pockets of knowledge to another project in the future?

Ruby: The team learned so much throughout the process of exploring Magic School, and certainly some of this knowledge will be shared in the development of our next Mini game. While the art style varied greatly from the clear and minimalist style of our Mini games, we pushed the boundaries of our knowledge in every way imaginable which will surely influence what comes next. To get more context on this, read some answers from our devs below.

Svend Hansen – Programmer: A big ah-ha moment for me was when I learned that you can’t just nest a blueprint under another blueprint in Unreal Engine. This is such a routine thing to do with game objects in Unity, and it took me a while to accept that I had to solve some problems in a very different way than I was used to.

Working in a new game engine was also a big challenge, not just because you don’t know how to do X, which you know how to do in your usual engine, but because sometimes you just don’t do X at all in the new engine, but you do something completely different.

Robert Curry – Co-founder | Designer: Honestly, getting over myself! I was the one who pitched the original concept, so even though I know many people put a lot of energy and time into the project and that there were so many other factors swimming around, it’s been easy for me to find fault in myself to explain why the game didn’t make it into production. If only I’d carved out more time for the project, if only I’d been quicker with feedback, if only I’d had a firmer say in direction, if only, if only, if only… it’s natural to have these questions pop up, and I have to keep reminding myself that I always acted the best I could given the information, constraints, and context at the time.

Jo Tuapawa – Producer: Initially the challenge was understanding where the project “was” and then where it wanted / needed to go. It was a little like detangling the Christmas lights. It took some time to assimilate and gather a collective consensus of the projects’ viability, enthusiasm for it and Vision. Then – and this is a privileged challenge to have; when you’re working with highly skilled individuals, my next challenge was to find where I fit and how I could bring value and be of service to an already experienced team.

With Magic School out of the picture, are we likely to catch wind of any fresh IP over the coming months or years at all? If so, could you please tell us a bit about what it is that you’re working on?

Ruby: Most definitely, we’re really thrilled to be able to focus all of our efforts on the next installment in the Mini series. While it’s still a little too early to share concrete details of what exactly the third Mini game will be, we can confirm that we are working on developing our next title with all of our amazing Magic School talent being redirected into this new project. They’ll be joining the ranks of other dinos who have been prototyping over the last year or so, and hopefully we’ll have more juicy details to share in the near future.

We’d love to stay up to date with Dinosaur Polo Club. Are there any social channels, streams, or newsletters that we’re able to share with our readers?

Ruby: Absolutely! You can follow us across our social media channels on Instagram, X, and Facebook and you can subscribe to our newsletter on our website. We also share trailers and dev streams to our YouTube channel from time to time, so check that out too if you want to see more of our content.

Is there anything you would like to add before we close the book?

Ruby: We’re really grateful for the way Magic School has been received so far, even though it’s bittersweet that it’s been canceled. It was an incredible opportunity for our team to work on this, one that was afforded to us by our very supportive and dedicated ‘Mini’ community, for which we’re eternally grateful. While it didn’t work out for Magic School in the long run, we learned so much and we’re so proud of our developers who now have a chance to share their work with the world in a way most canceled projects don’t allow for.

Thanks for your time, and best of luck with your future endeavors in the gaming sphere!

Ruby: Thank you so much for chatting with us, we’re so grateful to share all of this with the world!

 

For more information on Dinosaur Polo Club’s latest projects, be sure to check in with the team over on their official social channel here. Alternatively, you can visit the website for additional updates here.

Jord is acting Team Leader at gaming.net. If he isn't blabbering on in his daily listicles, then he's probably out writing fantasy novels or scraping Game Pass of all its slept on indies.