E3 2017: Welcome to Adventure with Super Lucky’s Tale

At Playful Corp, we had the amazing opportunity to introduce Lucky’s Tale last year, our character-driven action platformer for Oculus Rift, to the world. Since then we’ve heard from so many people how much they adored the game and have asked when they’ll see more of Lucky. We’re ecstatic to finally have an answer: Super Lucky’s Tale is coming to the Xbox One family of devices this year, including Windows 10, and will be playable in 4K on Xbox One X!

I wanted to walk through a few meaningful moments in bringing Super Lucky’s Tale to life. One of our guiding principles is to give the products we create with a feeling of playful delight. With Super Lucky’s Tale, we wanted to both honor the first game while applying what we’ve learned to amplify that delightful, joyous feeling.

A great example of this is deconstructing the experience of guiding Lucky around his world. Sure, he can run, jump, spin, carry things, and grab ledges, but is there something more that we can express here? Something that makes even routine traversal fun and memorable?

This examination lead to Lucky’s new burrowing ability, a move that came to life after one of our prototypes evoked the way a dolphin arcs gracefully in and out of the water. We knew we were on to something compelling when we realized that in many situations, we preferred burrowing to running. The challenge then shifted to iterating on that mechanic, giving it even more exploration and traversal potential without losing that simple delight of diving in and out of the soil.

Super Lucky’s Tale developed into something significantly different from the game we thought we were going to make when we started. Not just different — better, more engaging, more fun. We’ve seen this happen with many of the games we’ve worked on in the past. We’ve found that our team works best when we keep perspective on our initial pitch. It’s great at inspiring the studio at the outset, but the real fun is often found in the twists and turns along the way.

Like our lovable hero, we consider ourselves “lucky” to have such a talented team along for the ride. And I’m speaking from both the team here at Playful and our partners at Microsoft Studios, who helped make Super Lucky’s Tale a reality. I’ve never seen a more dedicated and passionate group of people, and their combined work imbues every frame of Lucky’s next tale with magic.

You can get a taste of what we have in store in the trailer we debuted at E3 2017 (above). We can hardly wait to share more details with you, so stay tuned to Xbox Wire and PlayfulCorp.com!