Päls & Fjäder: Skogshjältarna

About:

Join the forest heroes, Päls and Fjäder, in a thrilling quest to protect their forest home from the never-ending spread of fire. Päls, using their trusty water gun and precision, extinguishes the fire from burning trees. While Fjäder soars through the skies, navigating through the burning trees and obstacles of nature. Both Päls and Fjäder work together to quickly help rescue the endangered animals of the forest, and they aim to save the forest and quell forest fires once and for all. 

Restore the forest, watch out for the fire and use teamwork to efficiently put off the fires and reduce its spread, and make a name for yourself by putting out as many fires as possible and reaching the top of the leaderboard. The forest and its adorable creatures need your help before everything burns away, can you save them?

Our Process:

Our process with Päls & Fjäder started on the very first day we met our team members. We sat down to discuss our team structure and brainstorm about some game ideas. We wrote our ideas on post-it notes and read them, so everyone had an idea of what our team wanted to create. Here are some ideas we were able to establish with this method:

• We knew we wanted to have animal characters for our game instead of humanoids, since it would fit the theme much better.

• We wanted to create a Co-op experience,  so players felt a sense of collaboration while also working towards a common goal with their friends.

• We decided to go with a low poly aesthetic so we would have more time to polish the game afterward.

• We wanted to focus on accessibility, so we designed the game to use only the two large buttons on the Xbox Adaptive Controller. This decision greatly influenced both our design process and control scheme.

• We wanted to create a leaderboard system to target 10–12-year-olds who enjoy challenging and competitive gameplay.

When we had a clearer idea of what the game could look like, we came up with two game ideas. One involved a bear sitting next to a river and catching fish. It was a rhythm game where players would press the buttons with perfect timing to grab the other bear’s fish. However, we decided the game lacked depth and replayability, so we went with our other game idea: Päls & Fjäder, a local co-op adventure game where two players must work together to fight the raging fires in their forest.

We decided to make one of the players a pelican and the other a squirrel, as we thought it would represent an unlikely but cool friendship. The pelican player controls a physics-based character, requiring constant wing flapping, diving, and gliding to bring the squirrel to the fires. The squirrel player needs to throw water balloons at burning trees to extinguish them while also protecting the pelican from catching fire.

We came up with all these ideas on the first day, which allowed us to quickly develop prototypes and begin testing the game. We divided crucial roles equally, and we are very proud of what our team was able to accomplish in just 14 days. The development process was so smooth that we never encountered issues with team dynamics. While some might perceive this as a missed opportunity to gain problem-solving skills, we are thrilled because we now know what to strive for in future projects. We understand what smooth sailing and team harmony look like for an amazing development process.

Meet our team:

Name	Roles
Programmers
Doruk Şaşmaz	PO / Backend Programmer
Galina Syrodoeva	Character Programmer
Halldór Kári Kristmundsson	Character Programmer
Ilyas Kaya	Assistant PO, Fire Programmer, P4V Manager, QA
Tiger Martin	Lead Programmer, World Generation
Designers
Alexander Hörnqvist Granskog	Narrative Designer / Generalist
Brian Barikhann	UI Design / Generalist & Quality Assurance
Federico Garcia Vera	Lead Designer & Gameplay Designer
Vamsi Kasina	Level Design / Game Design
Artists
Emilia Molander	Game Artist
Kristin Walkhed	Game Artist
Marcus Swensån	Game Artist
Animation / VFX
David Hult	Animation / VFX / Music
Robin Eriksson	Animation/VFX