Wanderstop

The game's protagonist, Alta, is a former warrior who has been traumatized by fighting in an arena.^[2] She hopes that by working to maintain a tea shop, her trauma will be healed.^[2] She adjusts to her life in tending to the shop in a forest, performing tasks such as growing and harvesting ingredients and mixing them together in a large flask machine, cleaning and decorating the shop, chatting with customers, or just sitting on a bench.^[3]

Alta has trouble convincing herself that this low-stress life is working for her. She battles with her unresolved trauma throughout, yet still fights to enjoy her quiet life.^[1][3] However, Alta cannot simply achieve progress by racing through her checklists.^[2] The shop demands patience and rejects those who have come only in the "pursuit of growth unchecked",^[1] and healing must be found for her and her customers in a more challenging way.^[2]

As early as 2015, composer and sound engineer Daniel Rosenfeld, known by his pseudonym C418, had considered creating a video game. In an interview that year, he described a desire to create something that was "not really a game, but an experience based on it". He mused that "you’d buy it on Steam and you’d get the album and you’d also get the game frame", but admitted he was only experimenting with the idea, and that the game would take a while.^[4] The musician had also completed a house album, and considered "hiring a couple friends to see if we can make interesting games based around listening to albums".^[5]

At the same time in 2015, game designer Davey Wreden had just released his video game The Beginner's Guide. He had begun to daydream of going to a tea shop in the woods and lying on a bench by the water, and after sketching variations of the scene, decided that image would become the basis of his next game. Wreden did not find that the ideas of simply completing a list of tasks or just making a "cozy game" were satisfactory; it was only when Karla Zimonja joined development that Wreden realized they would make a game about trauma.^[2]

In a 2018 interview with Bandcamp, C418 disclosed that he was working on a game with Wreden. He called it a "crazy experiment on making a game where you don't 'earn' anything and there are no numbers that go up, but it's something you can maybe still obsess over if you want to." He remarked that there was much room to experiment with audio in the game and that he wished to spend "a while" working on it.^[6] In July 2019, Wreden began hiring for a gameplay programmer working on tea-related implements and a systems engineer for his next game.^[7] In 2020, C418 said that he would serve as the "lead audio person" for a video game development studio based in Austin, Texas helmed by Wreden. The musician said of the studio's game, "I can tell you that there’s going to be a lot of me."^[8]

Development, which started around 2017,^[9] was led by a small team.^[10] Developers for the game include lead producer Patrick McDermott, lead designer Steven Margolin, lead programmer Andrew Nguyen, and 2D and 3D art designers Nat F and Temitope Olujobi, respectively.^[11] Aura Triolo, who served as Animation Lead on the game, prioritized finding shortcuts to animate the characters with. When she began working on the game in 2019, she was the only animator employed by Ivy Road, though the animation team would grow to as many as four simultaneous people later on. She spent much of her early development on Wanderstop setting up animation technology to automatically handle many different situations, including character idle and active stances. She utilized procedural generation and inverse kinematics to apply universal animation sets across all characters, which would work for each despite them having different models. She called the earlier of implementations "one of the simpler examples" of procedural generation present in the game.^[10]

The game's original soundtrack was composed by Ivy Road studio co-founder Daniel Rosenfeld, known professionally as C418.^[12][3] C418 also served as sound designer. He was directly involved in implementing the SFX into the game, a task he described as "extremely hands on in a way I’ve never been allowed to".^[13] He described the audio engine as "too complex";^[13] and remarked that the "talking" from the game's "pluffins" caused trouble for it.^[14]

On July 29, 2021, C418, Wreden, and Gone Home artist Karla Zimonja revealed their game development studio Ivy Road, and announced a partnership with Annapurna Interactive. There, the company stated their intent to create a new video game with the company.^[15] Their publishing agreement was one of four announced at Annapurna's showcase that day; the others were with Outer Loop, No Code, and Canadian developer Jessica Mak.^[16] Studio co-founders Wreden, Zimonja, and C418 released an official announcement video with Annapurna in which the earlier two co-founders drank tea and joked about video games whilst Rosenfeld played an original piano piece in the background.^[12]

During the Summer Game Fest 2024 showcase in June, the game was officially announced as Wanderstop, to be released that year on PlayStation 5 and Steam. A trailer was revealed at the event, and the game was announced to release later that year.^[3] In response to the trailer, PC Gamer's Lauren Morton remarked that the game "[has] exactly the kind of commentary we'd expect from Wreden as Wanderstop's director and writer",^[1] and GamesRadar+'s Hirun Cryer opined that Wanderstop "is The Stanley Parable creator's take on Stardew Valley".^[17] Inverse's Robin Bea felt that the game had the potential to explore the "real-world stresses that players are seeking to escape by playing them", and mused that the game could be seen as "a parody of cozy games themselves".^[18] Game Informer's Kyle Hilliard anticipated a deeper meaning to the game given Wreden and Zimonja's previous work.^[19]

By the time that the entire staff of the game's publisher Annapurna had resigned in September, Wreden affirmed that the team at Ivy Road remained "100 percent okay", and that "Nothing's gonna stop us from getting Wanderstop out the door very soon" on an X post.^[20] Rosenfeld concurred, writing "We're fine and our game is doing just fine!"^[21] In October, the studio announced a delay to early 2025.^[22] On December 11, 2024, music from C418's score will feature throughout the Day of the Devs: The Game Awards Edition showcase.^[23]

• Official website