Big World, Small Folk: ‘Smalland: Survive the Wilds VR’ Scavenges its Way to the Quest Platform Today
Picture this: You’re the size of a small insect, stranded in the middle of a massive yard, with towering blades of grass rising all around you. Enormous creatures like spiders and flying bugs are ready to tear you to pieces from all sides. Scary, right? From way up here as a normally sized human the idea of walking across a yard is pretty simple; but for the Smallfolk, it’s anything but a walk in the park.
Smalland: Survive the Wilds VR launches today on the Quest platform, bringing dozens of hours of survival, crafting, and exploring to your virtual yard of adventures. We spent time chatting with Daniel Fraser, Producer at Merge Games on Smalland: Survive the Wilds VR to get a better idea of what we’re in store for when we set out on this journey for ourselves.
DF: The concept of Smalland actually first began life with another developer! We were so impressed with the idea that we acquired the IP and completely rebooted development from scratch, culminating in Smalland: Survive the Wilds as it is today.
Our inspirations for Smalland always came from the original game concept. Incorporating key player feedback has always been really important to us too, as the community is what makes the game so special, so developing with our community and their feedback in mind has been what we’ve always worked towards.
DF: Smalland: Survive the Wild VR is a new, unique single-player adventure set within the world of Smalland: Survive the Wilds. With the giants long gone, you must reclaim the Overlands and survive in the perilous surface world. Step into the shoes of a Smallfolk venturing out of the Burrows and into the giant world for the first time, as you craft, build, fight and forage your way through the Wilds.
DF: Conveying a strong sense of scale was very important when creating the non-VR version of Smalland, as we really wanted players to believe they were tiny beings in a giant world. That sense of scale translated perfectly into the VR version - there is something really unique about putting on a headset and being able to look up at the skyscraper-like trees that tower above you, or come face-to-face with an insect that is twice your size. Being able to immerse yourself within a VR game with so many recognisable real-world elements, whilst you are the size of an ant, really helped sell that sense of scale that makes Smalland so unique.
I also particularly love walking up to ladybugs and petting them - so cozy!
DF: The world of Smalland translated to VR wonderfully. The sense of scale is ideal for VR as people recognise objects that would usually be small in our world suddenly towering over you, which created so many great opportunities when designing and dressing the levels.
One of the biggest challenges in adapting Smalland to VR was designing the Building feature. There aren’t a lot of games in VR that allow you to craft and build entire structures piece-by-piece, so we had to figure out a lot of the design without the usual amount of established design language and quality of life design that would usually help get the feature off the ground quickly.
Another was trying to figure out how to capture the essence of the PC game while ensuring that the game was performant and looked visually appealing. We spent a lot of time designing environment layouts and exploring optimisation techniques to help us understand the different constraints between PC and Quest hardware. With this growing knowledge over the course of the development cycle, we were able to develop a game that feels and looks good to the player.
DF: In the game, players will have their own home base where they can build their own house out of different materials they have unlocked over the course of the game. This is a safe space where the players do not need to worry about big bugs attacking, allowing them to craft weapons, cook food, and build a home that really makes the space their own. They can build their home as tall or wide as they wish as longs as it fits within the space, and they are under the building cap.
DF: There are quite a few ways in which Smalland: Survive the Wilds stands out from the rest of the survival and crafting genre, which has become very saturated in recent years with a bunch of really great games!
Creature taming is one of the stand-outs, with the non-VR version allowing players to tame and mount creatures to aid the player on their journey. Whether you choose to take to the skies on a Blue Tit with full 360 degree flight, or leap great distances with the grasshopper, tamed creatures and mounts offer so much variety and depth to gameplay in Smalland. Each creature also has their own stats too which you can upgrade, and can even aid you in battles! We’ve incorporated this key feature into the VR version, with players able to set traps to capture and tame creatures which join your party and can aid you in various scenarios throughout your journey.
Building is another core feature which helps differentiate Smalland from other games like it. Our community are incredibly creative and have utilized our building mechanics in the non-VR game to create structures even our developers didn’t think was possible! Allowing players creative freedom to build their perfect base is really important to us, and we’ve even added building scalability options to further encourage this creativity. Building is a core part of Smalland and features in the VR version within the player’s Great Tree base - a safe space in both versions of the game that is away from the danger of enemies and solely allocated for the player to build their dream base. We can’t wait to see what amazing structures players in VR are able to build!
DF: For new players, I’d say - tread lightly and be prepared! There are lots of dangerous creatures lurking in the Overland, so crafting a weapon and armor is key to your survival. Make sure to collect as many resources as you can and head over to the Balloon Attendant, who can transport you to the safety of your Great Tree to craft tools that will help you gather better resources and craft better armor and weapons. Also, make sure to keep an eye on your health and hunger bars - if you don’t make sure to replenish with food, you may find yourself in a perilous situation!
DF: You can keep up to date on all the latest Smalland: Survive the Wilds news via our Meta Quest page, @playsmalland X account, or by joining our wider Smalland community on Discord!
