Pixile Studio and Super Animal Royale

Pixile Studios, founded in 2011 in Vancouver by Michael Silverwood and Chris Clogg. Their breakout hit, Super Animal Royale, a 64-player top-down battle royale starring adorable-yet-deadly animals. This game (initially released in December 2018) offers a compact, enjoyable experience that’s welcoming to players of all skill levels, and it has grown into a global cross-platform community of over 12 million players as of 2025.

With a fully remote team spread across the globe, Pixile is known for its absurdist humor, charming characters, and strong community engagement—from in-game fan art showcases to an animated series based on player moments. The studio is now expanding its universe through Super Animal World (a whole new social space) —a major new chapter that shifts the focus from battle to playful, community-driven social interaction.

As a longtime fan of Super Animal Royale, Rashel represented indienova and excitedly invited Michael Silverwood—founder of Pixile Studios and co-creator of Super Animal Royale—for an interview about the studio’s origin story and the game’s development journey.

Interview

Rashel: Can you talk about how you founded Pixile Studios? Was that related to your work experience in the finance world, the VC firm—or is that a different story altogether?

Michael: It's a bit of a long story, because my co-founder and I have actually known each other since we were three. We grew up on the same street. Since elementary school, we’d been making animations and short films together just for fun. Then we started learning web development on the side so we could create our own projects. Eventually, we began making websites for companies as a part-time job during high school.

We've always been really big game players. Back in high school, we started making custom maps for some of our favorite games, like Warcraft 3, Team Fortress 2, and Starcraft. That was our first step into actually building games. We both went on to study computer science at the University of British Columbia, and I also did a business program alongside that. Through those studies, we learned a lot more programming and started building mobile apps for companies instead of just websites—once we picked up iOS development.

When we started making mobile apps, that’s when we felt like we had the skills to finally try building our first full game. So we built it. It took us about two years while we were still in school and doing internships. We launched it while we were still students. It was called Stratosphere—a multiplayer tower defense game where two people play on the same iPad. It did quite well. It got a lot of featuring from Apple and good critical response from the press. But the one thing that limited it was the platform—it was only available on iPad. Not even on iPhone, because it was very specifically designed for two players sharing one iPad. It was a $2 game, so it wasn't a full business at the time, but it was a lot of fun and a great starting point for us. Around the same time, I got an internship at a venture capital firm in San Francisco, working with early-stage mobile software companies—helping them build their first products and launch their businesses.

I actually got a full-time job offer there after school and after we'd released our game. So I moved down to San Francisco and stayed there for five years. That experience was valuable in helping me understand how to launch new products and find product-market fit. We worked with multiple companies—testing and iterating on their new products, watching how consumers responded. That job gave me a lot of confidence when we were still prototyping games on the side. We always thought it would be fun to release them, even if it wasn’t going to turn into a business, because we just loved making games.

Then we made the prototype for Super Animal Royale (SAR) and thought it was actually pretty fun. With the prototype showing promise—and with all the experience I’d gained in launching things over the years at the VC firm—we felt confident that maybe we could actually turn this into a business. So we quit our jobs, took the risk, started the full studio, and hired the first members of the team that year.

R: It sounds like such an ideal path. When I first started playing the game, I completely fell in love with it—and honestly, I got a little obsessed. I play it whenever I can, and when I can’t, I watch others stream it on Twitch. I think it’s the characters, the giggles, the gibberish voice, the dance emotes—they’re all just so irresistibly adorable. And they come together so seamlessly.

I’m curious—could you briefly introduce the team behind the game? How did you all collaborate to ensure that each element is not only great on its own, but also contributes to such a cohesive and delightful experience?

M: The game was inspired by stuff we played growing up and things we watched—like Conker's Bad Fur Day and Happy Tree Friends. But we wanted it to be less mature than those—more friendly—so there's no blood or anything like that in the game. Once we had the prototype, we started thinking about the world and the characters. First of all, we just love games with colorful, minimalist art styles, and we love animals. So we knew we wanted the game to look like this and for those to be the characters. But then we had to ask ourselves: why are they fighting to the death? What's the story behind all of this? Once we answered those questions and came up with the history of the world, it made development easier—we had a kind of guide for where to take things and how to design everything in a way that stayed consistent with the story of the world.

At the beginning, it was just Chris and me. So for the prototype, he handled the coding, and I did the animation, art, and user interface design. But we knew that for this game, we wanted to make something better than what we could produce on our own. So we started looking for initial artists. Everyone we hired was remote and came from all sorts of different places—we found them in all kinds of ways. We went to a job fair at a university in Los Angeles, met a bunch of artists, saw their portfolios, and ended up working with some of the ones we really liked from there.

Our artist and animator for the game, Erika—she’s based in Milan, Italy—we met online. I was learning the animation tool we wanted to use for the game and found her through an online community. She loves animals and doing animation for animals, so it was a perfect fit. We met our composer and sound engineer Charlie at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. And for writing, video, and production work, we brought in my friend Ruben, who I had worked with previously at Tandem, the venture capital firm. He's just really talented like so many of our initial team members—he actually writes plays too. He’s the reason we’re able to make “Super Animal Royale Tonight,” he voices a lot of the animals. And Charlie plays a big role too—she creates all the sound effects and music that bring the show to life. Erika also animates the entire show.

Later on, we mostly hired out of the community. We brought on people who were moderators on our Discord server. One of them, a backend developer based in Austria—Lyze—started by writing Discord bots for us and then he built an entire backend moderation platform for the in-game chat and even helped rewrite the matchmaker. So yeah, we really found amazing people from all sorts of places.

R: I remember in the game, I saw something written on a wall—I think it said, "Are we not people?" Was that part of the world-building before you started designing the game?

M: Yeah, the core of the world is this idea of Super Animal World. Humans developed the technology to create animal-human hybrids. And one of the funny things is that they could do all sorts of things with this technology, but they decided to just create an amusement park—where the mascots are actual living animals, rather than humans in suits.

But then we started asking a bunch of funny, philosophical questions about that. Like, if the animals themselves have full free will—like humans—would they even want to be doing this job? The company just forces them into being mascots. So we created this whole story about how the animals fight back against the park that forced them into those roles, and how they eventually destroyed the park.

After that, the company that created Super Animal World has to figure out what to do next, now that their amusement park is in ruins. And they decide, well, we can just make as many clones of these animals as we want—so why not make them fight to the death and televise it?

R: I really like the soundtrack. Who's the composer?

M: Catbaux! Her work is amazing and really brings the world to life.

R: I really love her songs—I even followed them on Spotify! From my perspective, those tracks give soul to both the game and the episodes, which is what keeps me coming back to the series.

R: Are you planning to create more animated films outside of the game? You’ve got such a talented team of animators, composers, writers, and voice actors—it feels like there’s so much potential there.

M: We’re planning on doing a third season of Super Animal Royale Tonight, our animated series, but we’re aiming to return to it after we release the Super Animal World expansion. That’s been a really large project, as big as building the original game itself. So it’s taken us a bit longer than expected, and the whole team is currently focused on getting it ready to release this year. Once that’s out, we’ll shift back to working on Super Animal Royale Tonight.

R: Before playing this game, I didn’t really play any multiplayer survival shooters—because I actually have a bit of trauma from getting verbally abused by other players. So that kind of turned me off from the genre. But this game kind of cured that for me. I came across a partner in a squad who was super protective, and even some enemies I ran into invited me to dance instead of just shooting me. I really love the atmosphere. I’m curious—how did that contrast come about? The contrast between the battle royale gameplay and such a wholesome, friendly vibe?

M: I guess part of it comes down to the style and characters we really liked. But it was also about making the game accessible to more people, which was a big design goal for us. In addition to the art style, the games are structured so that you can win after only about seven minutes, which takes a bit of the pressure off. If you die, you can just jump back in right away. We also wanted that final moment to not feel too frustrating or toxic. For example, the fact that when you die, you explode into confetti or spaghetti and get an animal pun makes each death a bit less serious, which helps make it harder to get upset.

So, I think those elements together really help make the game feel less intense compared to other battle royales. We actually did a survey early on and discovered that more players in our community play games like Pokémon, Animal Crossing, and Minecraft than games like Fortnite or PUBG. For a lot of people, this is their first battle royale game, and we were really happy about that because we love battle royale games. We love PUBG and Fortnite, but we wanted to see if we could create something that would bring the genre to a wider audience without losing what makes it fun.

R: I read somewhere that your team is really small—something like 16 people total, with only six full-time? Is that right?

M: Yeah, roughly. We're around 16 people now, but with a mix of full-time and part time we add up to around 9 or 10 full time equivalents. When we first launched in early access, it was just seven of us.

R: That's such a small team! I imagine you put a lot of effort into community management. I'm curious—how do you manage the community across different platforms like Discord and others? It sounds like a lot to handle.

M: Yeah, it is a lot, but I think one thing we got really lucky with on SAR is that it grew organically and gradually at first—not too fast. That initial slower growth meant we could be really engaged with the community from the very beginning, chatting directly with players in Discord. Because it grew more slowly first, we were able to be very hands-on with shaping the community—establishing values and fostering healthy norms early on. When it did grow bigger later, it already had a positive, wholesome community that didn't become toxic, or having too many players flow in all at once and change the character of the community. It also gave us time to build up moderation practices and community programs from scratch, based on what was happening naturally.

We have a lot of really talented and wonderful people on our Community and moderation teams who do a great job supporting community programs and modelling positive norms, and our Community Director, Logan, has been a part of the team since right before our Early Access release. As for platforms, each one is quite unique. Discord has always been our main focus because it's where we can engage directly with players, get feedback, and build things like fan art showcases and content creator support. It’s really become a home base for the whole community.

R: How many seasons do you usually release in a year? It feels like a lot! I’m curious: do you as a small team have a set structure for planning releases each year?

M: We typically release a new season every quarter—so about every three months. That’s been our standard schedule for the past few years. Right now’s a bit of an exception, though, because we’ve slowed down seasonal updates to focus on our big expansion, Super Animal World. Once that’s out, we’re planning to return to the regular three-month cadence. But earlier in development, we tried out different rhythms. Back when we were in Alpha and Beta, we did weekly updates—just rapid prototyping and testing directly with players. But that pace wasn’t sustainable once the core game systems were all built out, so after launching into early access, we shifted to updates every three weeks. Then we later switched from paid to free-to-play because we were originally paid on Steam. And around when we hit version one and added all the game consoles—Switch, Xbox, PlayStation—we introduced the Animal Pass system. That’s when we settled on the quarterly model, which gives us enough time to make each season feel substantial.

For the most recent season, we actually gave away a free Animal Pass that players can claim anytime before Super Animal World comes out.

R: Yeah, I got that one!

M: Thank you for supporting us and waiting for the expansion! 😉

R: I’m really curious—what exactly does the expansion include? Will there be a new map or new game modes?

M: The expansion is based on our observation of how social players naturally are in the pre-game lobbies before matches. There’s usually not much time in there, so we thought it would be interesting to expand it to a full MMO-style social hub, where you’ll be able to do things like fishing, catching bugs, and racing in hamster balls. You’ll also meet NPC Super Aanimal characters who send you on quests. A lot of people come into the game expecting something wholesome because of the art style, and the community turned out to be very wholesome—so we want to build a social space for that.

It’s almost like adding an additional relaxing, wholesome game on top of Super Animal Royale. Yeah, it’s been a huge project—we’ve had to redesign a lot of systems to combine the two parts and make them work together smoothly.

R: I noticed that celebrating Chinese New Year seems to have become a tradition in the game. And I think the special items you release for it are really well-researched and thoughtfully designed—they feel culturally appropriate and respectful. I also chatted with some players on the Chinese channels, and a few of them seem like long-time, very loyal fans. So I’m curious—how did this cultural connection come about? Do you have any team members from Chinese-speaking regions?

M: No, actually—it happened very organically. The game just gradually grew around Asia, including in China. From there, we started working closely with community members—we’d chat with them, ask for ideas, show them our concepts, and get their feedback to make sure the items felt right culturally.

Also, our founding team—Chris, Robert, and I—are all based in Vancouver, which has a large Chinese community. So we’ve had some familiarity through that as well. But the cultural connection is mostly from working with the community.

R: I remember pretty clearly—last year, you announced that Pixile became fully independent again, which surprised me—I thought you were indie the whole time! I also noticed the Modus logo disappeared from the game. Around the same time, Maximum Games rebranded and grouped several studios under one umbrella. Was your decision related to that, or did it happen independently?

M: Oh, that wasn’t super related—it just happened around the same time. I guess a lot of people had that same reaction, thinking we were always indie until we announced that. I think that’s partly because we did self-publish the game initially—we handled the entire early access launch on Steam by ourselves. It wasn’t until later that we partnered with Modus (which was a brand of Maximum Games) to help with console porting.

And then we realized we had the skills and infrastructure to do everything they were helping us with on our own. Going fully independent again meant regaining full creative and operational control, and we felt that was best for the studio to return to being fully in-house again.

It definitely adds more work when we do everything in-house—but even during the partnership, we were already creating all our own marketing assets, doing our own community management, making all of our trailers and the Super Animal Royale Tonight episodes in-house. So it felt like a natural transition.

And going indie again gives us some opportunity to make player-friendly decisions that might be dumb business decisions, like giving away the Popular Request Pass for free. It doesn't make a lot of financial sense, but hopefully makes players happy so that they keep playing and come back to play Super Animal World when it's ready.

R: I played the Chinese mobile version of Super Animal Royale back in spring 2022, published as “Little Animal Star” (Chinese translation) by iDreamSky. Even though the animations and music were the same, the overall vibe felt different. That version was later discontinued—are you open to sharing the story behind it?

M: It was definitely a very new and unique experience for us working with iDreamSky, since we’re used to doing things ourselves. But we knew that for a Chinese version, it would need to be localized for the market, so we gave them a lot of freedom to adapt it however they felt was best. We still discussed everything with them, but yeah, we gave them a lot of room to take it in their own direction. It was really interesting to see, especially how much of a larger team they put on it—much larger than ours. It was too bad that they eventually wound down development, but we appreciated that they at least kept the servers up for quite a while after that.

Overall, it was a good learning experience. We’re considering how we might return to the China market in the future. But in the meantime, the Steam version is still available. We’re fully focused on building the Super Animal World expansion, which will also be on Steam in China. After that, we’ll consider whether we want to try a mobile version again—though if we go down that path in the future, we’d probably handle more of it in-house.

R: Has the current development of Super Animal Royale aligned with your original expectations?

M: Yeah, it definitely exceeded our expectations—pretty dramatically. We hoped it would resonate with people, but we didn’t expect it to reach over 12 million players worldwide. But there’s always room for improvement. There’s a never-ending list of things we want to add to the game—we’re always coming up with new creative ideas. Super Animal World is really setting up a new foundation for us to build even more on top of. That includes gameplay balancing, new community features, more opportunities for storytelling within the game itself… and of course, we have lots of ideas for new modes down the road too.

R: Yeah, I remember the Mystery Mode—I really liked that one!

M: So far we’ve done three alternate modes: The Bwoking Dead, SAW vs. Rebellion, and Mystery Mode. Mystery Mode was actually the first one—it was kind of an experiment with all sorts of twists on the battle royale model. We’re still considering ways to do a new version of Mystery Mode. We also have ideas for improving the existing modes—especially The Bwoking Dead—and plenty of ideas for totally new modes too. But first, we’ve got to get Super Animal World out the door. Once that’s done, we’ll be able to build new modes on top of it.

R: Then I guess I already know the answer to my next question… Are you working on any new game projects?

M: Totally focused on Super Animal World right now. If everything goes well and players enjoy it, that’ll give us plenty to keep working on in the future—lots of things we can keep building on top of it. So yeah, just really focused on that.

R: Even after the expansion—do you have any plans for other projects?

M: No plans for other games currently—just continuing to build on Super Animal Royale 😉

R: That sounds good to me as a player! Do you have any advice for indie game developers—especially those still in school or just starting out?

M: I think giving generalized advice is always difficult, because everyone’s journey is different, but I can share what’s worked well for us and some approaches we've taken. One thing that’s always been important for us in game design is limiting the scope as much as possible in the beginning. We like to focus on one core mechanic that’s really fun in a prototype state. Just that one simple mechanic. Once we nail down what makes that part fun, we build out from there. If the core simple center of the game isn’t fun, it’s tough to make the whole game fun later on. So, once you’ve figured out the fun part, focusing on just one simple idea and iterating on that piece by piece is key.

For us in our prototype, the big turning point came when we built a 2D top-down battle royale and were wondering if it could be as fun as the third-person or first-person shooters. What made it fun was when we figured out the line-of-sight fog of war. We already had the shooting and movement mechanics, but the game didn’t feel right if you could see everything on the map at once. The surprise of finding someone inside a house or around a corner—that’s what added suspense and strategy to the battle royale. Once we figured that mechanic out, then the gameplay worked and we iteratively built all around that.

Another key piece of advice is engaging with the community and listening to player feedback. It’s really important too. But it can be a double-edged sword. We have a wholesome and positive community, but there will always be a percentage of people who, because they’re so passionate, get upset and can be very direct. You have to balance your mental health and not take things too personally—it can feel very personal when someone critiques your game, which is like your baby. But I think it’s crucial to hear what people are saying, no matter how it’s phrased. Just don’t take it too literally.

As a designer, your job is to listen to the emotions and experiences players have, then determine why that’s happening and what you can do about it through your design. Players know very well what feelings they had and what they were doing when those feelings happened, but they’re not game designers. So your job is to interpret what they were experiencing and try to theorize why it’s happening and how you can address it. It’s important to get the feedback, but if you just do everything exactly as players suggest, that won’t be a super successful approach.