Bruce Straley, the co-director of The Last of Us and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, has announced a new studio called Wildflower Interactive, formed with other industry veterans.
Wildflower's pitch right now is aimed more at recruiting developers than exciting players, but the official site says that the studio is "making ‘small-ish,’ creatively-charged, uniquely-stylized games that explore the possibilities of our medium." Job listings, like one for a gameplay and systems designer, make mention of "the intersection between gameplay and story," and the desire to "create mechanics and set-ups that let the players play and still create rich, emotional experiences." It seems the Naughty Dog DNA is alive and well in Wildflower.
Straley left Naughty Dog back in 2017, calling it at the time "the hardest decision of my career." In a video accompanying today's studio announcement, Straley says "I left the industry not sure if I wanted to make games anymore." Yet he adds that "this idea kept following me, so I grabbed some friends and started prototyping," and that project led to the founding of Wildflower.
Some of the other industry veterans who are already a part of Wildflower include fellow Naughty Dog alums like lead animator Almudena Soria Sancho, designers Liz Fiacco and Nicholas Lance, visual effects artist Doug Holder, and producer Vivian Alcala, as well as others with credits in games ranging from Call of Duty to Astroneer and Abzu.
Straley says that Wildflower is intended to be "inclusive, equitable, and collaborative, full of big-hearted people who want to grow both professionally and personally. The culture needs to be as iterative as the way we make games." The video game industry is notorious for its poor working conditions, and Naughty Dog itself has reportedly had its own major issues with things like crunch in the past, so it's nice to see Straley directly addressing work culture from the start.
Naughty Dog itself is at work on The Last of Us Part 1, which recently went gold ahead of its September release.
