Super Animal Royale is a beloved, free to play battle royale game that’s lasted well over 7 years in a very competitive genre. After years of development, developer Pixile Studios is finally releasing their most anticipated update: Super Animal World! This expansion offers an MMO-inspired hub where players can convene to engage in fun activities such as fishing, catching bugs, and hamster ball racing. The hub area is also where new NPC quests and additional lore can be as found. This update will be on all platforms and preserves the full cross-play and cross-progression as well as adding a much requested feature: a cross platform friends list.
CFG had the opportunity to chat with Pixile’s Michael Silverwood and Ruben Grijalva about Super Animal World and what it means for the future of Super Animal Royale.
Can you introduce yourselves?
Michael: I’m Michael, co-founder of Pixile and I’m the creative director of the game and the team.
Ruben: I’m Ruben Grijalva and I am the narrative and video director.
You recently went to Japan to promote the release of Super Animal Royale there. How was that?
Michael: Yeah, it’s been good. We did a booth at Bit Summit in the summer too, so that was really cool. It was my first time at Bit Summit and it focuses all on indie games, so it was a lot of fun. We actually saw the player with the most hours in Super Animal Royale. He is based in Japan, and he came to the booth. So got some pics with some fans, which was really fun to meet them in person.
The big thing is just that it’s been nice to sync up the release of SAR in Asia, especially Japan, because Japan is so console centric. The Nintendo Switch and the PlayStation versions haven’t existed there until now, but to sync it all up with Super Animal World, it’s been our big project for the last few years.
What is Super Animal World and why did you decide to create this expansion?
Michael: It came out of really observing what the community was already doing in the game. So it goes back to early access when we first started building Super Animal Royale and we just noticed how social and wholesome the community was. I think partially the colorful, cute animals and the art style led to a very different community than a lot of other online competitive shooters.
When we saw how social they were, we just really wanted to build a space that led us do so much more of that. But obviously that was in early access, and so we still had a lot of the core game modes to finish building. So finally for the last three years, we decided to just do the big project and build this whole new social space, which is kind of a second half of the game, bolted onto the first and kind of woven into it. Was there anything you wanted to add, Ruben?
Ruben: Players only had only two minute lobbies and they formed these bonds with each other. They played really creatively. They came up with kind of a whole culture, some of which has been absorbed into the canon lore of the game. I’m really curious to see what this community does with lobbies that don’t end after two minutes that keep going where they can keep engaging with each other. We’re giving them lots of ways to engage in that space as well.
So the current menu will be completely replaced?
Michael: How it works is we actually are basically getting rid of the whole main menu. When you first load into the game, you see a main menu, but it’s stripped down and you just hit the play button. Once you’re in the world, you’re just in the world persistently. So there’s no more two minute waiting. You’re just in an MMO social hub and you can choose to match into modes at any time. So you can be questing doing story content, fishing, bug catching, hamster ball racing, and spend as much time as you want in that social hub world. And then at any time you pull up the mode selector and you can queue into a round of the battle royale or the Bwoking Dead or SAW Rebellion, the competitive modes.
Ruben: Then there is a short hub once they queue everybody else that is in the two minute hub. Most of the time you can be queuing without having to be in that hub.
Michael: You get pulled from where you are in the social hub and put on the runway, the giant eagle runway where you’re about to take off. So you’re just there for 15 to 20 seconds as you’ve moved servers, but everyone’s already kind of match maked in, so it doesn’t have to wait for anyone. Then your mode just starts and then at the end you either die and so a new animal has to be cloned for you, and then you get shot back into the social hub. If you win, if you’ve survived, you get to unlock a new space called Victory Island. So it’s the same cap as the battle royale 64 still, but we’re doing a little bit of matchmaking stuff to make sure that friends can get into each of the different social hubs. So we try not to fill it all the way to so that we’re leaving a few open slots for if your friends join late, they can get into the same one as you.
Since there’s more emphasis on story, lore, and NPC interactions, is the addition single player focused? Or can the new quests be completed with other players?
Ruben: Some of it can be played either way. There are some quests that require cooperative play, actually, but a lot of it can be done on your own. Figuring out what that balance is and how you can play together has been one of the things we’ve been trying to work on. Essentially it’s like a story that takes you through the different modes of the game via these different NPCs. There’s 200 NPCs that you can meet along the way, and some portion of them are involved in this story in which new players have always had a hard time with SAR. So one of our main objectives with everything we’re doing is to make it an easier experience to get into and to learn piece by piece, especially if you’re jumping in for the first time.
Ruben: At this point, we have so many mechanics in the battle royale, and then we have the other two competitive modes. Now we’re adding all these other mini games and stuff like that. The story mode will give you a nice fun and story driven way to slowly be introduced to all these concepts, including VR training and weapons training. So it’s a combination of like, yes, we’re fleshing out the world, but we’re also trying to make a nice way for you to have your hand held a little bit more. It’s still quite open, but if you follow the main breadcrumbs, you can learn all the different things that there are to do in the game through the story mode.
Ruben: So there’s kind of two layers of a story that’s about what is Super Animal World. How did it get to be the way it is? Why are all these cute looking animals shooting at each other? It’s answering some of those questions at the same time. It’s answering what can I do in this open hub world? What kinds of modes do I have to engage with and how can I be more successful by learning them?
Michael: You can do some of the quests on your own and you’re in the social hub the whole time. So even when you’re not doing the co-op specific quest, you’re kind of in that social hub world. You could also team up with two people and do it together.
Will you be adding to or replacing the current milestone system?
Michael: We do have a few additions to the milestones, but the biggest addition to all of it is the quests, because those quests, reward experience, Carl coins, and then some of the major ones also reward cosmetic items like the milestones did. So there’s quite a few of those.
Ruben: The structure is sort of like you go through this main branch of the story where you are given a tour of all the activities. Then as you go through, you unlock other branches that are specific to different activities, the fishing chain, the bug catching chain, and battle royal chain. As you do those, you can get cool cosmetics related to those NPCs that are giving those quests.
What were the biggest challenges integrating this contrasting experience to the battle royale segment?
Ruben: The main challenge actually ended up making these two tracks fit together. The goal was getting a better onboarding system for players, getting players to be introduced more gradually to all the different things there are to do in a way that didn’t feel overwhelming but still felt open. Finding that balance was a big challenge. At the same time trying to tell an overarching story that’s highly distributed. We don’t have one main character who’s going into one main class. We don’t know who you are, what character you’re playing as and how you see yourself. We don’t want to dictate that for you because player creativity is really important. One of my discoveries was that the main character of Super Animal World is Super Animal World. It’s the world itself. It’s like I said, how did this world get started?
How did it come to be the way it is today? Who are the different factions that hold it up and some of whom are trying to tear it down? The nice thing is that we have been doing environmental storytelling the whole time, planting the seeds for everything that you’re going to come across. There’s a lot of new material, but all of it builds on what was put down as we were laying down the maps, and also in our YouTube series, Super Animal Royal tonight, where we introduced a lot of the factions and ideas that are in the lore and the story. Now we’re taking things that were kind of implicit and that you had to discover your own and making them explicit, putting them into the mouth of all these 200 something characters. But it’s still not fully explicit because the characters are all unreliable narrators.
In other words, each character you talk to has their own perspective on what’s going on and what happened and what came before and what’s coming next, and who’s a good guy is and who the bad guy is. We don’t have a monolithic viewpoint here. It’s very quirky dialogue. They’re very quirky characters who have their own kind of parochial concerns. Like the dogs are mad because the bureaucracy is not working well. It gets into all these kind of minutia and each character you talk to each dog, each beaver, each person in the world has their own little mini story, and then some of them have bigger ones, like the ones that have quest chains.
What were your inspirations for the story? Animal Farm was mentioned in a press release, but is there any other works of fiction or games that influenced you?
Michael: Animal Farm is one, there’s definitely Orwellian inspiration for some of these. We really like the kind of absurdist dark humor and the two factions in the game that you meet throughout the story. It definitely draws a little bit of inspiration from that. The rebellion, we thought it was just kind of a fun little nod that it begins at Super Animal Farm since there’s not a ton of direct specific inspiration there, but the overall theme and this being this uprising of the animals has a lot of really nice parallels with that.
Ruben: We’re inspired by a lot of this sort of mid 20th century dystopian fiction like Animal Farm and 1984, but also by all kinds of science fiction. SAR is an absurdist humor. It’s kind of an absurd, humorous world, but also structurally is a sci-fi one. It’s a story of genetic hybrids, human animal hybrids who are created by a corporation in order to create a theme park, a travel destination for humans to come and interact with them. It goes wrong. The company pivots and creates a battle royale to try and recoup their losses. They use this cloning technology to basically create these infinite clones of you. Every time you die and respawn, you’re getting another clone created of you. Depending on your perspective, that’s either like, that’s either hopeful, oh, there’s always another me. Or it’s horrific, oh my God, you’re just killing me and replacing me with another clone.
So there are slight inspirations like Westworld or Jurassic Park or very clear inspirations Animal Farm. People often ask in the community, especially when they first joined, who’s the good guy? Who’s the bad guy? Lots of people in the community take their side. There are people who say it’s clearly the rebellion, people who say SAW. Maybe more naturally to think, oh, the rebels are the heroes, but when you get into the rebels, the rebels have their own rebel characters. Maybe it started with good intentions of freedom, but they end up with their own petty squabbles. They end up using their own dark tactics that are themselves unethical. Like Animal Farm, when the animals take over the farm, it’s not like the utopia commences, but a new kind of tyranny evolves. We’re playing with some of those themes of “is it even possible to have a sort of true utopia?”
What’s the roadmap for Super Animal Royale and Super Animal World?
Michael: We’ve been working on Super Animal World for almost three years now, so it’s been a long wait for the community because we were just building so much new stuff. We’re really excited after this to get back to quarterly releases. So every three months we’re going to be coming out with major new updates after this Super Animal World. It’s like the 2.0 for the game. It’s a new foundation to build on top of after this. While we were developing this, there were so many things that we still want to do that we have to bump to future updates. So 2.1 is coming after this. It has way too many things already listed that we still have to do after we finally get Super Animal World out the door. We have to decide what things make it into 2.1 and in 2.2. Suffice to say we’ll be improving and building upon all the stuff that’s in the new social hub in the future. We’ll be getting back to all the existing game modes and looking at doing new game modes. There’s definitely a lot that we’re going to be working on in 2026. For now it’s trying to get this out the door by the end of the year was just kind of a huge list for the team.
Ruben: We’ll be adding more quest and story content as well. One of the hardest things about the quest and story content was just creating a system to put that all in. Now that we have a system, we’ll be expanding on that as well. There’s a whole list of quests that I cut for time that are planned. So that side will also get more content over the coming updates.
Michael: Yeah, this has so much that’s new and a lot of it inherently has a lot of hooks to build new content on top of it. When you load into new modes, we’ve got this whole new mode pecker that happens in the world and definitely has slots to expand into the future so that you have this hub world that connects you to all the existing experiences and any future modes that we build.
Super Animal Royale is a free to play game with optional battle passes players can purchase. Can you tell us more about the monetization model in Super Animal World?
Michael: The game is still free to play and the expansion is free. There’s lots of free content in it. We’ll have a new animal pass that’s paid and also has its free tiers on the track, and then we’ll also have a new starter pack. So it’s kind of the same thing that we’ve been doing with previous new seasons of Super Animal Royale in terms of those new paid content, but the majority of it is free. Like before, all the past animal passes never expire. They go into an archive. There will be a new pass for this.
What new feature are you most proud of?
Michael: Maybe we have different answers based on what we worked on, but I think it’s fundamentally this new flow between being in a social hub and never having to go back to the main menu. Then going straight from that server into a game mode and being able to actually do fun stuff while you wait for the matchmaking and then seamlessly go back into the world again. That kind of new circle of life is what I’m most proud of and was also the most technically challenging, to take people from one type of server into another type of server and back.
Ruben: Yeah, I agree. I think we’ve used the term bolting a new game onto the old game a lot, but really what we did was we synthesized an old game with a new game. They’re intertwined in a way that feels natural. I’ve been playing it on our test server for months now, and going back to the live servers, it’s like, oh, I missed that. It makes me realize how nice the new loop is and how integrated it feels. So I think that’s a big accomplishment we didn’t know about. To me it feels like a world that’s alive now that you wander around and there’s just all sorts of things to discover. It feels like a living, breathing island. I think even more so when there’s servers full of players and not just a few of us on there testing. It’s that feeling of a living, breathing world with characters and things happening. I’m really proud we were able to add that aspect.
Michael: Yeah, it’s cool that even when there’s only a few of us on there testing, the sheer amount of NPCs and content makes it feel full. We’re really excited to see when all the players are actually in there too, how full it feels. We thought that was important because players already are always meeting new people, but they only have two minutes before each match to meet someone and potentially add them or not. So when they have this social hub and you can meet all sorts of people as you’re wandering around. We thought it was really important that you could send those people a friend invite regardless of which platform they’re playing on to make that easy.
Will you be adding in game text chat for the console versions? That’s been a highly requested feature for a while now.
Michael: Yes. Yes.
Ruben: So we are going to make some news right now or what?
Michael: Yeah, we haven’t actually said that anywhere yet. Haven’t confirmed it yet, but yes, that’s the confirmation.
Ruben: It’s been a shockingly tricky one to get.
Michael: It’s nice to finally have it. We’re interested to see what people think because all the different consoles have different levels of different types of text inputs. It’s nice to at least have that there now. We thought that was important when we’re building a social hub that everyone would be able to communicate.
Are you making any balance changes to the battle royale mode? Any plans to add new competitive modes?
Michael: We just posted on social media one of the new things that we’re adding. We added respawn tanks so that in duos and squads modes, you can revive teammates. So they’d get knocked down before and you could pick them back up, but if they were fully eliminated, they’d be gone. Now you can collect their DNA and there’s a few respawn tanks around the map, so you have an opportunity to try to revive them
It was always, that was a tough feature to consider. We’ve been considering it for a long time, and Super Animal Royale has very short, tight matches, so it was a little harder to do than in some of the other games. We think we found a good balance so we’ll see. We’ll keep iterating on it as we go as the community responds to it. I think it’s nice to just have something if your friend dies early in the match, that there’s still some reason for them to continue being engaged for the rest of it, even if it’s only a chance that their friends managed to revive them.
Super Animal Royale has been around for 7 years now. A lot of battle royale games have come and gone since then. What’s the secret to the game’s longevity?
Ruben: Stubbornness (laughs). No, I think that it’s getting back to the origins of Super Animal World. I think it’s what we’ve done and what we can do to foster a positive community that enjoys hanging out together, and we’re hoping to go farther with that with this update. I think that battle royals are social experiences. They’re things you do together with other people or against or together with other people depending on what mode you play. We are trying to cultivate a friendly, fun environment, which our moderators are really actively involved in our community team. That has helped us, weather a tough market. I also think that the fact that it’s a 2D top down game helps. I think we’re one of the only ones surviving who has that perspective and the short matches make it a little more accessible. So all those things have helped us to hang around, and I think Super Animal World‘s going to help us hang around even longer.
Any plans to bring Super Animal Royale to mobile or other platforms?
Michael: We’re definitely thinking about it. We would like to bring it to new platforms. No plans to announce right now, but now that Super Animal World is out the door, it definitely opens up to look at doing more things like that. We like to keep it cross play and cross save across all the platforms.
I think you’ll see some of that definitely in 2026. We are also kind of building some of the infrastructure for that into Super Animal World, and so some of that was just waiting on getting Super Animal World released. We have some fun ideas for how that can work now that we have the new social hub and everything.
It’s been global on PC since we first released, but we’re also launching it on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation in Asia for the first time, and so that’ll be exciting. That’s the one new region being added, this update.
What video games are you both currently playing?
Michael: Oh, man, I play all sorts of stuff. I like to just sample a lot of things as they’re coming out. So Keeper just came out, so I was playing some of that and it was really beautiful. I play a lot of Counterstrike, too, long term. That’s been a fun staple. Got a lot of friends that have been playing it since we were kids, so got a good group for that. Have you been playing anything interesting lately, Ruben?
Ruben: I mean, I wish I could say I was playing more games recently. We’ve been so busy getting this launched. I’ve been mostly making games, mostly testing SAW. I’m embarrassed to say a lot of games I’m playing are old. I just got Stray. I know this game’s like five years old or something.
Michael: Oh, I love Stray.
Ruben: Before I got overwhelmed, I was like two-thirds through Stray. I need to go back and finish it once we shipped this game. Then the other game I was playing is the one where you, it’s the, you take photographs and you can use the photographs with the chairman of the world. I can’t think of the name of the game right now. Do you know?
Michael: Yes. Oh, I know what you’re talking about.
Ruben: That was another game I was playing. I’ve been playing a little bit of the top down Zelda, where you play as Zelda with my daughter. But the truth is, this process of lifting this, it has been a huge, huge, huge challenge. I know if Michael brought it up, but there’s a novel’s worth of dialogue in this game that mostly was written this summer, so I have been locked down. But yeah, I like the indie kind of single player games I can just zone out to. I’m probably the worst competitive SAR player on the team. So I like to play more relaxing things when I’m not, I’m not doing SAR.
Michael: I’ve been playing Peak with friends, too, that is another good fun one. I like Nintendo games as well, so I’ve been playing Donkey Kong Bonanza.
Ruben: I really want to play that. I don’t have my Switch 2 yet, but that one is cool.
Michael: Pokémon Legends: Z-A I’ve been playing as well.
What’s your spirit animal?
Michael: Everyone on the team has an animal that’s their character in the world. It is not always the one that was like, oh, this is my favorite animal from beforehand. For me it’s the fox, the Super Fox in the game. That was the first mascot character that we locked down the design for, so I’m especially attached to the fox myself.
Ruben: I use the dog avatar because that’s the one that I play in the game that is the most similar to my actual voice, but not necessarily because I strongly identify with a donkey (laugh). The character/model that means the most to me is the Jennifer Dogna yellow lab. When we were designing the yellow lab, I had a yellow lab. She just died last year and she was very important to me. The model is somewhat based on Aretha, so I’m quite partial to the Dogna model.
What are your favorite animal puns?
Michael: We should ask Dukey Bear. We have a bot in our Discord called Dukey Bear, and that was from even before Early Access. Dukey Bear used to give out keys for the alpha and the beta play test. And then Dukey Bear also has a whole bunch of puns. You can type exclamation pun in the Discord and Dukey gives you a pun. So we actually added Dukey in the Super Animal World, and Dukey has a pun bar.
Ruben: Dukey’s pun bar where he only serves puns.
Michael: So you can go get a pun from him. He has a very large library of pun.
Ruben: I don’t know what my favorite one is. It’s so funny. I’m writing them all day long, and then when you put me on the spot, I can’t think of any.
Any plans to update the physical merchandise store?
Michael: Yes, we do have some new merch planned. There will be some stuff at launch. We do have a bit of a challenge right now with the tariffs in the U.S. so that’s been one thing holding back new items. I’m hopeful that that gets resolved because it makes shipping into the U.S.challenging. So we’re not currently able to do that, but hopefully soon that’ll ease up and we’ll get more merch items into the U.S and the rest of the world.
Any words you’d like to share with the Super Animal Royale community?
Ruben: I’ll say thanks for inspiring, especially the historic community, and the legacy community for sticking with us. We know it’s been a long way. We know people have been agitated to varying degrees about how long this has taken, but I mean, a lot of people are super kind and have given us space, but we totally get it. We have been, like I said, we’ve been working hard late nights for months trying to get this ready. We’re so excited for you to finally have it. We’re also very thankful that you helped inspire what we tried to create, and we truly hope that it serves that purpose and it meets that need that we think is there for this community, which has been so great to us.
Michael: Yeah, I really hope that that comes through and just mostly excited to see everyone’s reactions. Hopefully it feels like it’s been worth the wait and that we’re really hoping that this sets a new foundation for lots of stuff to build on. We’re excited also to just see what the community says since normally we’re releasing updates more frequently and constantly building community feedback into it. This has been such a long project. We’re kind of excited to also get back to just iterating quickly with the community and seeing how they react to all the stuff that’s new.
The Super Animal World content update will be released globally on December 9th. You can find additional information on the game’s website.
