How a hardcore survival game morphed into an open world town-builder where you play as a corgi mech pilot

You wouldn't know it by looking at Animalkind, a cozy and colorful town-builder where you play as a cute little corgi driving a mech, but it got its start in a different genre altogether. The game about building houses for a bunch of adorable forest animals was originally a hardcore survival game.

I met with Steven Jian, CEO of Uncommon Games, at GDC in March because I was curious how the game went from hardcore to cottagecore during development.

"At the time, we were super into survival games...