The story of Planet of Lana is the story of triumph over adversity. But it’s also one of naivety. The developers themselves admit they had no clue what they were doing at first.
The 2023 platformer goes against almost all standard guidance. Swedish developer Wishfully Studios didn’t start small with its first ever game, as so many advise, instead going straight in with a cinematic adventure that took six years to complete. They couldn’t have chosen a more over-saturated genre to pitch to publishers, either. As 11-Bit Studios’ Chris Wigley told GamesIndustry.biz recently, “If you make a great platformer and it takes off, it can do amazingly well, but there’s so many of them that it’s extremely difficult to stand out.”
On top of that, the developer’s first demo was woefully inadequate, falling far short of what would typically be required for a successful pitch. As Wishfully co-head and creative director Adam Stjärnljus explained in a talk at Nordic Game in May, it simply consisted of the main character plodding back and forth.
“It felt sluggish,” he explained during the talk. “And on top of that, we also had a very unrealistic production plan. So we were basically slaughtered by publishers.”
“We had no idea what we were doing,” added game director and writer Klas Martin Eriksson. “We were just like, ‘Look, she’s moving’.”
Stjärnljus said that they did “hundreds” of pitches and received “hundreds” of rejections. “Some of them were kind ‘Nos’ and some of them were not so kind. But it was really, really hard. It sucks to be told no.”
Yet they kept going. All it took was for one person to say yes.
(And three years of unpaid work.)
Time for something completely different
“It was very naive, looking back,” Stjärnljus tells GamesIndustry.biz. “But if we hadn’t been naive, then we wouldn’t be here now. So it’s a mix of stupidity and just trying to build something you care about, I guess.”
Stjärnljus comes from a background in film and advertising, and together with Eriksson and lead game designer Dan Faxe, he ran the film production company Makers Only in Stockholm, creating corporate films and animated commercials. Eriksson really wanted to make was feature films, but “commercials just seemed like an easy way to get paid to do the film stuff.”
In around 2017, Stjärnljus found he was getting tired of making adverts. “In the beginning, it was very exciting doing these commercials, and the first time you had a commercial on TV, it was huge. But then as the years passed, it was more and more a job to pay the rent.”
Eriksson says that he put huge amounts of time and effort into the commercial work, but started questioning whether that passion was misplaced. “I was shooting something in the Philippines and I was just like, oh my God, this is so amazing, I get to travel. I’m on this set and people listen to what I say, and it’s great. But then at the end of the day, it was an ad for a denture adhesive. If you’re going to get burnt out, you may as well get burnt out doing something that you really believe in.”
Stjärnljus was determined to try something new, reckoning his skills in animation and film could translate to the games industry. “I really wanted to make games, and to see what could happen if I took everything I learned and actually had something that I cared about,” he says. In his early thirties, not long after the birth of his second child, he made the leap.
Working on Planet of Lana meant working for nothing, at least at first. Stjärnljus says living in Sweden made it possible. “We have social security here. I had a wife that supported me. So there were a lot of things that enabled me personally to spend a lot of time [on Planet of Lana] during these three years without a salary.” A Swedish game accelerator program helped, too. “They could pay us to go to conferences to pitch,” he explains. “We didn’t get any funding for actual development, but we could get funding to put the game in front of publishers.”
Stjärnljus says he was determined enough to see the whole thing through, even if it meant making the whole game himself, but he quickly realised that Planet of Lana “was going to be immensely better with more people.” He and his wife invested all of their savings – around €20,000 ($23,000) – to pay for a freelance animator and part-time programmer.
The starting point
Before almost anything else, Planet of Lana existed as an image Stjärnljus created on Photoshop, showing Lana and her creature companion Mui staring at a black, spider-like robot in an idyllic green field under blue skies. He was inspired by games like Another World, Limbo, Inside, and Oddworld, as well as by Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away, Ponyo, and My Neighbour Totoro – and that initial image did a lot of heavy lifting. It was sufficiently inspiring to attract the attention of Takeshi Furukawa, who composed the score for The Last Guardian, and who came on board to write the music for Planet of Lana.
But although the image made waves on social media, it was far from enough to convince publishers. “The vision was good, but what they saw was we didn’t have a realistic plan,” says Stjärnljus. The timeline for completing a vertical slice was hopelessly optimistic, and all they had to show so far was a test of Lana running back and forth. “Then it was the realization that, okay, this doesn’t work. Should we just scrap this now?”
By that point, all the savings had gone. But rather than quitting, Stjärnljus realised he needed more people to make the vision a reality, and decided to form a studio – Wishfully. None of the employees were paid at first, but everyone had a stake in the company.
Eriksson says Stjärnljus’s energy is what convinced him to join. “I could just tell that you guys were so serious about it from the beginning,” he says. “It’s like, okay, this is something that Adam really wants to make happen. That in combination with just that first image, and all the ideas that evoked in me.”
The new plan was to spend a year creating a vertical slice, which was finished in early 2020, and found an appreciative audience at Xbox. “We got an exclusivity deal with them,” explains Stjärnljus. “That gave us a bit of money so we could hire some more people.”
“I guess they were convinced by our vertical slice and the vision we had at the time,” he continues. “But I mean, it was a long process there as well. And to be honest, I think there were one or two people at Xbox that fell in love with the project.”
“They probably had meetings saying, ‘Wait a minute, these guys are quite inexperienced, will they really pull this off?’ And I guess they made a leap of faith.”
Getting Xbox on board was the turning point, he says. “It was very obvious that it opened up more discussions, that went further than they had before, with several different publishers.” Around eight months later, Wishfully signed with Thunderful, and two and a bit years on from that, Planet of Lana was finally released to the world.
Hard-earned success
The game debuted to glowing reviews. The first to emerge was from Edge magazine, which awarded the game 9/10, although the print deadline caused a minor conniption. “It was kind of funny, because we had an embargo on reviewers,” recalls Stjärnljus. “And Edge obviously is a printed magazine, and it came out a week earlier, so they had to put it online. And our publisher didn’t know, and they thought they were going to respect the embargo.”
Following Planet of Lana’s successful launch in 2023, a sequel followed in 2025, as well as conversions to Switch and PlayStation, along with a well-received premium mobile port. “It’s a really good port,” says Stjärnljus. “It plays really well, and we’re getting really, really good reviews.”
But what of the future? “We definitely want to keep building on the Planet of Lana universe,” says Stjärnljus – and part of that plan involves Hollywood. As reported by Game File, a Planet of Lana movie is being pitched to film studios and streamers by Story Kitchen, the same company behind the Sonic the Hedgehog films and Tomb Raider TV series, among many other game-related projects. Amber Midthunder is set to star, and Pixar veteran Angus MacLane is also attached.
Stjärnljus says that Story Kitchen’s Dmitri M. Johnson initially got in touch via X after the first game was released. “They’re super excited and have been from the start,” he says of the firm. “They get it, that’s the thing. We feel that it’s really in the right hands.”
“You never know, of course, what it becomes in the end. But so far it’s been a great collaboration.” He can’t say much more about the film right now, except that there’s “a lot of exciting stuff happening around it.”
“I really love how unpretentious it is, coming from film”
Klas Martin Eriksson
In a way, Stjärnljus and Eriksson have come full circle, from films to games and back again – and Eriksson might finally get his wish of making a feature film (or at least being involved with one). But he has been impressed with his sojourn in the games industry. “I really love how unpretentious it is, coming from film,” he says. “It’s not about cred.”
The film industry, by contrast, is “very auteur driven,” he says. “Game making has to be collaborative by nature. I’m not saying film isn’t – it takes a village to make a film. But… everyone’s so nice [in the games industry], you know what I mean? It’s a big difference.”
“The community between indie studios is really, really nice,” confirms Stjärnljus. Having come into the industry from outside, he thought that people might look down on him, thinking he didn’t know what he was doing. “But I didn’t experience that much at all. It was very much like we’re all trying to make good games and help each other out.”
Almost a decade after making their big, risky leap into video games, with two successful launches behind them, the pair have gone from unfledged outsiders to Hollywood hopefuls. It took nine years but, Stjärnljus says with a chuckle, “now I think we can say that we are experienced.”
