Adorable Adventures with Steven ter Heide

Adorable Adventures is the new cosy exploration game being developed by Wild Sheep Studios. In the game, you take control of Boris, a young boar, who’s on a journey to reunite with his family. One thing that catches the eye as soon as the trailer starts is how well the team have captured not only the forestry environment but also the movements of Boris himself. 

I met up with Steven ter Heide, the Creative Director at Wild Sheep Studio, to find out more about his background in game development, the scent mechanic, why the game is narrated and much more! 

To get started, I was interested to find out a little about Steven and his background in game development.  

Hi, I’m Steven ter Heide, Creative Director at Wild Sheep Studio. I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years now, starting at Guerrilla Games in Amsterdam (where I was born, Amsterdam, not Guerrilla).

 My first shipped title was Killzone: Liberation for the PSP, followed by several Killzone games, RIGS VR, and Horizon Zero Dawn. While I loved my time at Guerrilla, I felt the pull to return to smaller teams where I could be more hands-on and closer to the craft. That’s what brought me to Wild Sheep Studio.

Can you give some backstory to Wild Street Studios and its team? 

Wild Sheep Studio was founded in 2013. One of the original founders is still here: Celine Tellier, the CEO and Art Director. The studio became known with Wild, a game that was announced by PlayStation, but unfortunately this game was cancelled in 2023. We would have loved to see it come out, but that is not up to us anymore. 

In order to survive, we went through a difficult period where we had to say goodbye to a large part of the team, and we regrouped as a smaller, tighter team of 12.

We have a great group of people and found a good way of working together to make original games. The first game we officially shipped was a co-development on a VR rhythm game called Maestro, where you play as the conductor of an orchestra. Now, with Adorable Adventures, we’re building something personal, something of us, using tools like Unreal Engine and Blender to stay nimble and creative.

Moving on to Adorable Adventures, can you give a more detailed explanation of the plot of the game?

In Adorable Adventures you play as Boris, a young boar who has been separated from his family after a forest fire. 

Alone and overwhelmed by the scents of the forest, Boris must learn to understand the world through his nose, gradually focusing on what truly matters. The story is narrated by a Forest Guard, who uses Boris’s journey as a way to reflect on life in the forest and what it means to grow up.

A boar in the title role is a rare and original sight. What inspired the team to make a game about a boar? 

One of the people on our team also works as a volunteer at a wildlife rescue organisation. In the surroundings of Montpellier (where we are located), there are a lot of forests and a lot of wild boars. We had the opportunity to meet and play with some young wild boars, and once we did that, there was no going back! They are so resilient, playful and curious. A perfect video game hero. 

We know that Adorable Adventures is a cosy exploration game; could you elaborate on what players will be doing in the game?

So we want a game that is relaxing, with no danger of dying or bad things happening. Unless, of course, it is you causing a bit of mischief. The main idea is to explore a fictional national park (inspired by a nearby national park called the Cevennes). As a baby boar, you have some expected abilities: a delicate nose to smell things, strength to push over things and speed to get away quickly. Apart from smelling and identifying things, we have a range of activities that are perfectly suited to being a boar. We are still prototyping some of these, so I do not want to spoil anything just yet! 

On top of that, there are quests and a collection challenge to complete, which are captured in a notebook that belongs to the forest guard narrator.

One of the biggest mechanics is smell. The trailer heavily shows Boris following scents. Where did this idea come from? 

The first thing that comes to mind when you see a wild boar is its nose; it is iconic. Their sense of smell is amazing, and they can find truffles and all sorts of stuff that other animals just can’t find. So it felt pretty natural to use that as a key feature.

Having recently been the victim of pollen allergies again, it reminds us how there is lots of stuff floating through the air and entering our nose. So that gave us ideas for visuals, as well as being inspired by the old cartoons where characters are almost carried by the odours they smell. The scent system became a way to reveal an unseen world, one that Boris must learn to navigate, just like a child learning to make sense of their surroundings.

So we started building layers of scent: the idea that some scents must be ignored to access others, going deeper and deeper. To be honest, it’s a unique use of a scent mechanic, and it’s the core gameplay feature. The rest is just variety: what if a scent was so faint it barely lingered or so strong it overwhelmed everything else? It wasn’t too hard to imagine. The real challenge is how to make it understandable for all types of players.

This scent mechanic sounds quite involved and intricate, so was this a hard mechanic to implement?

An easy first step to implementing the smell system was to use Unreal’s navigation mesh tools to find the path from a location to a given target, like we usually do for AI character movement. But to make it work well in the game and be fun to use as a player, there was a lot more to do.

On the path creation side of things, we have given the trail a more organic shape, creating a sense of volatility and letting the player wander while having to follow the trail. We also make the trail move if the source is moving or gracefully change shape when players interact with it. While, of course, taking care of bugs, like trails going through objects or terrain, especially when it is changing its shape dynamically. 

There is more to do on the logic side, but those are big tasks to make it work. But there is also the visual side, making it look nice and making interactions feel rewarding. Then there is the authoring side to give designers the control they need to adjust ranges of scents or priorities, etc. It basically requires all disciplines working together on the feature.

Most things evolve from their original point; as they get worked on, new elements and ideas are born, and I asked Steven if this was the case with the scent mechanic. 

Well, there is a lot of variety in the mechanic when we brainstormed it. But as you start to play with a first prototype and you build some situations, new ideas start coming. So now there are smells that are inside of other things or smells that are intermittent. It is fun to come up with situations where the smell system is pretty robust, so I imagine we will still come up with some more strange situations during development.

Steven has mentioned the Forest Guard, who narrates the story through the game. Why did you feel it was important to include this feature? 

We wanted the animal to stay an animal and not give it a voice or behave like a human. But we still wanted to have a fun, touching story about growing up and life in a forest. So instead, the story is told from the perspective of this forest guard. Much like a story you would read to your children, he guides you through the quests, narrating your actions and creating a relaxed atmosphere. He’s not omnipresent, nor is he always up to date with Boris’ latest shenanigans. So at times we can hear him in the distance (he is part of this world after all!), and sometimes he will continue to tell Boris’ story to park visitors. It is a fun way to get you into the story while being respectful of the world it takes place in.

Visually, Adorable Adventures looks incredible. The team has managed to capture a serene forest perfectly. How much time has been spent on perfecting this?

We are very fortunate to be located in a very rich natural landscape. So we do lots of hikes to nearby forests, mountains and caves. This gives us a feel for the environments we want to create, from the sounds to the smells and the visuals. 

Combine that with technology like photogrammetry (3D models from photos) and photometry (texture generation from scans), and we can start to recreate the scenes that we have imagined for the game. Our goal is not to recreate an exact place but rather how it lives inside our heads, so we take some artistic freedom in how we compose our scenes and attempt to recreate how we felt when we were there.

Still, having all this technology and models requires a lot of work to make sure they all work together in a cohesive way, finding out that we are missing some key elements that bring it together. These we then make by hand, like, for example, trees or vegetation or branches. 

To test all of this, we started with just one scene, a ‘beautiful corner’, as we call it. This took us a couple of weeks to make, and now that we have figured out the style, have a working asset bank and know how to compose the scenes, we manage to go a lot faster. The latest scene you have seen in the gameplay trailer took us about two weeks, for example. 

But those are ‘just’ the 3D models; we also need other elements to make the forest feel alive and insert the gameplay. We do this in the form of cute butterflies fluttering around, leaves falling as Boris strolls through the bushes, or tiny flakes of dust in the air illuminated by the warm sun. The VFX also must communicate the gameplay. In our case, we visualise the scents with a particle system to help players find their way through the forest.

And last but not least, we use effects to add interactions. When Boris uses his olfactory sense, the scent particles fly to his nose. And when he jumps into a pile of leaves or whirls around like a little tornado, the leaves are whirled around wildly. The latter is not necessarily important for the gameplay, but it brings childlike joy and transforms a “static backdrop” into a believable game world.

I was captured by Boris’s movement in the trailer. He moves so naturally, and I love his animations, especially when sitting. How hard was it to capture these movements?

We want to create a memorable character with Boris. So how he looks, moves and sounds is super important. For animation, the key lies in observation first, then caricature. We spent some time studying how baby boars behave, their movements, unique rhythms, and how they respond to their environment. Careful observation builds a visual understanding of how to bring Boris to life.

All this groundwork feeds into our storytelling, allowing us to exaggerate and stylise the animation with purpose. For example, Boris’s behaviour must always reflect his personality. He’s adorable, but also strong-willed and a bit rebellious. So, even something as simple as sitting had to feel deliberate. Boris doesn’t just plop down; he chooses to sit. That intention is what makes him feel alive. It’s a good example of how animation is about striking the right balance between strong intent and believable motion. But the keywords are observe, then caricature.

Sound design in the trailer also captivated me, with birds chirping, wind rustling leaves and hardly any music. It really gave off a warm atmosphere that I just wanted to explore. What can you tell us about the sound in the game and the difficulties in capturing this atmosphere?

Sound is very important to our creative process. We have two passionate sound designers and a music composer. They try to achieve the highest level of realism and recapture the emotion we felt in certain locations. So we want to use sounds we’ve recorded ourselves from our surroundings. 

Many ambient layers were captured locally, and some of Boris’s sounds were actually made using recordings of a real wild boar piglet (Céline is an animal lover; we make the most of it!). And all the footsteps and lots of foley were recorded in our sound studio. We’re lucky to have a small garden as part of the studio, and our sound designers aren’t shy about getting their hands dirty to gather exactly what they need for their recordings; it keeps everyone happy!

Lastly, our composer Christophe Héral has been a long-time collaborator. For this project, we intentionally chose to keep the music subtle in order to preserve the organic, relaxing atmosphere. Christophe beautifully embraced this approach, adding just the right poetic touches to the soundscape. We want players to feel like they’re truly in the forest, not just seeing it, but feeling its embrace.

Nothing comes easily, and I appreciate the game is still in development, but I wondered if you’ve come up against any hurdles that you’ve had to overcome at all? 

Sure, there are hurdles everywhere, and it is part of what makes the development rewarding. A big part is about learning how Unreal works and what we can use for the game and what we need to change. There are always surprises where systems are clearly made for a certain type of game. Movement, for example, is very different for a quadruped than a biped, so all of a sudden you have to rethink the inverse kinematics (that, for example, make sure feet are nicely planted on uneven ground). 

Or more conceptual hurdles, like making sure plants we want to smell stand out but at the same time still have purely decorative plants also. Or how about that super nice rock that we photoscanned but that doesn’t allow for good gameplay because the ledges are too uneven? Hurdles everywhere, every day! But we would not have it any other way.

I gave some space for Steven to tell us about the game that we haven’t covered. 

You covered a lot with great questions. All I could think of was to say that we are super happy to be making this game in our own way. In a way we see ourselves a bit in Boris: resilient, playful, curious and just a bit rebellious.

I know I am already ready to help Boris to be reunited with his family, so when can we expect the game to release, and will it have a demo? 

There will be a demo for sure! As far as the release date goes, we want to make sure we get to a certain point in development before we are ready to commit to a date. In the meantime, people are welcome to follow along with our development. We release videos and updates pretty regularly on social channels, and where possible, we try to answer questions.

Ending on a fun question, what one word would you use to describe Adorable Adventures?

Adorable (French for Adorable!)

Many thanks to Steven for his time and for suppling the featured pictures. I found it fascinating learning about the development of the game, and it has only served to build my excitement for Adorable Adventures! 

As Steven mentioned, you can keep up to date with the development of the game on their YouTube channel; please give the team a follow on BlueSky, and, most importantly, if you have liked the look of Adorable Adventures, then please go and wishlist the game on Steam.