Wondy's Journey ?? A journey of collective curiosity

At Wonder Makers, we believe in the power of curiosity.

Given the right environment, exciting things can happen.

But curiosity needs time and space and a bit of freedom to be explored.

Playgrounds

So, every week, we hold a “Playground” — a 3-hour session where everyone is free to explore whatever sparks their curiosity, be it a new skill, a tool, or just playing around.

We’ve been doing this for over a year, and lots of great, creative things have come from it.

Recently, we noticed something — lots of us kept exploring the same things: 3D, animation, gaming, and immersive design.

Perhaps it’s because of the recent Wonder Games projects we worked on, or maybe it’s just where design is heading. Probably, it’s a bit of both.

What if we combined all our curiosities into one project?

And that’s how Wondy's Journey came to be!

Wondy's Journey

We decided to create Wondy's Journey — an interactive world, where you can explore and learn more about Wonder Makers and our creative projects.

The goal is to design a project that bridges our curiosities and aims to:

1. Design our own game: Just for the fun of it.
2. Explore and experiment: A dive into 3D, animation and immersiveness to see what the possibilities are and what we’re capable of.
3. Showcase our creations: Use this space to show you some cool playground creations from the past year.

Behind the process

Given the nature of our work, our creations often remain behind the curtains. However, with Wondy's Journey, we want to share the entire process as we develop it.

And that’s exactly what we’re about to do in these upcoming series.

Make this project transparent by sharing both our big and small decisions, the lessons we’ve learned, the tools we’ve employed, and more.

And, of course, we always welcome your questions and insights.

Ready? Then let’s dive into the design side of things.

Piecing it together

Our initial concept was relatively straightforward:

Create an engaging game environment where users interact and learn about our Playgrounds.

And it all started with design and creative explorations.

Creative exploration

ENVIRONMENT

We chose to replicate an environment we all know too well — a creative professional’s desk, cluttered with random items just like ours.

VISUAL STYLIZATION

Our brand identity guided our choices — dark, minimalistic, clean but with an exciting twist (or as we like to call it — the 4th element). Combine technology and creativity into a detailed yet simple design.

CHARACTER EXPLORATION

We hit a roadblock here. Object or entity? Inanimate or animated? The jury’s still out on this one.

First design steps and stumbles

Once the basics were clear, we started diving into the actual creation.

Which led to the first visual concepts of how the environment and the game could look like.

Which led to the first visual concepts of how the game environment could look like.

LESSON #1

I started modeling our initial assets in Blender, but I stumbled upon a classic pitfall: neglecting to work in real-world scale. This oversight likely contributed to the physics issues we encountered in our online iteration after.

–– Lukas, Art Director (- who knows better now)

That’s all from our first week, and we’ve only talked about design so far.

But there’s more on the horizon.

Next, we’re going to talk about how we approached technology and mechanics.

Stay tuned!

Collaborators:

Luká? Hubka & Natálie Pleská [Design stuff]

Gabriel Uhlí? & Kry?tof ?erník [Tech stuff]

Filip Vasulin [Project ownership]

Early access invite

Eager for a preview? Let us know in the comments and we’ll notify you when the beta version is live.