Last week, we had the opportunity to sit down and have a quick chat with Sebastian Sehr, Co-Founder & Developer at Toppluva about their latest title, Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands.

1. How important was your vision of the game to be an on-the-go experience and how excited are you that it has made its way onto the Nintendo Switch?
   We decided early on that we wanted to strip the game of menus, tutorials, and any kind of interruptions from actual skiing. And we have also kept the challenges in the game pretty short. They usually take less than a minute to complete, but perhaps 10 tries to perfect :). So we think it’s a really good fit with the portable Nintendo Switch.
2. The way the snow interacts with the player as they cut through the fresh powder is mesmerising. What this the most difficult aspect of the game to achieve in development?
   Good observation! The snow-layer on the mountains was one of the first things we focused on when starting developing the game, and it’s really a central feature of the game. It’s unique in that every mark in the snow remains, like ski tracks, little rolling snowballs, avalanches, and footsteps from animals. Making this snow pretty, believable, and optimized has definitely been one of the trickiest things we’ve developed in the game.
3. I have been advised that this game began development during recovery from a skiing accident. I hope it wasn’t too serious and is behind you now, but did you ever consider having an Easter egg in the game by having your name appear randomly when you crash in the game?
   Haha! We missed adding that, but we have sprinkled the mountains in the game with references to things we’ve heard and experienced during ski trips to the Alps when we grew up.
4. As this game was developed by three brothers, was the multiplayer side of the game inspired by a competitive sibling childhood perhaps?
   Haha! It’s been a fun feature to add as we often got together to test during development, and yes, it does get quite competitive then. Luckily, I (Sebastian), designed most of the multiplayer challenges so I had a lot of secret shortcuts to exploit when needed.
5. Can you tell me who has the most gold completions of challenges in-game between Viktor, Sebastian, or Alex and if that is a bragging right for them.
   All three of us can brag about having completed every single challenge and trial in the game during test play, perhaps multiple times even. But we still have left to arrange an official, recorded competition to finally settle who is the best among us 🙂
6. Being from Australia, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve ever seen snow. This is such a beautiful experience in the game on the mountainsides, are you happy to share that feeling with other people who may not have experienced the slopes in real life.
   Yes, we are! As we’ve tried to create a vivid mountain world filled with every little detail we can remember from our own ski trips, you do wonder how it’s received by players from very different countries. And ever since the release of the first beta, we’ve been surprised by the unexpected places we get feedback from, like Indonesia, and the South of India.
7. This game has received a lot of love as you have continued to evolve and add more to it over time. Is there a desire to make this an ongoing development project or would you like that to carry over to a sequel/new game?
   We’ve worked on this game for a lot of years now, and depending on the reception we might add a mountain or two more in a future update. But we are also getting keen on starting on something new. Perhaps a sequel where we fit all the ideas that didn’t make it into this game. But it’s not decided yet:)

Thanks again to Sebastian for having a chat with us. If you’d like to find out more about Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands, check out the gameplay trailer below or head over to: http://www.toppluva.com/GrandMountainAdventure/index.html