Almost two years after its initial release, Hello Kitty Island Adventure is finally available on Nintendo Switch and PC. The cozy Sanrio-themed game was previously an Apple Arcade exclusive, and the Switch port in particular had been a hotly-requested addition since the game first came out. Since it began, the title has received consistent updates, with new content coming to the game every three to five weeks.

The Apple Arcade version of Island Adventure released to rave reviews, surprising fans of the genre and IP by bucking expectations in several ways. Though many thought the title would be more or less be an Animal Crossing-style game reskinned as Sanrio, its puzzles, dozens of hours of story, and frequent additions of things like events and characters set it apart. Even now, following the new ports, developers are far from done with the game - there’s still a roap of updates spanning at least a year, and the team is listening closely to fan for all of them.

Screen Rant interviewed Chelsea Howe, the Chief Product Officer at developer Sunblink, this week to discuss the porting process, exciting future updates coming to the game, and how far the title has come since our last chat about Hello Kitty Island Adventure at SGF.

The Hello Kitty Island Adventure Update Process

The Highs & Lows Of Adding New Content & Bringing The Game To Switch

Screen Rant: It is the eve of the Switch release. Are you excited?

Chelsea Howe: I am so excited. People have been asking for this game on Switch since the moment we announced it was going to be on Arcade, so to have that payoff a little shy of two years later is pretty fantastic.

You guys release updates a really impressive amount, I think you said you aim for every three to five weeks. Since the game was released, which like you said has been almost two years, what updates did you find seemed to be most impactful for players, and has that influenced your thinking with updates moving forward?

Chelsea Howe: Yeah, absolutely. We love our community, we love their , and they're certainly not shy about telling us what they love, or less than love, about the game updates that come out. Since launch, we just released 2.3, so that's 13 major updates, and then a whole bunch of event updates that we've done in the meantime.

One thing that we find universally exciting to players are the new quest lines, and new story. People love the Sanrio characters, and quests are an opportunity for them to get more of that fun dialogue, to get more of the characterization, and they just love doing the quests. Since launch, we've drastically increased the amount of quests that we're putting out each update.

The other thing that is just a no-brainer is new areas. This is an open world adventure game, so, of course, anytime we give them a new piece of the world to explore and make their own, players are absolutely delighted.

Some of the things that surprised us was we try to do quality of life updates every update, but there were a few updates where we took a step back and, instead of releasing major new features, we just did some quality of life features, and we didn't think those were going to perform as well, and they actually drastically over-performed our expectations.

People loved the world becoming a little bit friendlier, a little bit easier to use. There was a time when we just introduced filtering for the inventory and people went bonkers for that. We've also done a bunch of improvements to how you can teleport around and communicate with your friends, do a lot of the daily grind stuff. Anything that falls under grind alleviation, when we release that, players are obviously very, very excited.

On the development side of updates, is there any particular type, like new quest lines or new areas, that is particularly more difficult or fun for you guys to work on?

Chelsea Howe: New areas - they are both the most challenging, because it requires coordination across every group in the studio, but they're also by far the most rewarding. When we introduce a new area, we usually have to pair it with a new character. Whenever we have a new character, we introduce a new key resource into the economy. Whenever we introduce a new resource into the economy, we have to have really interesting ways to sync it.

We try to introduce a major new functionality with a new area. For instance, in Merry Meadows you got flowers, and obviously that was this super big deep system. With City Town, we were able to get in the Imagination Cafe and this idea of being able to use ingredients a lot more creatively and make a bunch of custom outputs that you can then use to decorate or whatnot.

A new area is a huge, huge endeavor. That's why we can't come out with them too often, but the team just loves working on them, and we love seeing the happiness in the community when they do release.

When we spoke at SGF, you mentioned how the game had a two-year roap ahead of it. Obviously we've gone through about seven months of that two years at this point, but are you able to give any insights or sneak peeks into what that roap is looking like for you guys now?

Chelsea Howe: Basically, the more people are playing and enjoying, we just keep on extending that. It gets fuzzier the further out you go, but we definitely have big things on the horizon. We've got a few new characters that folks are going to see, at least one coming up in the next six-month period. Alongside a new character, there'll be some interesting and quirky new little areas that we're introducing. We just released City Town, and so we're focusing more on investing in City Town for the updates as opposed to releasing an entirely brand-new area.

But there is a mystery involved in City Town, and we do hope that players will get that pay off, either late this year, probably early next year, depending on how much we want to put into City Town. Initially we thought that we were going to unlock the rest of the island much earlier this year. However, once we released City Town, people were really, really invested and were like, "I want things in all of these storefronts. I want to have more mechanics within the city, I want..."

We figured that it would be worth it to just take time and really flesh out the feeling of that city, solidify it as its own space separate from what's happening on Friendship Island, and we've had a lot of fun doing that. You saw the first new storefront just last week with our 2.3 update. We introduced the Piano Plush Pals, so you get the opportunity to go in and make really, really cute stuffed animals that you can then customize. That's one of several storefronts that we're starting to think about, and that will be coming up again in that next fuzzy six month period.

When it came to the Switch port itself, what were the trickiest parts of bringing that to fruition? Was it just working out bugs between OSs or were there other challenges you didn't necessarily expect?

Chelsea Howe: The good news is that we have to a very, very broad range of devices on Arcade. Usually, going to - especially a handheld platform - you always have to think about performance, optimization, memory, all of those fun nitty-gritty things. That was an order of magnitude more complicated because we were introducing updates on Arcade in real time.

Usually, a lot of the ways that you optimize is by chunking things into different groups and into different optimized structures. However, since we're constantly adding more stuff to that, the team really struggled with figuring out how to compartmentalize and optimize Switch as we were continuing development on Arcade. I would say that was the standout challenge.

The other thing was that we had been deg for devices that were broadly touched, right? The percentage of people who were playing on Arcade with controller or keyboard and mouse was quite low. Obviously, that's totally different on Switch. We basically fully redid our UI interactions schemas.

We wanted controller to feel 100% first class, to be shining in its own right. We wanted Switch gameplay to feel super intuitive, super natural. That required months of going back through all of our UIs, which hadn't been made in the most extensible way, and having to revisit that and make them able to really ensure a positive experience on Switch.

The Power Of The Hello Kitty Community

How Player Is Key In Shaping The Game's Future

In of updates since the game has come out, have you had - not necessarily in how the community reacted to it or anything like that, but just you personally - have you had a favorite update for whatever reason?

Chelsea Howe: I love the flower system. It was one of the big features that I pushed. I've, since childhood, been pretty obsessed with any sort of breeding mechanic, where there's colors that you can mix and patterns that you can shove in there. I just love it. When that came out in Merry Meadows and when I saw people start to get really into it, when I started to get really into it, I just had an absolute blast.

I love getting to start each day going in and seeing what new flowers bloomed and if I got any of the rare crossbreeds that I was hoping for. That's my personal delight. Then, of course, when we finally released Milk, and Milk came to the game after over a year of anticipation, that was really exciting for me personally as a Cinnamoroll fanatic, but also to see the community get that payoff.

We have talked a lot before about the power of the community and how their reactions and suggestions and the super active Discord all have a big impact on how the game is shaped, and you mentioned a bit about how seeing their reactions to stuff like UI updates has really changed your focus sometimes. But I'm curious if there have been any instances that stand out to you of community suggestions where it's like, "Oh, we never would've thought to input that into the game," and then you're like, "Oh wait, should we? That sounds great."

Chelsea Howe: There's rarely something that we haven't at least thought tangentially about, just because obviously we spend usually sometimes more than 40 hours a week thinking about this and having to play through it. I think one of the things that the community's brilliant about is just giving us additional creative ideas. We really love seeing their suggestions for clothing, or regions, or new avatar types, new areas. That's something that we just don't know, right?

Yes, I think a polar bear avatar would be super cute, but that's very different from seeing a Discord community posting their own fan-drawn examples of what these different avatar types could look like. We did our poll when we were releasing new mermaid tails where we were like, "What do you guys love?" We couldn't have predicted at all what wound up being first place, so I think getting their aesthetic and creative input has been incredibly, incredibly helpful.

We've got those major innovations on the horizon, and the launch of Switch actually represents a chance for us to take a deep breath and look at the horizon again, instead of looking at that milestone. - Chelsea Howe

How do you guys foresee that community involvement evolving now that it's coming to Switch and it's going to broaden the game up to so many more people?

Chelsea Howe: We're both terrified and ecstatic, I guess. Because there is something that's been nice about a community that is big but not overwhelmingly so. You see familiar faces there, we've gotten to know individuals, and I hope that that continues, even with this influx of new folks. We anticipate that once the Switch launches we'll get a bunch of those kind of UX and quality of life requests, just because, again, it's a new interface, it's a new mode of interaction.

Also, a lot of the early game stuff. We got to the point where what we were hearing was always about the new updates, and so it was interesting when we were developing and starting play testing on the Switch to go back to, "Oh, in the first hour of gameplay, this is not quite right, or this is really high friction, or this is pretty confusing."

We've actually done a ton of optimizations to that initial one to three-hour period of the game, as we were looking at Switch. I anticipate that after the first week, as people start to get deeper into the game, we're going to have a lot more of those requests for clarifying, simplifying, or just generally improving the overall experiential flow.

The Switch port is obviously a huge milestone for you guys, that has been in the works, like you said, about since it released initially. With this achievement almost coming to fruition, obviously you have your roap, but are there any new, more lofty goals like the Switch port was that you guys have? Or are you just like, "Alright, now we're mostly just focusing on that game update ideas that we have."

Chelsea Howe: With the imminent Switch launch, we've been very focused on the immediate - get Switch out the door and maintain our update cadence. A lot of the recent updates have been, again, a little bit more focused on City Town, a little bit more smaller scope, but on the roap we have these three-ish major technological innovations we want to bring to the game.

That's what's really, I think, exciting for us, because they represent not just an incremental update, but like, "Hey, here's a fundamentally new way to engage with Hello Kitty Island Adventure." Either with the exploration and traversal mechanics, or with the customization and making the world your own aspect, or with the multiplayer and social engagement aspect. We've got those major innovations on the horizon, and the launch of Switch actually represents a chance for us to take a deep breath and look at the horizon again, instead of looking at that milestone.

Awesome. That about does it for my questions, actually, I know there's only so much you can say about the future at this time.

Chelsea Howe: Just a few caveats. The Switch release won't have City Town in it, so the Switch cutoff is the 1.9 update, which was right before City Town. Essentially, we didn't want to put anything on the console that was going to feel incomplete, and we knew that City Town was going to be getting a bunch of investment, so City Town is not a part of Switch.

The release cadence on Switch is also going to be different than on Arcade, just because Nintendo pipeline, Nintendo processing, Nintendo promotional schedules, all of those are very, very, very different than Arcade. People on different platforms can expect a different release cadence, but the goal is gameplay parity and all of the content will come to all platforms eventually.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure is available now for Nintendo Switch, PC, and Apple devices via Apple Arcade.

Source: Nintendo of America/YouTube