Juggler Games, creators of titles such as Tarnished Blood, The Amazing American Circus, and well-received action-adventure My Memory of Us, invited us to their studio located in the capital city of Poland. It was a great chance for us to observe the work of this indie team from within, as well as learn some more about their previous projects and their experience in the gaming industry. We also took this opportunity to try out the latest version of their upcoming city-builder The Whims of the Gods, which will release sometime in Q3 2025.
It was 17th February 2016 when Mikołaj Pawłowski and Łukasz Janczuk decided to establish Juggler Games studio. As their goal was to create games with immersive stories, outstanding art style and engaging mechanics, more veterans of the polish gaming industry kept joining their projects. It has recently been 9 years since the studio was officially founded, and while the size of the team changed over time, Jugglers are still committed to making games that you’d like to binge-play for multiple hours.
After arriving on the scene, we were guided by a lead designer and producer Łukasz, as well as Mateusz from PJ Games, which was established in 2021 due to a collaboration between Platige Image and Juggler Games. PJ Games is now involved in the production of The Whims of the Gods, as this company will publish the game independently.
We managed to have a look at the workstations where designers, artists, programmers and testers were examining, improving and fixing various aspects of the game. Their work was displayed not only on the screens of the computers, but also on the boards containing different schemes and notes relevant to the game – that really made us realize the complexity of the whole process.
We also took a moment to appreciate the results of their work by checking out the awards from the Digital Dragons Conference: the Best Indie Game Award in 2017 for My Memory of Us and a 2nd place in the Indie Showcase competition in 2023 for Tarnished Blood. Since the Juggler’s team attended the biggest events in the gaming industry such as PAX EAST and WEST, E3, Tokyo Game Show or Gamescom, as well as similar happenings in Poland (e.g. Poznań Game Arena), they also compared their experiences from those events, highlighting the importance of interactions with the participants.
After all of this, it was finally time for the centerpiece – I got to try the latest build of The Whims of the Gods. If you want to know more about this game and the process of creating it, I highly recommend you to check the interview my colleague Ivan did with the devs. For learning my opinions about this title, you can read a preview here.
The playthrough of The Whims of the Gods concluded our visit to the Juggler Games studio. Not only we had the chance to learn the ins and outs of working in an indie studio, but we also got a valuable insight into polish gaming industry and what can we expect from it – that being so, we will keep The Whims of the Gods on our radar, waiting for the full release and the reception of this cooperative city-builder.
English (UK) 
Hrvatski