The story of Planet of Lana is the story of triumph over adversity. But it's also one of naivety. The developers themselves admit they had no clue what they were doing at first.

The 2023 platformer goes against almost all standard guidance. Swedish developer Wishfully Studios didn't start small with its first ever game, as so many advise, instead going straight in with a cinematic adventure that took six years to complete. They couldn't have chosen a more over-saturated genre to pitch to publishers, either. As 11-Bit Studios' Chris Wigley told GamesIndustry.biz recently, "If you make a great platformer and it takes off, it can do amazingly well, but there's so many of them that it's extremely difficult to stand out."

On top of that, the developer's first demo was woefully inadequate, falling far short of what would typically be required for a successful pitch. As Wishfully co-head and creative director Adam Stjärnljus explained in a talk at Nordic Game in May, it simply consisted of the main character plodding back and forth.

"It felt sluggish," he explained during the talk. "And on top of that, we also had a very unrealistic production plan. So we were basically slaughtered by publishers."

"We had no idea what we were doing," added game director and writer Klas Martin Eriksson. "We were just like, 'Look, she's moving'."

Stjärnljus said that they did "hundreds" of pitches and received "hundreds" of rejections. "Some of them were kind 'Nos' and some of them were not so kind.

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