Dave the Diver’s director on the breakout indie hit of 2023

Whereas 2023 has produced a bumper crop of fantastic video games to date, one explicit title rocketed to success seemingly out of nowhere: Dave the Diver, the charming fishing/life sim-RPG hybrid from Mintrocket. The sport launched on Steam from early entry on June 28 and have become one of many top-selling titles inside every week. Inside a month, it’d bought over a million models. Most lately, Nintendo revealed throughout its September Direct that it’s launching on the Swap in October.

GamesBeat spoke with Dave the Diver’s director, Jaeho Hwang, in regards to the sport’s improvement and the way its creators have responded to its meteoric rise in reputation. In accordance with Hwang, the crew responded to their viral success by ensuring the sport was pretty much as good as attainable: “We started the early entry in October final 12 months, and through that point, we made quite a few enhancements due to open communication with the group. After launch, seeing an astonishing variety of customers like our sport made us notice how vital and significant these enhancements have been.”

Provided that the Steam web page presently has a score of “Overwhelmingly Constructive” with over 50,000 critiques (on the time of writing), it’s protected to say that gamers appreciated Mintrocket’s efforts. Hwang says, “We prevented many potential issues and had the prospect to organize plenty of good content material. Now we’re engaged on new content material that we hope everybody who has given us a lot help can take pleasure in.”

Coronary heart and allure: Dave the Diver’s success

Hwang instructed GamesBeat he wasn’t initially certain that the sport can be as interesting because it was, given its distinctive strategy to gameplay: “Personally, I had some considerations that the slower and extra deliberate tempo of Dave the Diver may not enchantment to some streamers, however through the demo and early entry interval, I used to be pleasantly stunned to see so many streamers taking part in the sport voluntarily.”

These streamers, says Hwang, turned a part of the post-release viral success: “We maintained good relationships with many streamers, and we ended up even making a few of them into NPCs within the sport. Due to streamers who live-streamed our sport even earlier than the complete launch and those that live-streamed after, this enthusiastic help has made our sport go viral.”

Dave the Diver’s core gameplay is a mishmash of oceanic exploration RPG and restaurant administration sim. Balancing the 2 facets was a course of that concerned suggestions from early entry customers, whereas additionally discovering area to inform the sport’s story. Hwang notes that customers notably like hero Dave, who experiences his personal progress over the course of the sport.

Hwang says he’s at all times liked retro-pixel video games, and that he needed to make a sport with such an artwork type set within the ocean. “The ocean we envisioned was a mysterious dungeon stuffed with distinctive creatures. Once I watch deep-sea documentaries, there are moments when the information of the sheer existence of those actual creatures within the deep sea provides me goosebumps greater than any made-up fantasy creature ever may. The imaginative and prescient of a sport that might seize these creatures, however in an arcade gameplay type, is how Dave the Diver started.”

In the meanwhile, Mintrocket is presently rolling out fixes and high quality of life updates for Dave the Diver. Hwang recently told Dualshockers that the crew plans to roll out extra content material to beef up the second half of the sport, to bolster an in any other case story-focused part. “There are extra tales from our distinctive characters to inform.”