Highlights
- Game Director Jaeho Hwang drew inspiration from real-life sushi bars and popular video games like Metal Gear Solid and Like A Dragon when designing the game.
- Mint Rocket, the studio behind Dave The Diver, aims to improve the game's quality and add new content based on player feedback, including more side missions and additional fish for night dives.
- Collaboration with other developers and crossovers are also on the horizon.
With only a few months left in the year, Dave The Diver has popped its head up from under the water and cemented itself as one of this year's smash hits. It's the perfect blend of relaxation and adventure that has had me hooked from the moment I picked it up.
A mix between management sim and RPG, Dave The Diver isn't just incredibly unique and quirky, but it lets you manage your time how you want to manage it, with absolutely no pressure to do things in a linear way. Interested in catching extravagant fish from the depths? Go for it. Want to trawl through the sunken mysteries of a sea village? It’s there, waiting for you.
I was lucky enough to sit down with the game’s director, Jaeho Hwang, to talk about how this year’s sleeper hit came to be. Apparently, it all began with a real sushi bar by the ocean, but there are actually some pretty famous video games and mangas that helped bring Dave The Diver to our screens too. "The blue hole in Dave the Diver is inspired by the ‘All Blue’ in the manga ‘One Piece’, which is a legendary sea location where all the fish from the world gather in one place," Hwang tells me, before sharing his appreciation of the management aspects and mini-games of Metal Gear Solid and Like A Dragon. "Those games created a new level of excitement by combining a management system and mini-games with solid gameplay mechanics. I thought we could do something like that with sushi and diving."
Creating a mashup of genres wasn't a simple process for developer Mint Rocket. The main issue was to keep the game lighthearted while giving it enough complexity to be engaging. "It ended up being much harder than it first seemed, so we had to go through tons of trial and error. The depth of the management system in the sushi bar is one thing that we constantly tested and changed,” Hwang says. "If we make it too light and automated, it easily becomes boring, but if we make it too complicated then it becomes stressful to be fun."
Dave The Diver appeared seemingly out of nowhere, receiving rave reviews from critics and fans alike, and earning an impressive score of 90 on Metacritic. While some developers scorn and question the power that Metacritic holds over games, Mint Rocket integrated it into one of the team's goals during development. "On a note I wrote two years ago, one of our team’s goals was to achieve a score of over 80 on Metacritic," Hwang tells me. "I’m really surprised that we got way more positive reviews and higher sales than we expected."
Hwang also has a sneaky suspicion as to why Dave The Diver has resonated so well with fans. "While many underwater-themed games are either serious or academic, Dave The Diver is lighthearted and has a lot of tongue-in-cheek type of humor,” he says. “Although we have tons of sharks that will kill you often, I believe this casual concept attracted a lot of users."
Whether it’s the massively over-the-top cutscenes of Bancho whipping up a new recipe, or the stereotypical anime lover Duff allowing you to rescue one of his statues from the sea bed because, as Duff puts it, “it’s not okay for Leah-chan to expire down there in the darkness.” It’s a refreshing change of pace to play a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
It's also pretty clear that fans have vibed with the titular diver himself. Dave is an easygoing character who just wants to make everyone happy, so it always surprised me that many of the NPCs in the game were so abrupt and rude towards him. Hwang explained that this decision was because Dave is "someone the player can root for and care about. If, while you are playing, your reaction to other characters is, “Hey! How dare you say that to my boy Dave,” then I feel like we have succeeded in creating the right character."
But with huge success and a new community to please, Mint Rocket is now focused on quality-of-life improvements and, eventually, new content for players to dive into. "We did have a plan to release more content after launch. There are more stories from our unique characters to tell,” Hwang tells me. “However, we are currently spending more time on bug fixes and QoL updates since we are getting a huge amount of feedback from the game’s community."
Bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements are natural things to expect in the short-term, but what about those meaty future content plans? "Our initial update plan is to add more content to the later part of the game. The later part is more story-driven, so the amount of side missions is a bit smaller than in the first half. So we will add some more to keep the same vibe going."
Nighttime dives are one of the most impressive parts of Dave the Diver. You never forget your first nighttime dive, the moment of awe as all the neon coral illuminates the depths, the different types of fish that you’re frantically trying to catch, but also the pure bliss as you hear the rain hitting the surface above you, it’s the game’s ultimate point of pure relaxation vibes. Hwang wants to add even more fish during those vibrant nighttime dives. "We are aware that players want to see nocturnal fish that only come out at night, so we will add more new fish for night diving as well, he says, adding that the studio has plans "for DLC with a larger volume of content," but the top priority is rounding out the current version of Dave The Diver.
Dave the Diver is an instant icon on the indie gaming scene, and collaborations with fellow devs are already in the studio’s sights. What kind of crossovers would work with a game like Dave The Diver? "I think collaborating with Subnautica or Dredge would be really cool. They have pretty unique fish in each game so that it would blend well with our Blue Hole," he tells me. But Hwang's personal crossover dream crossover actually comes from one of the game's core inspirations. "My personal dream is to invite Solid Snake to Bancho Sushi."
Dave The Diver is a game that’s ripe for new content. Not only are there already ideas being floated around for future content updates, DLCs, and crossovers, there's even content that didn't make it to release that could be seen in the future. "I wanted to have more boss battles in the game," Hwang says. "But making a boss requires a huge amount of time and resources. Catching lobsters is also something we weren’t able to implement in time, and some character-based mini-games as well."
Dave The Diver is the feel-good game we all need in our lives. Although it's currently only available for PC users, Mint Rocket is working on a Nintendo Switch version, as well as plenty of QoL updates. I can't wait to see what the team has in store for what has quickly become one of my favorite games of the year.