Into the depths of genre-bending restaurant and fishing sim Dave the Diver

24.08.2023 - 20:03 / gamedeveloper.com / Jaeho Hwang

Dave The Diver sees you heading underneath the waves to hunt for various fish and sea life, turning them into delicious sushi dishes as you scramble to run a restaurant by night. While that's a ton to juggle on its own, the game has only just begun to surprise you with its in-depth minigames (Seahorse racing?!), varied characters, and wild plot.

Game Developer sat down with game director Jaeho Hwang to talk about how mixing 2D pixel art and 3D artwork helped give the game a sense of depth, how surprising minigames and plot elements help make the game feel more true to life and connect players with the protagonist, and the crafty way in which the development team captured a sense of a wide, huge ocean through adding some randomness to the underwater segments.

You have mentioned that Dave The Diver was inspired by a real restaurant where they caught fish in the morning and cooked them at night. What thoughts went into turning that inspiration into gameplay? How did the initial concept come together from this inspiration?

I initially had a rough idea of making a sushi bar management game that used captured fish from the ocean, which was basically managing the automated sushi bar and going out to get resources from the ocean, just like a shop-management dungeon crawler. However, while playing the prototype, I realized it wasn’t really that compelling because I couldn't focus on either task. That was the moment I came across that sushi bar, where the owner catches fish in the morning and cooks them at night. I thought it could make players focus on each aspect and give a feeling of 'preparing dinner for customers'. So, we separated the day-night stages, and that really made a difference.

The game uses a mixture of pixel art with 3D artwork in some places (such as the backgrounds in the underwater segments). What drew you to add 3D art to a game of mainly pixel art? What purposes did this visual choice serve, both mechanically and artistically?

I previously made a game called Evil Factory, which is an all-boss battle 2D-pixel action game. In Evil Factory, there was a harpoon gimmick for hitting an angler fish boss and pulling him into spikes. I thought it was pretty fun, and I eventually wanted to make this mechanic into a game.

After establishing the core mechanic, our second decision was the game stage setting. I love platform games for sure, but I wanted our protagonist to roam freely and use a harpoon to capture floating objects. We tested space, sky, and underwater, and in the end, decided to go with 'underwater,' because capturing real-life fish felt more compelling.

However, it was not that aesthetically pleasing, making underwater environments only with flat 2D pixels. So, we started to mix 3D