While it sounds like an obvious question on its face, I really like asking game developers what other games they’re inspired by. You sometimes get some really fantastic answers. A lot of the time, you can look at a game and make pretty obvious observations about where it came from: this one’s a Zelda-like, this one’s like Destiny, and so forth. But sometimes developers I talk to dig deep and point out surprising games, and surprising things about those games, that they have woven into their own, very different work.
Like Nic Duchesne, a producer on Serious Sam: Shatterverse. You know, a spinoff of Serious Sam, a series about using increasingly ridiculous guns to mow down increasingly large herds of enemies and make them explode into gory bits. What inspires Duchesne, as he and his team make a bunch of different alternate-universe versions of a big meaty muscle guy who fires explosives and lasers at freaky mutants?
Stardew Valley. Obviously. Come on.
Sure, anyone can be interested in anything, but Duchesne has a rather sweet story of how he came to the valley:
“Me and my wife have this hunkering-down tradition when Christmas comes around,” he explains. “We select one game that we can play together, and we zone out of the world for a couple of days. So I think five years ago, I was just like, there’s this game, now it’s available on console. We could play together in our pajamas for a couple of days while zoning out everything else and closing our phones. And I think it’s going to be right up her alley because we’re both old or millennial, I’m going to call it. But we dream of this life where we can go to the country and have our little farm with chickens and stuff like that. And she said yes.
“And then we ended up playing it for three Christmases in a row. Always starting a new farm. And I almost feel like now we’re not selecting games for Christmas tradition. It’s just like, we’re going to select something, then play Stardew Valley. But also it’s very great because they keep updating the game. There’s always a little something that changed from year to year. So it’s a yearly tradition, like watching all The Mummys or The Lord of the Rings.”
The first time they played together, he says his wife was “very hardcore” about the farm chores. She wanted him to help water everything every day. But once he was done, he was cut loose on his own to do his own thing. “I like to fish,” he says. “I don’t fish much in my life. But it’s just like, I’m going to be like a regular man and just go fishing. So living the fantasy of being a regular man. You start the day together, you do your chores, and then you live the rest of your day. Which is something we don’t get to do because we work all the time. It’s like the fantasy of having free time.”
And yes, they always marry each other in-game. Duchesne says he’s never engaged with the other marriage mechanics, and even surprised his wife with the Mermaid Pendant the first time they played, as she didn’t know marriage was possible.
Duchesne has been at Behaviour Interactive for almost ten years, and has been working on Shatterverse for around three. His portfolio includes a lot of things that are not remotely Stardew Valley-like: he’s worked on mobile games like Assassin’s Creed: Rebellion and Giblins: Fantasy Builder, and he’s also worked on three total PC/console games including Shatterverse, two of which haven’t been announced yet. They’re all fun and colorful, but they’re also all far from the cozy, slow-paced farming sim that he loves so much. Especially Shatterverse.
Launched August 31, Shatterverse is a cooperative roguelike arcade-y shooter game for one to five players. Each run is composed of three levels, each ending with a big boss, and each filled with hordes of enemies, because Serious Sam. “Your love language is violence. And shooting. And when you shoot, things go boom, because that’s what you would expect them to do.”
And that obviousness and the way things do precisely what you expect is one of the things he most appreciates about Stardew Valley. “Stardew Valley is very simple. It tries to be complex in what you can do in the sandbox. But on the tin, anyone, like, a young audience can also pick up the game because it’s, like, two buttons. And a pickaxe does what you think a pickaxe does. And a shovel does what you think a shovel does. I’m a very big fan of simple designs that have interesting interaction.”
“I think a lot of games, modern games, have become very complex and very complicated. And usually our answer to that is to add a tutorial pop-up or something, and tell the player this information. It’s a lot of: read, don’t tell, and don’t show. It’s like the price you need to pay to get into a game. So a game like Stardew Valley—and I was very surprised because when I played it the first time, I got this feeling in the back of my mind, like this is really like the original Zelda or the first couple of Zeldas. Then I read online that it was actually inspired by some of the original Zeldas. The start is exactly the same. You start on a screen, you can go left, up, right, down. Nothing is explained to you. You have two buttons to play around with the world and figure it out because it’s a completely full feeling of exploration. You also explore the game itself and the systems of the game, and you learn how to use them.”
Another thing Duchesne loves about both Shatterverse and Stardew? Couch co-op. He tells me he comes from a generation of LAN parties, of StarCraft and Diablo. He loves experiences that are built to be enjoyed with others but which have a low barrier of entry. Stardew can be played fully solo or fully cooperative from the start, no fuss. Shatterverse almost can; there’s a 5-10 minute tutorial at the start, but if you want, you can back right out of it and jump into co-op immediately.
“I cannot count the number of times that I scheduled with my friends to sit down and play a game,” he says. “And it’s super hard because everybody’s super busy. We get to the game and it’s like, oh no, we need to play solo for like an hour before we can play together. And then half of the evening is wasted. We just wanted to grab a beer and play together.
“I wanted [Shatterverse] to be a beer-and-pretzel [experience]. Low barrier to entry, not expensive. You see it on Steam, you see it on PlayStation and you’re like, I don’t know what to do between my season of Call of Duty, League [of Legends], whatever. But like we have three hours together. Let’s get this game, just enjoy our time. It’s part of our rotation.”
There’s a third thing Duchesne loves about Stardew Valley that, like his other points, I hadn’t really thought that hard about before. In Stardew Valley, there’s no way to really “fail.” The community center completion (or, sure, Joja Mart) is always there no matter how long you wait. While the same is not exactly true in Shatterverse (you can die, for instance), what’s important about it to him is that players feel satisfied regardless of their actual performance outcomes in the game.
“The goal doesn’t matter because you’ve been playing for a hundred hours,” he says. “The more I work in games, the more having that satisfaction at the end of your gameplay, regardless of what you’ve done, I think is very important. Because too many times I think in modern games you need to work an absurd amount of time to get to your goal. And if you didn’t, it feels wasted a little bit because you didn’t make it to that milestone. And so respecting that, anything you do in a game should bring you something. I think it’s very, very important. And Stardew Valley taught me that.”
This Christmas, Duchesne is probably going to play Shatterverse, not Stardew, with his wife, and maybe with his friends too. Not all of them are into shooters, but Shatterverse (again, just like Stardew) makes it easy for him to carry them.
“I think that’s very powerful for a co-op game,” he says. “Because we all were in that situation where you’re very excited for a game, but nobody cares. And then it’s a very big ask for your friends to play with you. And you’re like, no, no, I promise. I’m going to play your stupid game that nobody cares about in exchange. It’s almost like a transaction. Just kick back, I’m going to buy it for you because it’s cheap. And play three hours. You’re going to enjoy it. Even if you don’t understand anything, I got you because I know how it works.”
Jokingly, Duchesne concludes by saying he’d like to do a collab with Stardew Valley one day. He thinks it’d be funny, like Doom and Animal Crossing (and, well, like this article!).
“I think it’s what’s funny about Serious Sam and like the concept of Shatterverse is that anything is possible because it’s the Sam-verse. You could have a universe that’s just farming and you need to go in and the objective of the mission is to water your crops while hordes of Mental are attacking your farm. Everything is possible.”
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