Everdream Valleyis a worthwhile addition to the ever-popular farming sim genre, with more than a handful of unique characteristics that help it stand out from similar titles. Featuring a plethora of engaging minigames for most of the game’s interactions, a focus on stress-free gameplay, and a generous helping of gameplay options to fine-tune the challenge level, it’s a remarkably comfortableindie gamethat fully understands its target audience.
Game Rant recently sat down withEverdream Valleydeveloper Marek Maruszczak to discuss the game’s positive reception, his plans for post-release content, and his thoughts on what makes a great farming game. He also went into detail about the challenges involved in balancing large open games with a small team, as well as some of the inspirations behind the game’s mechanics and aesthetics.The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Q:Everdream Valleyhas had a great reception so far. Is there any feedback since its launch that has particularly struck you?
Maruszczak:Tons of that stuff, actually, and we’ve already uploaded Patch 1.1 a few days after release based on player feedback. The patch not only included bug fixes but also features that players would like to have. For example, we added a mirror for players to change their appearance during the game because originally you could only do it at the start.
We’ve also changed the way you interact with wolves. We added the option “polite wolves.” We have these wolves in the game, and the wolves could get you and scare you at night when you are outside the farm. They won’t hurt you or kill you or anything like that, but they will scare you and the player will wake up the next morning on their farm. Lots of players told us that they get scared, and they would like to have the option to not play with wolves. Our wolves have those bright red eyes, and they howl loudly, and it can be pretty scary.
So when you check “polite wolves” in the options, it’ll turn that off. We also added dialogue where they tell the player “Okay, if you don’t want us to be so scary, then we won’t be!” Basically, we made them funny, and not that scary. We have also made mini-games optional. Some of our players were pretty happy with the mini-games. We havemini-games for almost every interaction, such as milking goats and cows, and shearing sheep and alpacas.
For some players, that was pretty good, but there was also this pretty huge group that said that they don’t want to do that. They just want to get some milk and wool and move on to decorating the farm or exploring. So we’ve made the minigames optional, but we also made the reward for playing the mini-games two times bigger than without the mini-games. So there have been a few of those kinds of rapid changes, and we will be adding more in the next few weeks. We also have snails that would eat your crops after the rain, and a lot of players were telling us that those snails are pretty aggressive, and it’s hard to fight with them. We changed their behavior, so they’re not as hungry and they’re not eating the crops as fast. Those kinds of things.
It sounds like you’re very flexible with the game’s design and that the goal is to be inclusive of everybody’s playstyles.
Maruszczak:Exactly. We wanted to designa cozy gamewhere everyone can just relax and feel the adventure of summer holidays when you were a kid but without all the time limits like “Do this in two hours or your crop will die out.” So we are trying to make it even more cozy.
But at the same time, if someone wants to have a little bit more challenge, we are leaving those options available like those wolves, etc.
Q: Although the game is a farming sim similar toStardew Valley, you left out a lot of the stressful mechanics like tools breaking or passing out at night. Were you intentionally avoiding punishing mechanics like that?
Maruszczak:Yeah, and although we have a stamina system and you can run out of stamina, it’s also pretty easy to get more by eating fruits, and you can even level up your maximum stamina by eating different dishes that you cancook with your kitchen. But yeah, we didn’t want it to be a hardcore farm simulator. We will see what the future will bring, but for now, we want to develop it as a cozy adventure.
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Q: You mentioned you recently put out a 1.1 update that added lots of quality-of-life features. Do you have any plans in the future for additional content?
Maruszczak:Yeah, we hope to add the next patch, 1.2, pretty soon. There will be some bug fixes of course that we’re aware of because of the players, but also some additional content that players wanted to have. If you scroll through the comment section and discussion on Steam, there will be a few of them implemented already.
We also will be adding additional content at the end of the month or maybe a little bit later, but we want to add content for a year or two years. Small content packs like different animals, different hairstyles, different clothes, and some additional mechanics, and we have a plan fortwo big DLCs. We are pretty sure that we will have them but it’s not something that I can tell you that’s set in stone.
One is a content DLC with a lot of new NPCs and lots of new content and building mechanics, and the second one is something that everyone wants: cooperative multiplayer. But, I cannot officially confirm that. So we are working on that, but I can’t give you any dates. We hope to have that sooner than later.
Q: I know your multiplayer plans are tentative, but do you have any ideas for how the multiplayer might work? How will players interact with each other?
Maruszczak:We’ve got a prototype in our hands that we are testing right now – again, I cannot promise you that all the options will stay or if we’ll want to add something – but for now, it will be for more or less four players on one map. They’ll be able to build together, farm together, and also do quests together. So it won’t only beAnimalCrossing-stylewhere you can only look at what I have on my farm, you’ll also do farm stuff together.
There will be a host, so it will be the world of one player and he will be sending an invitation for his world, and then you will be able to go to his world. But the host will be the one player.
Q: How did the team first come together for the idea, and has it turned out how you all imagined?
Maruszczak:I think it turned out better! We’re a little bit later than we envisioned but for sure better. I’ve known most of my team since around 2016. We worked on different titles in different studios but mostly worked for hire. Then I met my business partner with whom I started this studio Moon Eaters, and he had the idea for a small farm game for children. I said, “Okay, but let’s make it bigger, and let’s make itGrandTheftAutostylein terms of the seamless open world with mini-games on the same map.” So it started as an idea for a small game for children.
Of course, children can play this game and many children do play the game, but I think our main demographic right now is 20-to-30-something cozy gamers, players that likeAnimal Crossing,My Time at Portia,Harvest Moon, etc. So it’s the same case asPokemon: the focus of the game is seemingly for children, but the demographic is actually different. This project started as just one of our projects, and then gradually it became our main project. In 2020, there were three or four of us working on this project, and by the end, there were 10 to 12. So we got bigger, and we hope that it will be even bigger in the future.
The game has been out for like a week, and we have players with more than 120 hours of playtime, and many others have over 20 or 30 hours. Right now, we’re working on bug fixing, adding options that players want to have in the game, and also working on the DLCs. Right now we’re also having talks with more developers and game designers to make our studio a little bit bigger to make the game longer and a more complete experience.
Q: It’s interesting that you citedGrand Theft Autoas an inspiration for such a cozy game. Were there any other games that shaped how you wanted to designEverdream Valley?
Maruszczak:I will say a few words aboutGrand Theft Auto. I guess I have an eclectic taste in games because I lovedGrand Theft Autofrom the beginning, but I also lovePokemonand games likeAnimal CrossingandFallout 1and2. What was always important for me was this feeling of freedom in the game, like you’re able to go follow the main story, but anytime you could just go on an adventure and look under a stone or just go looking forrandom encounters like inFallout.
InGrand Theft Auto– the first two versions andGrand Theft Auto: London– I wasn’t doing the story missions at all. I was just wreaking havoc in the city. I wanted this kind of freedom in our game. Of course, the emotions are different – like we didn’t want to have any killing – but the sense of freedom, yes. I think we achieved that at least to some degree. Of course, our game’s smaller, but the sense of freedom is something that is showing in the reviews, so I think we succeeded at least partially in this area.
About other games, well, plenty of them inspired me. The whole farming genre likeHarvest Moon,Stardew Valley,My Time at Portia,and alsoSummer in Marawhere you have a story and a little bit of farming mechanics, but alsoAnimal Crossingwas a huge influence, especially with the collectibles like different insects, etc.
We have 30 different kinds of butterflies, 16 different kinds of beetles, and 12 different kinds of frogs, but we wanted to make them not only for display. You can actually use them in-game. Some of them can be used as material for animal treats, and some of them are used for other things. We were also inspired byPokemon, again, when it comes to the collectible mechanics.
They’re not games, but theStudio Ghibli moviesinspired us in terms of visuals and the idyllic atmosphere of some places in those movies. Additionally, theOriseries inspired us in terms of the richness of the graphics and atmospheric effects, like we have several particle effects on the screen. In the Ori series, you have very rich graphics built by doing parallax effects with a few different backgrounds.
Of course, we have a very different game, so we couldn’t use the same thing, but we use the particles for that. We have particles on the screen, FX particles in the world, and particles on animals. So this way, we are doing these layers of content. We also use volumetric fog.
Q: What do you think makes a good farming game?
Maruszczak:I think that there are a few categories of what makes a good farming game and different players probably would prefer one or another. For me, it’s the freedom of choice, as I said at the beginning. But I know that this is not necessarily the case with every player.
I think that the economy and the mechanics should really work well together, and that’s for sure something that we need to work more on in our game because we have lots of freedom, but the economy could be better. We’ve already started working on that, and I think pretty soon we’ll get it where we want to be.
With the economy, there shouldn’t be an overpowered way to play your game. Like “Only growing tomatoes is the best way to get a lot of money.” Still, I know that we have some things to do in this category, but we’ll get there. It’s always a choice – especially with smaller games – what to have first, and we decided that we wanted to be a little bit different. That’s why we emphasized freedom for the players, but it also makes it harder for us to tune up the economy and the whole balance of the game.
Those two categories are important but something that’s really big for me is the visuals. I think for me at least – I know that’s not the case for everyone – but for me, the visuals in farm games are really important. That doesn’t mean that it needs to be in 3d, because pixel art graphics could be awesome. I have this dream; I want to have a farm game with graphics fromEastwardby Chucklefish.Eastwardhas awesome visuals. I think it’s my favorite pixel art game in terms of visuals. Right now I know that Chucklefish is working onWitchbrookwhich is really cool, and it’s really close to what I imagine, but I still thinkEastwardis better in terms of visuals.
I think that we are pretty strong in this category. We can do better, and we’ll be working on little things like better shaders, but it’s something that a lot of players are happy with at the moment with our game. I know that we stick out in this category from the genre, and for me, that’s pretty cool. We also did it on Unity, and I know it’s a little harder to do some of this on Unity than on Unreal. On the other hand, other things are easier with Unity.
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Q: Speaking of difficulty, what do you think is the hardest part of making a game likeEverdream Valley?
Maruszczak:Bug fixing with a small team. If I had to choose one thing, definitely bug fixing. This is a special case withopen-world gameslike ours because everything can be done in many different ways. During development, we had help from our publishers with bug fixing and QA, but it still wasn’t enough. Players will find a lot of new and exciting ways to destroy your game and break it. I think it’s impossible to think about all of them. Sure, you can do better with more and more testers, but with a small team, it’s really hard to make an open-world game and test it.
We have a lot of ideas and a lot of mechanics that we didn’t implement in the game, and not because we didn’t have time to implement them, but because we didn’t have time to properly test it. And I know that even the things that we did implement sometimes weren’t tested enough.
Still, you need to decide at some point, ”Okay, now we are shipping the game and the players will either like it or not.” I think that we are doing pretty well of course, but we could always do better. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the state of the game, and I will be even more happy with the next patch and another.
Q: You mentioned features that didn’t make it into the game. Did you ever experiment with an interesting feature and find that it didn’t quite work out in the game?
Maruszczak:Yeah, actually, some of the features are now in the game that we still need to change! One of the things that we changed a lot and still need to change is the mechanic of herding with a dog. We have this mechanic that when you want to train your dog, he could be controlled by the second analog stick, and the other stick controls the player. And together,you may herd animalslike larger packs of animals, for example, 20 sheep.
We started with this feature by making it, so the sheep will run from the dog and the player and just run in any direction. The idea was to herd the sheep between the dog and the player, and it turned out very difficult for a cozy game. It was challenging, it was, I think, almost eSport level. I had a lot of fun with that, and my team had a lot of fun with that, but the players were flooding our comments section after the demo with rage-quitting information like, “This sucks! It’s really bad, I didn’t come here to rage quit, I just want to have a cozy experience.”
So we’ve made iterations of that making it easier and easier. Now, there’s actually a sphere between the player and the dog that works like a magnet for animals. In our opinion, it’s really easy right now, but some players find that it’s still too hard. We probably will not change the mechanic, but we are working on adding different mechanics for herding large packs of animals in other ways.
Some of the minigames were heavily changed. Most of the minigames were made easier than they were in the beginning. We’ve found that the level of challenge that was cool for us is far more challenging for our audience. I think that’s often the case with the developers knowing the game pretty well. This is especially the case with cozy games, where there are a lot of players that don’t want to be challenged. They just want to spend time doing nice things.
Basically, we’ve made the game easier and easier with each iteration.
Q: What’s next for Moon Eaters now that the game is released? Do you have a future project in mind, or are you just focusing onEverdream Valleyfor now?
Maruszczak:Working on DLCs is for sure our priority, and of course, fixing the bugs and giving more content to the players ofEverdream Valley.
We’re also working on two more games. We have a prototype ofa cute cooking game,Cute Your Food, where you can play with the food and always have a pretty good-looking outcome with stylized graphics and stuff.
We’re also – and this is a smaller game thanEverdream Valley– but we’re also working on a game with an open world and cozy graphics but with a slightly different setting thanEverdream Valley with more magic healing and magic creatures.
Q: Are there any frequently asked questions from prospective players that you’d like to address?
Maruszczak:In our comment section, you can ask any question and then we’ll try to address it, and probably other players will be even faster than us. There are lots of answers for the quests etc. in the comment section. We also started a wiki, a Fandom page, and it will be soon published on our Steam page and on our socials like Twitter, Facebook, and probably Instagram.
Finally, I want to thank you, our players, because the premiere went really well, and I know that you’ve had lots of patience with our bugs and quirks. Also, I really want to thank the players that are answering the questions in the comment sections. You are doing a lot of good work. Thank you.
Everdream Valleyis available on PC, PS4, PS5, and Xbox One, and is coming to Nintendo Switch on June 23.
