Indie Game Spotlight: Forager
This week’s Indie Game Spotlight became one of the most beloved and best-selling videogames of the year! We’re talking Forager, a highly popular and addictive crafting game that has taken over our lives.
We spoke with Mariano Cavallero, the creator of Forager, about what influenced the game, suggestions for other upcoming developers, and more. Read on!
Forager was originally created in two weeks for the GMS2Jam hosted by YoYoGames. How has it been to go back and continue working on it?
Yup, that’s correct! Actually, the jam was 2 weeks long, but I basically wasted most of the first week writing down ideas that never actually came to be, so you could argue that the first Forager prototype was made in about 7 days! Going back was a challenge, honestly. The prototype wasn’t supposed to be a fully fledged game, so going back and trying to figure out what made it click and how could that become the full game was very difficult. I remember the game going through several iterations until it finally reached its final form. You couldn’t even buy lands on the early versions!
What game was most influential in the creation of Forager?
The first time I played Stardew Valley I was immediately amazed by it, but I remember wondering how would the game feel like if it were more like old school Zelda games. So during a 2-week game jam, I decided to give that idea a try and combine Stardew and Zelda to see what would happen! The final game ended up leaning more towards gathering/crafting games such as Terraria, but you can still clearly see the original premise of the design in some game aspects.
What was your biggest struggle you faced when creating Forager?
Forager’s development is a very inspiring underdog story that I hope will teach dreamers like my younger self how to follow their dreams and achieve great success in a smart and calculated manner. It involves a lot of manufactured luck, people investing in me even when I didn’t believe in myself and the amazing game community stepping up and helping me finish the game when I needed help the most! I don’t want to spoil it for anyone interested in playing the game (as you start playing, you will unlock the story of Forager’s development!). But if anyone is dying to know,
Video Game Story Time featured my personal story on this video over here!
What kind of NPCs can we expect to meet?
NPCs were a LOT of fun to make. There are a lot of them and they are very quirky and weird in all the right ways. There is an invisible ghost that needs your help to become scarier, a furry fox that needs an insane amount of poop for a life or death emergency that is never quite specified, and even myself as a jester inside the game, asking trivia questions regarding the game’s content and giving rewards based on how much you know the game by then!
Forager is out for Windows and Linux on Steam, the Humble Store, the Discord Store, GOG, and Green Man Gaming. The Mac, PS4, and Nintendo Switch versions of the game are being worked on and will release sometime later this year (but we heard if you click this secret button you can play the FREE demo).
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