It takes time to get ambitious projects right, which is the case for the upcoming cozy tourism gameCritter Cove.Gentleman Rat Studiosrecently announced itsEarly Accessdelay to midyear in 2024, but it’s not slowing down as it prepares for a fresh round of playtests in March. Those playtests have been and continue to be important to developers at Gentleman Rat Studios.
Developers at Gentleman Rat Studios spoke to Game Rant in a recent interview, where they discussed how their rounds of beta testing have been important in shaping the version of the game that will be released later this year, as well as how Early Access will shape the roadmap toward full release. Eli Holding, lead designer, explained the process.
We’re going to be running some playtests here soon. A lot of our roadmap will be driven by what the players are going to do at this point. We’ve got our plan for the features that we need to get into Early Access, then we want to take a look at what the players are doing and figure out where our weak points are. From there, we’ll leave some space in Early Access to add in direct needs that we see from playtests.
That’s ultimately part of the point of beta testing and Early Access releases—seeing how playersinteract with the game and guiding developmenttoward a full release. Taking time to do another round of beta testing before releasing into Early Access, therefore, is a fairly good reason for a delay, particularly when the beta will be including a new system like this one.
Lead programmer and Eli’s older brother, Jason Holding, explained that the March playtest will be debutingCritter Cove’s farming mechanics. These will include fairly standard farming staples, as well as finding ways to incorporate some NPCs living in the player’s town. It will also allow farming of undersea flora using floating containers on the game’s vast ocean. Later in development, the team hopes to add those flora to the game’s museum.
The game is actually fairly robust as far as the systems are concerned. We havea complete farming systemwe really haven’t even shown off too much, but we are bringing that in the next update and it’s going to be brought forward in our next playtest … We have this underwater farming system where you have these floating containers, and you put things in there that are that you find in the ocean. Ocean plants that you can then grow and farm and you can place those in the ocean, and they’ll float wherever you put them. You can start creating like an Ocean Park.
Some of the things thatCritter Covedevelopers have learned from their playtesting have been usual fare: players are excited by the game’s character creator, for instance. But the biggest challenge that emerged from past rounds of playtesting isn’t a glitch to squash but a consequence of just how broad and ambitious the game is. Gentleman Rat constantly surprises players with the scope of the game.
As Jason said, the game is rather robust with systems. As a result,Critter Coveis more than a tourism simulator, an exploration game, a farming sim, or a crafting game. It has a lot of options for players, and a wide world to explore. That makes the question of how to communicate about the game something of a challenge for the three-person team that’s spent years crafting it. That’s not a unique struggle, as similarlycozy projectMoonstone Islandoften gets misclassifiedaccording to its developers. But forCritter Cove, Jason said they hadn’t expected messaging to be as hard as it has been.
We still hear it, we still have people go, “I was hesitant and I didn’t know what it was, but then I played it and now I freaking love it!” That seems to be the general response. They always say the same thing: “This is not what I was expecting, like, this is so much.” I don’t know, it’s different, bigger, and crazier than what they were expecting, especially the first time they are able to hop into the water. But now they’re just swimming around and diving in.
The game focuses on helpingrevitalize the post-apocalyptic paradiseof Critter Cove to attract tourists to players' islands. As part of this, players will be sailing the nearby seas to explore the ruins of an old, forgotten world, bringing its treasures home and using those broken pieces to build something entirely new and attract more tourists. Rather than using exploration to support the game’s tourism mechanics, however, the tourism mechanics are there to encourage exploration, the developers explained.
