The Joys of Digging

Michael Rousseau talks to Brjann Sigurgeirsson about the development of SteamWorld: Dig

Digging is one of the most mundane activities in the history of mundane activities. Unless you’re a professional miner, or a geologist who’s really into igneous rock formations, the idea of scooping up hunks of dirt over and over isn’t high on anyone’s bucket list.

And yet SteamWorld: Dig, a game about digging, is currently the most downloaded Nintendo 3DS game on the Nintendo eShop. This is a lofty position, considering that the title has trounced high-profile Nintendo-published titles like Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Mario and Luigi: Dream Team.

So what makes Dig so compelling? Brjann Sigurgeirsson, CEO at Image & Form, provides some insight into the game’s design and what it is about Dig that makes delving into the earth so fun and addictive.

Geek Empire: What were the inspirations that contributed to SteamWorld Dig and its world? I definitely feel some Metroid with a touch of Boulderdash, but what else is in there?

Brjann Sigurgeirsson: There are quite a few other things. I was more of a Dig Dug guy than a Boulderdash fellow myself. But the biggest inspiration was that we had already started on the SteamWorld story in a previous game.

When we started making SteamWorld Tower Defense in 2010, there weren’t that many tower defense games for the Nintendo DSi, so we decided to make one and claim that niche. Of course, by the time we were done (which didn’t take too long), two or three decent other TD games had already found their way onto the DSiWare Store. It became yet another TD game, but with a charming twist to it. The twist made us return to SteamWorld. We couldn’t help but wonder why the robots were good guys running gold mines, and the humans were such greedy, aggressive lowlifes. How had that come about? What’s the story here? We wanted to make another game in the series and give away a bigger slice of the background. The premise of SteamWorld Dig was interesting, because it built on the mining track established in SWTD, and we love games about mining.

Geek Empire: There’s something cathartic about going into the mine and digging out treasure just for kicks. The controls and general movement just feel so fluid and responsive. How much work went into the feel of Dig?

B.S.: We started for real in October of last year. Before then, our lead designer, Olle Håkansson, had been tinkering with the game design document. Soon after that, the entire team was working on it (We were 8 at that point, 11 now).

We spent quite a bit longer on it than we had expected from the start — at the outset we honestly believed that we’d be done by the beginning of March. We ran into the worst stumbling block sometime in January, when we realized that the game wasn’t fun enough. We took a couple of steps back and tried to pin down what the fun factor would be. Then we made the decision to introduce wall-jumping and predesigned caves. With those two features in there, suddenly SteamWorld Dig was a joy to play.

Geek Empire: What was the game like before you reworked it?

B.S.: It was quite strict — you had to dig down in a zigzag pattern in order to be able to get up again. We noticed how our polite testers held out for a while, but were noticeably bored after an hour or two. We decided to scrap the “dig intelligent” approach, and let people dig the way they saw fit. We also got a few “What am I supposed to do now?” reactions, which was mildly alarming, and we realized we would need milestone areas in the game — predesigned caves and friendly, non-intrusive hints at what to do next.

From the beginning, we also had heavy tutorials, and they were no fun. It could be a “this is how you use your speed boots” segment, which really intruded on the experience. Or, at the very start of the game, instructions on how to move and mine. We realized after a while that they weren’t needed — people would get it! Instead, once you got a new upgrade, we could present the player with an obstacle that could only be dealt with using the new upgrade, and give a super-tiny hint of the button combination needed to activate it.

Geek Empire: That method of teaching a player through organic narrative has always been my favorite way of letting players learns a new skill. Very Metroid. Just got the Ice Beam? You can’t leave this room until you learn how to use it! B.S.: It is the perfect way to teach stuff. OK, you got it — now learn how to use it before you do anything else.

Geek Empire: In terms of design and progression, the story has our protagonist, Rusty[SGH1] , slowly replacing his steam-based body parts with electrical ones, up until the final confrontation, where he realizes he’s essentially been led down this path. What was this story element meant to represent? The shedding of weakness to become self-sufficient? A commentary on the lack of agency in games, ala BioShock?

B.S.: That’s a great question.

We always knew we wanted to have a story for Dig, something to help build the world and sell the franchise. Before we knew what the fun factor in digging and upgrading was, we needed something to help drive the player down the mine again, something to focus the direction of the game.

Our first instinct was to make a Mega Man-style linear story, but as we hadn’t found the fun factor yet, it grew to something sprawling with multiple endings and real choices. It ended up taking too much room, driving players not interested in the story to punch that A-Button to skip.

We all felt that we still wanted the story, just never at the expense of game play. We ended up having to condense a multitude of story ideas into a few sentences to get back to that original simple concept. This of course led to more than a few concessions. In the end, we feel it was the right decision for the overall experience of the game.

The reasoning behind not giving Rusty any dialogue, except for the very beginning and end, was that this would take away from the player’s ability to project their own personality onto Rusty. It also meshed well with the Clint Eastwood-like loner character. What we lost was more humor.

Given all these concessions, the best tool we had to make this story coherent was theme. The main theme we focused on is humanity’s relation to technological progress. All the characters and story lines more or less touch on this subject. Rusty’s arc is the main force driving it. The story is sort of Spider-Man in that regard, though Rusty’s uncle is far from as nice as Uncle Ben.

Even though it is somewhat tragic, we never wanted Dig to be a “technology is going to doom us if we don’t know what we are doing” kind of story like a Michael Crichton novel. A game story, even a simple one like ours, should let the player be a character, coming up with their own conclusions. So we ended up letting Rusty go down a path of technological progress that he might not be ready to handle.

Geek Empire: In closing, is there anything you’d like to say to the people who haven’t tried Dig yet?

B.S.: Now, a month after release, we can safely state that SteamWorld Dig has had an extraordinary run. We are, of course, thrilled. It’s won both Platinum and Gold Awards from very well-respected sites, Nintendo wants us onboard for a number of events, and many people are eager to talk to us about the game and want to hear our opinion on gaming in general.

That said, I think that SteamWorld Dig is still too new for the 3DS community — it will need time to sink in. For example, the other day SteamWorld Dig was included at #9 on IGN’s list of the best 25 3DS games of all time, which is an enormous achievement for an indie game — the list was a bit of a Nintendo tour de force. There were more than a thousand comments on the list, and I was surprised at how few of these comments actually mentioned SteamWorld Dig — most of the gamers rather discussed why their favorite game didn’t fare better, posted their own lists of favorite games, and so on — instead of saying “What is this new game? Why haven’t I played it yet?”

When we released Anthill, we anticipated — and got — both great praise and the occasional “I don’t like it.” For SteamWorld Dig, it seems that everybody that plays the game falls in love with it. The user ratings are through the roof, and we have not had one negative remark so far. As far as we know, this is exceptional. So, to everyone who hasn’t tried SteamWorld Dig: this game is for you, get it and form your own opinion. I think it’s safe to say that not only will you dig it — you will love it!