Almighty Video Game Designer

Chapter 210: Spirit of Don’t Starve

There were many points which attracted players to Don’t Starve, but it all comes back to the ‘Survival’ aspect.

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, needs are divided into five major categories: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.

The five needs form a pyramid, with the most bottom playing being physiological, and self-actualization on the top.

The lower the need, the easier it is to realise, but also the most important and urgent.

That means if a person lacked food, safety, and esteem, they should feel the strongest for food. In that moment, safety and esteem wouldn’t be as important.

This was why under incredible food stress, humans would hunt large beasts (giving up safety) or beg for food (give up esteem).

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can also be applied to different industries, including video games.

Many game designers build the complete hierarchy of Maslow’s needs in the game, using to drive players to chase fictional numbers in the game, and be so immersed they can’t stop themselves.

A simple example would be pay to win games that sell ‘strength’, which focused on safety and esteem in the hierarchy of needs.

The weaker players would face the danger of being killed every moment they are in game. As they face a lack of safety, this drives them to spend more time and money in game in order to regain safety,

The stronger players on the other hand have a certain amount of safety, so they pivot to chase the needs in esteem or self-actualization, such as taking from the others, forming a guild, gathering this underlings to battle others as they fork out more and more money just to chase the high.

Normally, very few games reach the ‘physiological needs’ level on the pyramid as it was difficult to develop, and didn’t fit into a majority of games.

The physiological needs of humans are quite simple, consisting of food, water, health, and reproduction. However, games wouldn’t usually have their players run around to gather food or water. They usually wouldn’t have hunger in the game as they could only fit in so much content in the game, with better ways to spend the time of the players.

Don’t Starve exploits this oversight, conveying all aspects of survival.

Moreover, Don’t Starve wasn’t just a simple game. As one delved deeper into the gameplay, they will realise that there was a lot of content in the game.

It was different from many main characters with huge motivations. Wilson’s existence was just for himself, he didn’t need to save the world or save others. His only aim was to survive, and everything he does in the world of Don’t Starve was literally just that.

Don’t Starve is a highly stylized game with a very mature mindset.

The world of Don’t’ Starve wasn’t well realised nor have a deep story, it could even be said that it escaped reality. The art style and music was filled with dark humour, yet feeled incredibly real in the face of death.

The feeling of absurdity and reality runs through the Don’t Starve, which is strengthened when combined with technology and magic in the game.

Living moving robots, pigs living in groups, tombstones in forests, remains of the ones who came before, horrible monsters… These scary settings may seem unrelated at first glance, but were closely related upon deeper inspection.

The world was a highly integrated unique magical world.

And Don’t Starve’s lifespan came from its rich content. It may seem like a simple 2D game, but it was more playable than some large works.

The mobs were really complicated, each mob provided unique food items and resources which the main character could utilize using campfires, drying racks, crockpots and traps.

Moreover, there were many things the character could interact with, harvesting by hand, chopping, mining, digging, lighting, planting… The players could interact with anything, including the map itself. Precious materials could also be used as fuel in a time of need.

There are also various materials the players could obtain. If the player wanted some pigskin, they could go head to head against the pigs, or they could look for abandoned pig houses, using the altar, or planting spider dens near pig houses and let the spider kill the pigs for the players.

And when the players get gathered as much as they need and start losing interest in the survival mode, when the players lose interest in trying to survive, the players will discover a whole new challenge in adventure mode.

Moreover, it was also a cool emotionless game mode, any oversight could lead to unrecoverable consequences in the face of survival.

And so, survival becomes more and more desired. When the players will get a huge sense of bliss as they find a patch of carrots and berries in front of a pig village.

Many players only realise how good it was to have a full stomach after playing Don’t Starve.

And it was because of this that Don’t Starve was able to attract so many players who were interested in surival games and retain their hardcore players. There were even players who weren’t even close to getting bored of the game a few years in.

It was because every playthrough of Don’t Starve was a different journey.

Moreover, like many sandbox games, mods were the core of the longevity of a game like Don’t Starve.

Setting aside official DLCs, the players could also find a lot fun in mods they create themselves.

Character mods for example, One Piece characters such as Zoro (has their own blade, can cut trees, no sense of direction, map is always dark), and Ace(has fireball, regains sanity next to fire) were created. Assistant mods included more, better description, building guides, functional mods included permanent tents, expanded backpacks…

There were also large scale mods such as Hero in the Dark, which had enough content to last players half a year. These large scale mods could almost be considered their own game.

Of course, Chen Mo decided to create just a few of these more common mods that don’t affect the gameplay much, leaving the other mods up to the players.

This was the nature of sandbox games, only when the players play their part will the game’s full potential be realised.