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People often ask me why we didn’t do a sequel to Furi, and I usually answer that we made Haven because our goal is to surprise players, to innovate, to explore new experiences. This is the absolute truth. But there’s another side to it that I don’t always tell: Furi was exhausting to make. I needed a pause from fast paced action. I wanted a game that felt like a break between two action games. 

When I was working on AAA games, I played pretty much every blockbuster to know the market, the competition. But between a game of Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed, I needed a pause, and I used to play 30 minutes of Flower. I remember this time fondly. This game helped me relax between two overwhelming experiences.

That feeling was at the core of what I wanted to make with Haven: a game that feels like a gentle breeze. A game that lets you relax. A game that’s like holding hands on a nice outdoor walk. One way to achieve that was of course with Haven’s concept: the love story of a couple trying to stay together. A couple gliding over tall grass on a deserted planet. 

Gliding and leaving a trail of tall grass is relaxing

But that relaxing feeling doesn’t come only from the game setting. All the game design around it has to make the experience smooth and chill. I wanted a game that felt light. Lighter than most modern big games that ask you to remember so many things.

If you don’t see what I mean by that, think about any big AAA open world game or RPG. They all have tons of features, most of the time the same features but with tiny differences in their implementation. Character progression, with lots of characteristics. Weapons and upgrades. Skill trees. Combos. Vehicles. AI teammates. Consumables items. Wide variety of lootable objects. Exotic gameplays like puzzles or races… 

All those features and content are exciting. It sometimes adds depth, it helps build the lore and makes the experience immersive. But it’s also a bit tiring. Playing those games is like learning a new language. There is so much content that, naturally, it means a lot to learn and remember. 

In order to create that relaxing feeling in Haven, we had to drop all that content. We had to reduce the amount of information needed. It’s a game where we want you to feel free: you broke from your chains and you explore a mysterious planet. We don’t want the game to be a drag by asking you to remember too much. To make it feel simple, we needed to make it lighter. 

Here is a bunch of concrete design decisions that came from this philosophy: 

No quest log

A RPG needs a main quest and side quests, right? Well, there are lots of secondary things to do in Haven, they are just not formatted in a “to-do list”. If you are like me, you already have tons of to-do lists in your real life… I didn’t want Haven to be yet another game with a list of objectives to complete. So in Haven, there’s a simple main objective, given by the story and no objective list! 

You can always have a chat on the couch to get a reminder of what to do.

After that it’s just about you exploring Source. To be honest, Yu and Kay do have a logbook. It helps you remember what to look for on the different fragments of the planet. But it’s not a list of tasks. There are no “tasks to complete” in Haven, because tasks are boring and tiring.

The logbook (bottom right) lists what’s been done and left to do on each fragment.

Simple economy

In many games, you have to manage resources, currencies, and optimize your spendings to save every little gold coin you can. In Haven you won’t have to worry about micro management. You have enough or you don’t, that’s it. 

The inventory screen is rather simple compared to most RPGs

On Source, Yu and Kay gather flow, a very handy energy they use for many things. The flow meter isn’t a detailed gauge with number and an advanced refill system. It’s a ball of energy that’s more or less bubbly depending on how much flow you have. 

You never need to know “precisely” how much flow you have, you just need to know if you’re running out.

You don’t have to check how much rust (the red crust that covers the planet) or food you have, you just go craft something and you’ll see. Basically, you never really think about managing your inventory. 

Very few numbers

Even action games can be crowded with numbers these days. In Haven, you don’t have a precise health bar in combat, but instead your characters show their health status through the color of their energy suit and by the way they move. The game is designed so that you don’t need the precise info (note: and it’s also designed to be colorblind-friendly). 

When their health state changes, the characters walk and stand differently.

Their stamina and hunger are reminded through the dialogs. The only number you see is the damage when hitting an enemy or taking a hit. 

Numbers here are not really important, they just show which attack deals more damage.

Simple crafting

Crafting can be very fun and prompt experimentation. But it can also require a lot of memorisation. In Haven, the UI simply shows you the ingredients you have. You can start mixing them and you’ll see a preview of the result. 

Aaah… Creamberry flambé <3

No weapons or skill tree

I’m a RPG lover. I can appreciate spending hours choosing the best equipment for my team. But Haven’s taking a break from that. There’s no choice of weapon or skill tree. Sometimes it’s also fine to just focus on being good in combat, by yourself. And to drop the burden of comparing stats for each item in the game.

Yu and Kay evolve and gain new skills, but the game is not about becoming more powerful.

Very little HUD and UI

It seems easy to state “there will be no HUD”, but eventually you find out that people don’t understand a complex game without help from the interface… That happened to me on many games, indie and AAA alike. The only way you can achieve this is by actually having a very simple game. Journey pulled it off brilliantly. In Haven, the HUD is really super light, because the game is simple from the root.

While gliding, you just need to focus on your characters and where you want to go. 

Play coop seamlessly

Even starting a co-op session has been designed to be easy and simple. If you’re playing solo and want someone to join your game, they just have to take the gamepad and press a button. Co-op will start automatically. There’s no menu. You don’t have to start over a new game. 

A second player can join simply by pressing a button on their gamepad.

Of course simplicity is not the only way to go. I love a hairy and dense RPG as much as anyone else. But sometimes, between these deep and exhausting systems you learn in games, it’s good to take a little break. It’s what we wanted to achieve with Haven. Make it a gentle breeze, a soft hand that will take you through its journey without asking you to care too much about details. In Haven, we only want you to care about Yu and Kay. 

I often say that game design is like cooking, because creating a gameplay experience feels a lot like selecting ingredients, mixing them together until it feels good. But we can make the analogy with cooking even larger: making a game is very similar to creating a complete meal! Gameplay is the main dish, for sure, but you also have to think about the starter and dessert. And as much as starters go, what’s better than a good old opening movie?

Opening movies really set the mood before you start the game. The first time you launch the game, you get a peak at the tone, the values, the characters. You project yourself on the journey. It’s a teaser. Then, you discover the game, and you spend hours on it. Each time you launch the game, the opening movie is there. As soon as you hear the first note, you are swapping worlds. Like the smell of a dish, you anticipate it, it makes you salivate. The opening is not a teaser anymore, it’s a welcome.

Japanese games have a tradition of opening movie playing from the title screen. Each time I launch a game like this, I let the opening play once before loading my save. It’s like watching the opening of a TV show or an anime. It’s part of the experience.

In Phantasy Star 2‘s opening, I like how the title screen says that it’s bigger than a kingdom, it’s a multi-star fantasy. There’s mythology and tech. Even the music covers two different tones, starting from gloomy and mysterious to something more cheerful and positive.

Persona games openings are always pieces of art. They present everything with style: characters, world, story. I can’t hear the first notes of Persona 4‘s opening without feeling a chill down my spine. Dragon Quest XI opening movie is much more classic, but no less strong. It’s the image of the game, a pretty classic yet epic adventure of a group of friends.

Years later, when I watch the openings from old games, they take me back. In a couple of minutes, they revive the memory of the whole adventure. Hopefully, we can create that long lasting connection for Haven, with a memorable opening that captures the game magic.

Please enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bIhi9FP97Ys

The opening movie was directed and created by Yukio Takatsu – an expert of anime openings, with the support of Yapiko Animation. Takatsu-san did an incredible job bringing our concepts, world and characters to life. The editing really makes Danger‘s original music created for the game shine, and vice versa. We hope it will make you want to dance and twirl like Yu and Kay.

The art style is different from the art in the game of course, but it’s in essence exactly what we are trying to express with the game: a couple of characters who love each other, and with whom we hope you are going to fall in love in turn. An established relationship, that’s still evolving, in movement, gliding and twirling at a fast pace, tied by flow and rust, across different planets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ragUUT9bsFQ

We are hard at work for finishing Haven and bringing it to PC and consoles this year. We hope that you liked the starter and still have a bit of appetite for the main dish!

Emeric and The Game Bakers

Mr Boss is still there, bossing around! If you didn’t beat him already by chaining combos, now seems to be the right time.

As you may know, supporting a game is a lot of work. As developers, we make a game, test it, polish it, release it… and sometimes update it after launch. When it is stable, we think we can breathe, take some days off, and maybe, make another game. But reality isn’t as simple. A game that worked great at one point in time will eventually stop working. Not because we left a bug. Because new devices require an update, because there’s a new version of the OS, because the rules of the stores change… It’s not the game itself that’s buggy and stops working, it’s the environment that changes and breaks it. For us, the developer, it means days or weeks of extra work to keep the game working. This is what we call “support” and it’s also a significant amount of money to spend on a game. That’s why unless the game keeps making enough revenue, we can’t support it forever.

For instance, Combo Crew was removed from the Play Store. The same version that was approved a couple of years ago was removed, because the requirements changed, and it required too much work to update it. It’s still available on iOS, but at one point, it might not work on Apple devices as well.
We are working hard to close our next Consoles and PC game, Haven, and we can’t spend too much time and money to work on our beloved 2013 mobile game… But because we love Combo Crew and want people to keep playing it, we decided to make it free!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuW2fmz4S3Y

So, as for today, Combo Crew is available for free on the Apple App Store, and we’ll just host the Android .apk file on our server.

– Download Combo Crew on the Apple App Store
– Download the Combo Crew apk for Android devices
To install the apk on your device, you may need to allow the installation of unknown sources.

Disclaimer
– As our agreement with Capcom ended, the Capcom characters (Viewtiful Joe + Street Fighter) are not playable in this version.
– In App Purchases will not work (note: they were never needed to play and finish the game, so no worries on this side. They were just shortcuts.)

Have fun with the game!
The Game Bakers