Grimoire Groves is a new cozy, colorful game in which players team up with a variety of plant creatures and a quirky cast of NPCs to solve the mystery of who stole the Rainbow Socks. The game’s development story is a fascinating one, as making a combat-free roguelike was a challenge for developer Stardust. Grimoire Groves was also the developers’ first experience with running a Kickstarter, which successfully funded the game and allowed them to self-publish.
Game Rant spoke with Stardust founder and Grimoire Groves lead designer Tabea Iseli about the game’s development journey. They discussed how the team first came up with the idea for Grimoire Groves, how they drew inspiration from titles such as Wizard of Legend and Animal Crossing, the decision to include farming simulator-based mechanics, and more. The journey was a long one, but Grimoire Groves recently saw a successful launch in mid-March. This interview was conducted prior to Grimoire Groves’ release. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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The Origins of Grimoire Groves
Q: Where did the idea for Grimoire Groves first come from?
Iseli: It’s actually a really long story, so we created a game before Grimoire Groves, which was called AVA. AVA was a fairy-tale tarot card game for mobile, and it was much more of an artsy game. We collaborated with artists around the world. It got a lot of critical acclaim, but we never really sold a lot of copies. For our next game, we wanted to go with something that still had the same vibe and still is within our values of creating diverse games for a diverse audience, but with a broader appeal.
We started to search for ideas that we were excited about, and a lot of people in our team really love roguelike games. They are, on one hand, often very dark: you’re in a dark dungeon, slaying monsters and demons and stuff like that. They’re also kind of hard to pick up. I think a lot of us had to learn how to play roguelike games through friends who would explain to us how the genre works. You are dying and you lose yourself, so you have to try again. You just start over and stuff like that.
When we started to talk about that, we were thinking: is it possible to create a roguelike game that is actually not about fighting monsters? And can we actually do it? It was a game design challenge in a way because we wanted to create a roguelike game that is completely nonviolent. That’s where things started out, and we came up with the idea of ‘Hey, how about you grow plant creatures?’ We felt that it probably wouldn’t be that hard to create, but we realized that it’s so much more than just changing a setting, making a game more colorful, and removing monsters. It actually became a huge challenge to create something like that.
Q: In addition to roguelike gameplay, Grimoire Groves has elements like cooking and foraging. Were those always part of the game, or were they added later?
Iseli: We realized that the hardest part about creating the game is to get some familiarity with the game for players because it’s just incredibly overwhelming if you have to play a game where you have no clue how things work. Basically, it has a lot to do with ludic literacy, and what kinds of things we are used to as players.
And through the challenge that we had, where we wanted to remove combat, there were a lot of things that players are used to that we had to remove and rebuild from scratch. We had to kind of build our very own language on how we audiovisually communicate to players what’s actually happening on the screen. Because a lot of the conventions—genre conventions, but also general gaming conventions—we weren’t able to use. Stuff like “Oh, if you get hit, the sprite of a character or plant or NPC is blinking white” or something like that, which we realized seems very violent, even if our game looks different.
We had to basically recreate all these elements so that we could communicate what was happening on the screen. We also realized that we needed to bring in some things people are used to because, otherwise, it’s just so overwhelming. We basically decided to get our community involved from the very beginning, from day one of the project. After about six months to a year, we figured out that people who are interested in our games also really like farming games. We felt like adding some farming game elements to the game would work out pretty well with our concept, but also with the people who want to play our game and also help a lot with bringing familiarity to the game. That’s kind of how this happened, and how we managed to marry a lot of these roguelike elements that we had to reconstruct with elements that players love and know.
Grimoire Groves Drew From Many Different Sources Of Inspiration
Q: Were there any games that inspired Grimoire Groves, especially any that you looked to for inspiration about creating a combat-free roguelike?
Iseli: When you look at the final product, a lot of people are pointing out, of course, Cult of the Lamb, but funny enough, it wasn’t even an influence for the game because we started to work on the game long before Cult of the Lamb came out. Rather, when it came out, it was really like a relief to us because it was one of the first games where we really felt like, ‘Okay, that’s kind of proof that our concept of mixing roguelike with farming and cozy elements can find an audience and find an appeal outside the community that we were building ourselves.’
In terms of what games we were looking at, it’s probably a mix of Wizard of Legend and Animal Crossing. Wizard of Legend is also a roguelike game about casting magic, so we had a look at that. If you compare Grimoire Groves to Wizard of Legend, you can see a lot of similarities. So that’s one game we looked at for inspiration.
And then Animal Crossing. When we started to come up with our NPCs, they were at first traditional shopkeepers like in traditional roguelike games. We realized that our audience, our community, started to get much more attached to these characters. They also chose the names, and they helped us choose different designs for them. They were really, really attached to just the few pictures we sent them. We wanted to give these characters more room in the game than just ‘Oh, it’s a person who has one dialogue line, and you buy stuff from them, and that’s it.’
We started to look at Animal Crossing and giving NPCs individual characteristics and personalities and things that they like or dislike. In the end, we got feedback that they wanted to learn even more about the characters. We ended up writing a little storyline for about eight of the characters, where you can build a house with them or for them. So there we looked a lot at Animal Crossing, even though, of course, the scopes of the two games are completely different. It was still an inspiration in terms of how the players got attached to the characters and have their favorite villagers.
Q: Cozy gamers love characters.
Iseli: It’s true. And they love story, which was really interesting to us because I would argue that most roguelike games don’t really have a lot of story. Some of them are just like “There’s the dungeon. Kill some stuff. Whatever. Don’t think too much about it.”
Since we are so different in terms of how we have to explain a lot of mechanics, we started to get more and more and even more dialogue. We were like, “Oh no, what do we do? We have so much dialogue!” Of course, we wanted to make the dialogue fun and entertaining and so on, but we still felt like ‘What if it’s too much?’ And through our beta test, we actually realized that people were like ‘More. We want to learn more about these characters.’ So we were really happy. I wrote the story, and I was super happy that I could do more with that and give them more dialogue and more personality.
I love the overarching mystery of “Who stole the Rainbow Socks?” I want to know the answer. I can’t wait to find out whodunnit.
Iseli: It’s interesting because we fought a long time about what the story should be about. Because usually, in games, it’s like this evil big god or emperor wants to destroy the world or terrorize everything and whatnot. It was the middle of the pandemic, and we were just sitting there thinking, ‘Can’t we just have a nice story about something fun?’ And then we were like, ‘Okay, but what?’ And somebody was just like “A pair of rainbow socks.”
Everybody laughed in the meeting, and they were like, ‘Haha, what a silly idea.’ The longer we were talking and joking about it, the more we were like, ‘Actually, yeah, let’s make a story about rainbow socks.’
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The Game Was Successfully Funded Via Kickstarter
Q: Grimoire Groves was funded on Kickstarter, and it did very well. It reached its initial goal very quickly. What was that process like?
Iseli: Incredible. None of us had actually done a Kickstarter before, but several studios in Switzerland have done game Kickstarters before. Since the Swiss game dev community is quite tightly-knit and we are in close contact with other studios, we had the opportunity to go to others and ask them questions. But even if they tell you “These are the pitfalls that you should avoid, and this is what you should do,” in the end, you’re still like, I have a game idea, I have a Discord with several hundred people who seem to like the game idea, but is that enough?
We actually started the campaign with less than the amount of followers that Kickstarter recommends for the amount of money we wanted to earn. We launched our Kickstarter with less than we should have had for the goal that we were aiming for. Then, well, we basically pushed a button.
I don’t remember exactly how long it took, but I think it was like 30 minutes or an hour later, we were already at 5000 bucks. Everyone was just sitting there, not believing what was happening. I mean it wasn’t a huge success. It wasn’t a big, super-successful Kickstarter like Coral Island or The Wandering Village. But still, it was incredible. Within less than 24 hours, we met our initial goal. It was so nice to see that so many people were actually interested in our game.
We started working on the game in 2020, and our idea was, ‘Okay, let’s work on a prototype for six months to a year.’ After the year, we’d have the game, we’d have funding, and we could go and search for a publisher. And we didn’t find a publisher. It’s not a game that was low-risk. It wasn’t a safe bet. We did have several publishers that were super interested, especially scouts from under-represented groups that were so over the moon about the game, but then it just never happened.
We were barely scraping by, just having enough money to not stop, but not really enough to continue. At some point, we just said, ‘Okay, we need to do that Kickstarter.’ It’s going to be a lot of work, but there’s an audience for it. And if this doesn’t work, we need to bury our baby. This was about two and a half, three years into development. We did it, and it worked really well. It was a crazy month but we never had to worry about “Oh, will we make it?” Because we made it pretty early.
We were really excited about the Nintendo Switch port because we knew people wanted to have it for the Switch. We were like, we really need to get to $50,000 to actually be able to do that, and it was going really slowly. And then, once we hit it, it was like the floodgates opened again, and all the people who were waiting for the Switch port to be a reality were like, “Let’s fund this.” So that was really nice.
Of course, I’m also pretty sure that Kickstarter was actually one of the big reasons why our investors trusted us to be able to self-publish the game because we were able to show, “Hey, we’re a small team. Nobody in our team has done this before, but we managed to do that Kickstarter, so we can actually release the game.”
Q: And how does it feel, to be finally launching Grimoire Groves after all this time?
Iseli: I’m in absolute panic mode but not in terms of the game. I feel like we did a lot of balancing. Not all bugs are gone, and I’m sure, after we get more feedback from the players, we’ll have to do some more balancing. But we’re featured in Steam Next Fest, and that’s the same feeling as the Kickstarter because I’m just sitting here. I don’t know exactly what to do. We’re talking to our community, we’re doing marketing and whatnot, but it just feels like it’s out of our hands. We don’t know what’s going to happen.
Q: Last question – I’m curious, do you have a favorite plant or plant creature that appears in Grimoire Groves?
Iseli: I’ve been thinking about that, actually, because I played so much in the past few weeks. I really like the “mud-corn,” which is a floating octopus-like plant that has balls of mud on its head that it throws. If you get hit by a ball of mud, or if it hits the ground and you stand in it, it’s going to slow you. As with a lot of our plants, we didn’t just want it to have an interaction with the player but also with other plants. A lot of plants will have impacts on other plants as well. If other plants are walking in the mud, they’re getting fed. They get energy and grow. It’s really fun because, on the one hand, I’m trying not to get stuck in the mud, but then I’m also trying to position myself so that other plants get fed by the mud. That usually leads to a situation where mud-corns are something that’s helping me a lot in the game, and that’s something I really like.
Another favorite of mine are the “Herberts,” which were named by a community member. They are muddy monsters that are nice, but really big. When they jump around, you can see their hair, which is roots. And that’s pretty cute.
[END]
Casual
Roguelike
Action
RPG
Adventure
- Released
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March 6, 2025
- Developer(s)
-
Stardust GmbH
- Publisher(s)
-
Wings, Stardust GmbH