How Dave the Diver’s dev built a better Fortnite

The game director is considering adding a time portal to enable more crossovers

Mintrocket’s 2023 hit Dave the Diver is a chaotic mix of genres, fusing management and fishing sims with a host of mini games and absolutely absurd plot. The silliness and surprises not only produce a highly engaging game but make it very easy for Mintrocket CEO and game director Jaeho Hwang to keep adding content to it. Since launch, he’s been regularly reaching out to his favorite creators to find ways to bring new characters and challenges into Dave’s strange world.

“We try to be a version of Fortnite,” Hwang told Polygon in a video call. “Our game is set in the ocean, an open space that anyone can visit, so anything can happen, and we have a restaurant that anyone can walk into so it doesn’t feel really strange at all if someone suddenly shows up.”

Hwang traveled to Japan to broker deals to bring two of his favorite properties — Godzilla and Yakuza — into the game. The first add-on for Dave the Diver involved Godzilla retreating to recover in the Blue Hole, the place where Dave catches fish, battles giant monsters, and fraternizes with merfolk. In another content pack, Yakuza’s Ichiban Kasuga arrives at Bancho Sushi and teams up with Dave to fight the shady environmentalist organization Sea Blue.

“When it comes to bringing outside characters into our world, I don’t want to just make them a cameo appearance, but I want to give them some role in the game,” Hwang said. “I said I want to be like Fortnite, but we try to care more about the storyline, so it’s kind of hard for us to bring in characters from different settings like medieval or sci-fi. There are some IPs that I really want to work with, so maybe we should add a time portal to bring them in.”

Hwang’s favorite crossover so far was with another 2023 breakout game, Black Salt Games’ Lovecraftian horror fishing game Dredge.

“I had so much fun playing it myself, and I really wanted to find a way to work together, and there were a lot of requests from our players to do a crossover. I actually reached out to them directly by email at first, but I didn’t hear back at all, so I ended up going to their Discord and posting in the community channel myself,” Hwang said. “Later we heard the Dredge staff thought our email was fake.”

Dave and his pals have also popped up in plenty of other games including Balatro, Human Fall Flat and Real VR Fishing, and he’ll be coming to Fortnite soon. Hwang credits the popularity of his characters to how relatable they are, and he loves hearing about people’s favorites when they reach out about collaborations. Beyond Dave, developers and fans often want to see more of the sushi chef Bancho, the sketchy restaurant investor and vendor Cobra, and the restaurant’s resident cat Momo.

“My general approach is to have Dave appear in as many places as possible, in all kinds of forms so I’m pretty open to other teams changing Dave’s look to fit the art style and atmosphere of other games,” Hwang said. “Dave is very cute. We love our characters. We actually make T-shirts and merch ourselves for those characters.”

The crossover fervor will continue when the Dave the Diver: In the Jungle DLC launches on June 18. The content pack — which the developers estimate includes around 10 hours of content — will take Dave and friends beyond the ocean to a series of jungle villages, many of which will include references to other games.

“Those characters will show up as part of a quest, visiting this village,” Hwang said. “We are pretending these IPs are real so jungle villages talk about a certain game saying I love this game or I played this game and then they use some content or items from those games.”

While Hwang is excited to expand the world of Dave the Diver with In the Jungle, you can expect more collaborations down the line.

“We are working with the IPs that we respect and love,” Hwang said. “Since launch, we wanted to do a big DLC with a story about our characters, not other characters, but the crossover DLC was too fun, so we kept doing them. All last year we put enormous effort into the In the Jungle DLC and we’re almost there.”