This year, we’ve seen several successful cases of developers prioritizing co-op in their vision for a game. The co-op spirit is alive and well at every level, from bigger releases like Elden Ring Nightreign and Split Fiction, to smaller ones like R.E.P.O. and Peak. Secret Door’s Sunderfolk should be talked about on the same level in terms of co-op experiences.
Sunderfolk is a streamlined tabletop-inspired experience that you can play with up to four people after purchasing just one copy of the game.
There’s a big update on the way, so I spoke to Creative Director Erin Marek at PAX West last month about what’s to come. We also discussed Sunderfolk’s multiplayer focus, community collaboration, and more.
What’s Coming in the 1.5 Update?
The upcoming update is bringing several fitting additions, including the brand new One Shot mode that allows you to play any campaign mission as many times as you’d like, either solo or in co-op.
“We are actively working on some new stuff. Some of that includes things like the One Shot mode, which you played today. [It] has the rating and challenge rating system that you can use to get scored on how you do in the mission,” Marek said. At the moment, you have to replay the campaign to experience a favorite mission or challenge a second time. One Shot allows groups to drop in and play right away, which fits well for a game that takes minutes to grasp.
“And then, when it comes to the narrative scope of decision-making, we actually don’t have a narrative person on our team, so we try to keep it within a scope that we thought we could accomplish for this game,” Marek explained. This makes sense, considering the 1.5 update focuses on expanding features and how best to improve the gameplay experience. “But maybe for our next project, we’d look for something more… diversified in the way that the narrative impacts the gameplay.”
Players can also look forward to emotes, campaign renaming, and boss rebalancing to go along with One Shot. Emotes seem like a given for multiplayer games these days, but it turns out they weren’t high on the list of requests for Sunderfolk.
“Nobody asked for emotes, but we all internally wanted emotes,” Marek joked. “People really love naming things, and I think people love the social aspect. So, emotes were something that we’re like, not only can you visually do something with it, but you can also rename the text with it. You can literally do a mad lib at any point in combat, which is cool.”
On the other end of the spectrum, boss rebalancing is something that was highly requested by the community, and it’s being addressed. “We had some very strong opinions about how the bosses were, and we also had some internal telemetry that was suggesting, yeah, the players are saying there’s a problem, and we’re seeing there’s an issue. So that rebalancing, I think, was maybe the most requested from existing players,” Marek said.
“It’s a little sad because those players have probably already played that mission and suffered through it, so the balancing really helps the next set of people who come through. But it’s great that they’re still giving that feedback.”
Sunderfolk’s Community Collaboration
Secret Door is regularly in contact with the community, whether it be through dev updates on their website or conversations in their Discord server. This constructive back and forth has led to the development of a community mission that players have helped create, which will also be available to play in the next update.
“We just did a community collab where we pretty much had our folks in Discord vote on a bunch of different metrics. And then, we used what they voted on to construct and build a mission for them,” Marek explained. “We have it called ‘This is What You Asked For’ because this is an insane set of criteria to be able to play with and design a mission around.”
While this sounds like a fun concept, it doesn’t come without its fair share of challenges for the dev team. “We had a couple of different questions that included monsters, level, biome – stuff like that. And we knew that some combinations were going to be harder than others,” Marek said. “For example, one of the things that stressed us out is when the players were like, ‘We want the biggest map we can get at max level. We want it to be a puzzle mission.’ And we were just like, how do we make this fun and not [have it] take them two hours to play through this mission?”
Despite the difficulties and change in the level development methods, the team seems to be enjoying this undertaking. “We did have to kind of change our process a bit, but it was super fun. And I think that we actually have a mission that players are going to really like,” Marek said.
Many community members are also interested in being able to create their own levels or missions within the game, but a feature like that isn’t possible at the moment. It seems like the collaboration mission is as close as the team can get right now.
“There are so many people who are interested in creating their own missions or being able to design stuff in the game,” Marek said. “It’s not something that we can technically support right now with Sunderfolk, but potentially for a future product. Especially for how much the audience wants something like that. But maybe we’ll do more community collabs and things like that in the future.”
Features for the Future
The 1.5 update is bringing a lot of new content to Sunderfolk, but there are still features, ideas, and other community requests that had to be left out. “One of the things that we’re hearing quite a bit about is that some people aren’t a big fan of the phone controls,” Marek shared. “Where it’s a little bit of a turnoff. For us, the phone controls were intended to be for couch co-op first.”
Sunderfolk’s co-op is played using a free phone app. Each player joins the session through the app to play on a single shared monitor or screen. For example, the player who owns the game could share their screen in Discord or Steam Remote Play and have three friends join with their phones while watching the same screen.
“We do know that if you’re playing online remotely with friends, it kind of sometimes feels weird to be like, ‘I have to connect a phone in, I’m just by myself,’” Marek explains. “So one of the things we’ve been looking at is, is there a way for us to cheaply implement something that would be able to be on controls using mouse and keyboard, for example.”
The team is currently experimenting with different ways to implement other control options, but players will have to wait for future developments on that front.
A Balance Between Solo and Co-op
Looking toward the future, Secret Door is aiming to improve the solo experience, even though multiplayer has been the main focus thus far. “[Sunderfolk] was always intended to be multiplayer first, but we also knew that some folks wouldn’t have people they wanted to play with, or maybe they couldn’t get their group back together, but they wanted to continue the campaign themselves,” Marek said. “It was actually pretty late in development [that] we added the solo player mode. We’ve seen that there’s around 30% of the total campaigns are solo players.”
Marek mentions that the team wants to make improvements to the solo UX by upgrading the inventory management, item trading between characters, and streamlining the experience as a whole. “I think we’ll still always be multiplayer first,” Marek said. “Our goal is bringing people together in a positive way, but we don’t want to neglect these folks that are over here being like ‘I just love your game and want to play it by myself.’”
As someone who loves to play nearly any and every game solo if given the option, this sentiment is much appreciated. Sunderfolk update 1.5 is coming later this year.
