Discounty developers give us insight into why you should try this new spin on the life sim
Ring it up
- Discounty is an upcoming life sim in the vein of Stardew Valley
- But here you play as the manager of the discount supermarket rather than competing with it
- We spoke to the devs to find out more about this interesting spin on the genre
The humble life sim genre was kick-started into a new life by the release of Stardew Valley back in 2016. Offering the agrarian ideal and an escape from the hustle and bustle of city life, it proved a smash hit with fans. But many new releases in the genre have taken a different tack, including the upcoming Discounty.
Already popular on PC, Discounty is set to make its way to iOS and Android later this year. It puts you in the shoes of a young arrival in the town of Blomkest, a fading harbour community where your role is to run the local discount supermarket on behalf of your ailing aunt.
It's far from the utopianist fun of Stardew Valley, as you balance keeping the shop running with how it affects the community, and find opposition from the strangest corners. But already fans have warmed to it and hopefully will on mobile as well.
We got the chance to put some key questions to the Discounty devs over at Crinkle Cut Games for this new release, and here are some of the key insights we found!
Yes! My name is Anne Christina Elsberg, I am a co-founder of Crinkle Cut Games, and I served as the director of Discounty (although I mostly did writing and game design).
Can you give us a brief overview of what Discounty is all about and what inspired its creation?Discounty is a narrative-driven life simulation game in which you manage your aunt’s old supermarket. You stock shelves, ring up customers, design your own layout, etc., but you also have a life on the other side of the sliding doors. Strike trade deals with local vendors, get involved in petty small-town drama of Blomkest, and unravel old family secrets. Attempt to grow your business, but don’t expect the people of Blomkest to accept just anything; nobody wants their town to be defined by a supermarket after all.
Was it always the plan to bring Discounty to mobile? If so, why does now feel like the right time? And if not, what made you decide it was a platform worth pursuing?Discounty started as a university project, so it is our first ever title as a commercial studio. Making it to any platform feels like a huge achievement! We always dreamt of bringing Discounty to as many players as possible, and we thought the tactile cash register mini-game would work really well on a touch screen. However, we were a three-person company, so we didn’t have the capacity to bring it to mobile at first, and we needed the expertise to understand the mobile market. Shortly after launch, we were approached by our mobile publisher SnapBreak, who brought both the capacity and expertise.
The timing is impeccable as well, since we just finalized a major update to the game!
Why did you go with the running of a supermarket as Discounty's concept, rather than the kind of agrarian lifestyle that other life sims offer?While there are a few core inspirations for this game, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that it’s inspired by my love of the NumPad on a traditional keyboard, but let me get back to that.
When I was younger, I used to play shopkeeping rogue-lites like Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale and Moonlighter. These games heavily feature action rogue-lite gameplay as a means to gather items to sell in a shop back in town. While I loved those games, I often wondered if it wouldn’t be possible to build a game centered wholly around running a shop. A couple of years later, while I was studying interaction design at university, my brother gifted me an obscure 3DS game called Dillon’s Dead-Heat Breakers.
While this is a tower defense game, it also features a cute shopkeeping mini-game in which the player has to type prices on the touchscreen. And then it occurred to me. Make a game where the shop is the main focus, featuring a strong tactile mini-game using the NumPad, and put that shop inside the world of a traditional life-sim like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley.
This was a grossly overscoped idea for a university student, but here we are.
What gave you the idea of putting players in a role so close to, and without control over, what would normally be perceived as a villain role within small-town life?
My love of the traditional farming life sim runs very deep, but often they go like this: You move to a small town and through the power of farming/fishing/shopkeeping, you grow, become rich, get married, and fix everybody’s problems along the way. And that’s great, but when we decided to replace the farm with a supermarket, we wanted to avoid romanticizing the effects growing a business can have on a small community. That’s why we built Discounty as a somewhat subversive experience where good intentions might not lead to good outcomes. With the new update, there is a chance to redeem yourself (or a chance to double down if you took a liking to being the villain).
Is the free update going to be in the mobile version at launch?Yes! Our major free expansion, People or Profit, will be included in the mobile version at launch.
The cosy management sim has become quite popular in recent years. Why do you think people are gravitating towards this type of experience?I think there are many correct answers and interpretations of this question. Some will argue that it can be explained by escapism from an increasingly hopeless world. I would argue that these experiences afford a different type of gameplay. Keeping track of time, sorting and organizing, optimizing, designing, and even caring. They are also generally more welcoming to players of all skill levels. They offer low-stakes and little friction wrapped in welcoming aesthetics. They rarely feature a fail state, and you shouldn’t necessarily feel bad when playing them. And they often feature strong, relatable, and universal player fantasies.
At Crinkle Cut Games, we want to serve strong player fantasy. Quitting your dead-end job in the big city, moving to the countryside, and restoring an old farm is a fantasy so old that even an ancient Greek poet, Theocritus, wrote poems dreaming of the idyll of pastoral life. Opening your own shop is also a strong player fantasy (I’m sure people of ancient Greece dreamt of that as well).
And I want to note that I have been so delighted to see people finally recognize the power of these games and welcome a large number of new people drawn in by the rise of the niche. I grew up with the kinds of games people now call ‘cozy’ or ‘wholesome’. As a kid, I played Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Chibi-Robo, etc., and later I reconnected with the genre when Stardew Valley came out.
If you had to give a new player one piece of advice when they’re starting with Discounty, what would it be?Play the game exactly how you want to play it! You don’t have to rush it or play efficiently. Take things at your own pace. And check the settings menu for special settings to modify the experience to your liking. I hope players will engage with the characters and the story, but if you’d rather not, we’ve designed the experience to be understandable from just reading the quest log in the PDA menu.
Will players who try Discounty on mobile notice any major differences from the PC version?There are no major differences other than playing on a touchscreen. Typing the prices on the touch screen in the cash register mini-game works really well!
What kind of peripheral support and other quality-of-life features will there be?It will be possible to play with a controller, mouse and keyboard, and on the touch screen itself. The text and interface are scaled to match the smaller screen size. We will feature the same accessibility settings as can be found on other platforms.
Discounty was our first game as a studio, and we’ve learned so much about making and releasing a game. With the amazing support and feedback from the community, we were able to release our free major update, People or Profit, which brings Discounty much closer to realizing its full potential. The support also means that we can continue making games together as a team, which is such a huge privilege and very exciting. I hope players will stay tuned for what’s to come.
Are there plans to expand beyond this new chapter?The new chapter gives a definitive ending to the main story, well, three definitive endings actually! While we'd love to add some small content in the future, we're also excited to get started on a new project very soon. But first, the team is looking forward to a well-deserved break; which we haven't had in far too long!
Exciting stuff! So keep an eye out for Discounty, arriving later this year for Android and later on iOS. But in the meantime, if you want some experience with the format, why not check out our list of the best mobile games like Stardew Valley?
