I'm in an emotionally abusive relationship with an eagle named Apollo who keeps demanding coconuts - and I like it. That's right, I'm one of those people still playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, freaking out over the fact that Nintendo just added a garden to my campsite and working extra hard to afford a Christmas tree for my camp visitors.
One thing that's been noticeable is, despite playing this mobile game everyday since it launched, I haven't actually spent any money yet. Even weirder, the game hasn't made me miserable about it. We went straight to Nintendo to find out what the secret was, and the game's director Sensui Kazuyoshi, producer Konno Hideki, and series supervisors Nogami Hisashi and Kyogoku Aya got together to give us some answers.
GamesRadar+: How did you make sure the Leaf Tickets system (the in-game currency for the game that can be earned or purchased) felt fair?
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp dev team: Speaking to the point of feeling it’s fair, we created a system where, if you work hard to complete Stretch Goals, then you can get Leaf Tickets. You can get quite a lot of Leaf Tickets from these Goals. We hope both people who pay and those who play for free will feel it to be fair. We made it so there isn’t anything you can’t complete without paying.
How do you make the game work for people who want to play all day, and also people that want to just check in for a few minutes?
In Pocket Camp, there are no restrictions on things like how often you can play the game. There's an upper limit on requests from animals, but users who want to play throughout the day can continue fishing or bug-catching as much as they want. We think that can be very tiring, so we don’t recommend it, but... that would allow you to accumulate a lot of bells (in-game currency). And users who can only play a few minutes per day can talk to just the animals they’re interested in. We haven’t provided gameplay that takes time or is hard work. We’ve done our best so the experience doesn’t change significantly based on the customer’s play time.
What's your personal favorite part of the game?
That would be the scene where you change the camper design at OK Motors. Giovanni, Carlo, and Beppe are new characters appearing for the first time in this game, and are managing the camper dealership. If you ask them to change your camper design, they start work after showing you their trademark pose... I really think you can feel the personalities of the three new characters in their conversation from that scene.
