Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley puts players in charge of running a farm, including growing crops and raising livestock.

Stardew Valley is a farming simulation game primarily inspired by the Harvest Moon video game series.[1] At the start of the game, players create their character, who becomes the recipient of a plot of land and a small house once owned by their grandfather in a small town called Pelican Town. Players may select from several different farm map types, each having benefits and drawbacks.[2] The farm plot is initially overrun with boulders, trees, stumps, and weeds, and players must work to clear them in order to restart the farm, tending to crops and livestock so as to generate revenue and further expand the farm's buildings and facilities.

Players may also interact with non-player characters (NPC) that inhabit the town, including engaging in relationships with them; this can culminate in marriage, which results in the NPC helping the player's character to tend the farm. Players can also engage in fishing, cooking, and crafting, and also explore procedurally-generated caves with materials and ores to mine or creatures to combat. Players can take on various quests to earn additional money, or work at completing specific collections of materials (called "bundles") to restore the town's Community Center. Completing bundles rewards players with various items, including seeds and tools. Completing multiple bundles grants players access to new areas and game mechanics, such as a desert.[3] All of these activities must be metered against the character's current health and exhaustion level, and the game's internal clock. The game uses a simplified calendar, each year having four 28-day months that represent each season, and this determines which crops can be grown and which activities can be beneficial. Later in the game, players can restore a greenhouse which is able to grow any crop regardless of the season.

Stardew Valley was created by American indie game designer Eric Barone, under the alias of ConcernedApe.[4][5] In 2011, Barone had graduated from the University of Washington Tacoma with a computer science degree, but had not been able to get a job in the industry, instead working as an usher at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle.[6][7] Looking to improve his computer skills for better job prospects, he came to the idea of crafting a game which would also pull in his artistic side.[6] Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Barone incorporated many elements of the region into the gameplay and art.[8]

Stardew Valley originally began as a modern fan-made alternative to the Harvest Moon series, as he felt "the series had gotten progressively worse after Harvest Moon: Back to Nature".[9] Unable to find a satisfactory replacement, Barone began to create a game similar to the series, stating that his intent was "to address the problems I had with Harvest Moon" and that "no title in the series ever brought it all together in a perfect way".[4] Barone was also inspired by other games, including Animal Crossing, Rune Factory, Minecraft, and Terraria, adding features seen in those games such as crafting, quests, and combat.[4][10][11]

Initially, Barone considered releasing the title on Xbox Live Indie Games due to the ease of publishing on that platform, but found early on that his scope for the game became much larger than originally anticipated.[6] Barone publicly announced the game in September 2012, using Steam's Greenlight system to gauge interest on the game.[12][4][9] After the title was shown a great deal of support from the community, Barone began working on the title in full, engaging with Reddit and Twitter communities to discuss his progress and gain feedback on proposed additions.[4] Shortly after the Greenlight period in 2013, he was approached by Finn Brice, director of Chucklefish, who offered to help publish the game on release.[6] Chucklefish took over many of the non-development activities for Barone, such as site hosting and setting up his development wiki.[13] Barone decided not to use Steam's early access feature for development, as he felt that it was not well suited to Stardew Valley.[13] Barone spent four years working on the project, redoing it multiple times, and was the sole developer on the game, frequently spending 10 hours or more a day working on it. He programmed it in C# using the Microsoft XNA framework, while also creating all of the game's pixel art and composing all of the music.[4][9]

Barone aimed to give players the feeling of immersion in a small farming community, stating that he wanted Stardew Valley to be a fun game, while also wanting it "to have real-world messages".[7][14] In contrast to earlier Harvest Moon games, which could end after two years of in-game time has passed, Barone kept Stardew Valley open-ended so that players would not feel rushed to try to complete everything possible.[7] During development, Barone recognized that some players would attempt to figure out mechanically how to maximize their farm's yield and profit through spreadsheets and other tools, but hoped that most players would take the time to learn these on their own.[7] To that end, he designed the cooking aspect of the game purposely not to be profitable, but instead to pay back in bonuses that aided exploration, farming, mining and fishing skills.[7] Barone also opted not to include the butchering of farm animals for meat products, encouraging players to name and tend to each animal individually in staying with the feeling he wanted for the game.[7] The animals cannot die but, if not tended to, stop producing products.

Stardew Valley received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic.[43] Jesse Singal writing for The Boston Globe wrote that the game was "utterly compelling, lovingly crafted", and provided players with numerous varieties of activities to do without falling into a cycle of repetitive activities.[54] Elise Favis of Game Informer found that watching her autistic brother play Stardew Valley helped her understand his condition better, as the game provides enough structure of present events with enough of a view of future events to allow her brother to enjoy the game.[55]

Yasuhiro Wada, the creator of the Harvest Moon series that Stardew Valley was inspired by, stated that he was "very happy" with the game, as it has shown to him that Harvest Moon was not a forgotten series and continued on in spirit. He also stated that the approach taken by Barone with Stardew Valley was able to retain the freedom that he had wanted to keep in the Harvest Moon series that had been lost in the later games, with more focus on animation and graphics.[56] Gamasutra named Barone one of the top ten developers for 2016, identifying that he had "single-handedly" developed something that "breathed new life into a genre" otherwise dominated by the Harvest Moon series.[57] In 2017, Forbes named Barone one of their "30 Under 30" people to watch in the area of video games by citing his commitment towards making Stardew Valley.[58]

• Official website