I could become a real indie game developer. “At some point I realized this could be legit. “As I started to work on the game and my development skills improved, I started seeing all the possibilities,” he said. That limited vision didn’t last long, though. He figured fans of the original series would play, and it could serve as a sort of proof-of-concept of his own game-design skills. “I just wanted to release it on XBox Live Indie Games, which is kind of a free-for-all,” he said. His original ambitions were modest: He had always been a fan of the Harvest Moon farming-simulator games - a classic series dating back to the 1990s with a cult-like following - and decided to make a clone of sorts. None of the prospective employers bit, though, and Barone wasn’t particularly enthused about the prospect of working in a cubicle anyway, so he decided to try to make a game instead. What makes it especially remarkable, then, is that it was produced by a single developer who had never before made a commercial game: Eric Barone, a 28-year-old Seattleite who is better known by his ConcernedApe handle on Twitter and Reddit.Īs Barone explained to Vulture, he graduated from the University of Washington–Tacoma with a computer-science degree in 2011, and did what you’re supposed to do: He applied for entry-level coding jobs. Stardew Valley would be an impressive accomplishment for a seasoned game-development studio. There are different strategies during each of the four seasons, a zillion options for laying out your farm and choosing which animals and crops to raise, and so on the depth and variety is astounding. It’s one of those titles that looks underwhelming at first blush, but then makes quick converts of those who click “download.” It’s an insanely addictive, mesmerizing game - I lost about eight unplanned hours to it during an otherwise busy weekend. If this mostly sounds more like drudgery than play - a simulation of waking up early to water melons? - that’s because the appeal of Stardew Valley is very hard to explain. In addition to raising crops (which must be watered every day), you can learn to fish, extract ore from a mine that runs dozens of levels deep, talk to and romance townspeople, and on and on. The goal is, in a sense, whatever you want it to be: Stardew Valley floods the players’ stimulus-reward system with a never-ending series of short-term goals as day bleeds into day, season into season. The premise is simple: You’re a young-professional-type who leaves your soulless corporate job to take over your grandfather’s dilapidated farm, starting from scratch. And yet it is - more than 550,000 people have downloaded it in the two and a half weeks since it was released. Whereas the rest of the list is populated mostly with the most recent entries in the long-running, big-studio Hitman and GTA and Tom Clancy franchises, sitting inexplicably in the #2 spot is Stardew Valley, a game with pixelated SNES-style graphics, a meandering pace, and the simple core mechanics of planting and watering and cultivating different crops over and over and over as the days and seasons pass. If you check out the list of top-selling titles on Steam, the online game-distribution juggernaut, one game sticks out.
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