Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)

This is cool to read. I'm about 6 months in making a game 99% myself, full time. Writing all the code / making all the 3d models / sfx / marketing etc. A friend has recently been helping me with music. Reading what you just said is heartening, I've received some shade about how inefficient it is to do it this way.

I chose to do that so my vision would shine through (and so the art style would have some core consistency!). It's still an open question if society will appreciate what I can deliver enough to support me continuing to do it.

It's an interesting feeling to be in the midst of it. ~Every other day when I post a little 30 second video of progress on twitter, it's like a question to society asking if I'm good enough, if I should be allowed to go to the dentist, maybe buy new glasses some day as a reward. Is my mettle enough to survive without evermore accepting the indignities that come with fealty to someone else's banner? Someone else's dreams? The trickle of likes and follows have been a resounding "maybe! We're bewildered but intrigued. Keep going!"

It's like a super position between a catastrophic, financially ruinous midlife crisis -- or being some eccentric who knew he would be alright all along. Just between you and me, it could go either way. Reality will write the label.

While the uncertainty is kind of fun, I'm really excited to be nearing a moment to get a firmer answer. It's hard to imagine any answer could get me to stop tbqh.

To apply what you're saying to a different media.

I was a big star trek fan growing up. Around the time of enterprise, then going on to the reboot and new series i'd lost interest in star trek.

The series changed in ways I didn't enjoy. Not to bash on them in any way and getting to my point.

I've been recommended The Orville a bunch lately. After hearing what it was, I wasn't really interested, but finally i was pushed into watching it and I was immediately hooked and finished the first two seasons in a couple days.

This is the reason why:

>Lately I played a game, Ex-Zodiac, which is a StarFox clone. Only the demo is available, but the author really captured every single aspect that made StarFox great. That attention to detail is what makes games fun.

You can tell the people that made the Orville loved the hell out of the earlier star trek series and put a lot of care into small details that really made it feel like star trek, moreso than most newer actual star treks. Despite being somewhat of a comedic parody, like you say, they 'really captured every single aspect' that made star trek great.

I get the point you're trying to make but regarding the hotel analogy, I expect a lot more from a hotel than a video game. The trappings of a dodgy hotel are more universal than the subjective shortcomings of games whose tropes align to specific genres. For example, I have a soft spot for the aesthetic vision of the original StarFox but the game itself is incredibly linear, repetitive and one dimensional. According to your criteria it would ruin the magic, but I don't really see it that way.

Nobody really doubts that some art fails because its just not good. Differentiating art that is technically superb to art that really resonates is a more interesting conversation.

I do game dev. It's very easy to think "this animation could be better". It's a lot harder to figure out "could this be made more fun". Tactics vs strategy.

The thing is unless you are a small shop like the Vlambeers of the world(rip) there's so much work to put together a game that clicks.

You have to trust that your art, animation, gameplay programmers, etc are experts in their own way and there's usually at least one or two people making sure those things are all coehesive.

Honestly that's the thing I think we lost in the 90s/00s was that the scope of a game was within the grasp of a team of 8-12 people. This is now making a resurgence in the indie space(latest example is Everspace 2 which just nails the feel of Freelancer and Escape Velocity).

Are we talking about Stardew though? Because IMO it excels in half your criteria and is pleasantly adequate in the rest.

If you mean games in general I mostly agree. Most teams just don’t seem to prioritize these things and it can be frustrating. Especially when the core concepts are so promising.

There are a lot of reasons to idolize John Carmack, but my favorite is his lifelong obsession with latency. End to end. From the player's fingers, through the hardware, through all the many software layers, back through the hardware and into the player’s eyes. From Doom to the Oculus Rift architecture. This is why to me Id games feel and play like no others. He realized from the beginning that latency matters more than any other factor in competitive FPS games, and prioritized it as much as the rendering he’s more renowned for.

Depth vs breadth is an issue with the study of every medium, and with games particularly, there is a staggering amount of potential breadth. Coverage of detail results in "top 10 tips" articles, coverage of the broad strokes results in an oversimplification.

My current approach to game design revolves around a three-stage process: find well-justified principles, set concrete success benchmarks based off the principles, and routinely do studies of specific elements to test the benchmarks. This is something that can be applied fractally, from the top level down into every last asset, and isn't really specific to games, but it lets me cross the boundaries between media, ask and answer detailed questions like "what form of music is most appropriate for this scene?" A question like that isn't adequately answered by personal taste, and really benefits from a principled framework starting from basic philosophy-of-truth questions about the concepts.

And this goes for stuff with the software and UX, too: requirements around stability, performance, ease of use and so forth appear in the success benchmarks and enforce a rough shape for the featureset.

When the game "doesn't work" despite meeting technical standards, it's usually because there's a conceptual issue where the ideas the game explores are presented incoherently, where features are added because "this feature appeared in another game and it was fun there" and the contradictions implied by the juxtaposition are ignored. When the game goes in that direction, it makes players throw up their hands and say, "I don't know what this game is about." It's also harder to make such a game, because you end up laboring to paper over those contradictions with complicated special casing.

I mean part of it comes from what game designers have control or responsibility for. Game designers across the industry may or may not have the ability to strongly influence or control many of those factors that you mentioned (dependent on the scale and organization of the job and game). However, designing the core gameplay loop and player incentives is nearly always a core responsibility of a game designer.

They are also often not mentioned because many of them are a different type of problem solving. High frame rate, stability, good quality animations are all effectively engineering and resource challenges. No one seeks out to not achieve those things, everyone knows that they're important. But the success of achieving those are typically driven by aspects completely out of control of a game designer (unless they are caused by gameplay mechanics or features that are just too technically taxing).

I mean really, it's right in the title isn't it? This is a game _DESIGN_ perspective, not a game implementation, or game marketing, or game post-launch community support retrospective.

I didn't get it. Can you please explain?

Exactly the same thing happened to me! I only used to play games like civilization, XCOM etc and had zero interest in shooters. Now my job includes management and got a lot more stressful and I also got into FPS for the first time ever (Half Life 2). I’m absolutely terrible at it but having to think less makes it much easier to focus on when I’m tired.

That's a very unique take that I agree with. It would also explain why I just couldn't get into management games (I played them to death when I was a kid), Zachtronics games (reminds me of my day job) etc. What games would you suggest playing aside from FPS? I don't usually have a lot of time to sink in front of a PC anymore and have just been playing mobile games during my commute. I essentially went from hardcore gamer to a casual one as I got older.

I think its the duality between macro and micro.

In strategy games, you're often concerned with the macro game. Yes there's "micro" in strategy games, but you can't ever take control of a single pawn and play as them (I think the one game that tried to do this was Dungeon Keeper 2, where you could "possess" a minion and play a limited fps-style game in your dungeon).

FPS gives you a quick, short term escape from reality as you're transformed into a different, perhaps more controlled reality with very well defined and measurable objectives.

Strategy and open world games like Factorio, Stardew Valley, Minecraft etc. let you go nuts, with no real objectives except those that you make yourself.

I'm guessing human brains like variety. So if you have to strategize too much at work, you're likely to want a mindless romp through zombies with a machine gun. If you're doing mindless enterprise coding, maybe you're likely to want to plan, build and optimize a gigafactory in factorio to feel more in control of your world.

Rimworld has had so many wonderful moments that have stuck with me even though I haven't touched it since the alphas. Because one of the mechanics of the game is the colonists can lose their minds due to stress, where usually they strip naked and grab a gun and start shooting people or run toward the nearest living thing and try to beat it to death, managing that is important.

Anyway, one of the early builds had this bug where sufficient terror/horror stats were enough outweigh any degree of stress. So the solution to a happy colony was hundreds of occupied gibbet cages placed in rows as a sort of path guide to/from the entrances to the cafeteria, bunk houses, etc. so colonists would constantly be exposed to them.

If you filled them with barbarians or whatever you could catch (sometimes your own people if the headcount started to get above your food production...) you'd have a nice "happy" colony.

I'm sure this is long removed or fixed, but it just struck me as amazing at the time...

Hey there, author here. We took a look at Rimworld on our podcast (https://www.pixelatedplaygrounds.com/bookclub/rimworld - gif art by me). Loved that game - it was on my top 10 games list a couple years back. Its focus on storytelling really sets it apart from some of the other base-builders.

I really wanted to get into Rimworld, but it mostly felt like a stripped down Dwarf Fortress...

Even so, the base building was fun, the endless raids less so...

I felt the same, but my gf became so obsessed with it we eventually broke up

The game doesn't do a good job of explaining this, but, there is almost no benefit to min-maxing it. Absolutely nothing is gated off by taking your time to do it. If it takes you seven in-game years to finish the community center, there's no downside. It's a common misconception that you need to complete everything as quickly as possible. I think this stems from the fact that after your second year you get a kind of "grade". But this doesn't matter since you can choose to get graded again whenever you want!

Some people find the min-maxing to be part of the fun, but it sounds like it stressed you out, so you just shouldn't play it that way. Take as long as you want, the game will not punish you for doing that.

I think so. It's true that there's a time limit per day but you have as many years as you want to accomplish any task.

Are you talking about the day/night cycle or the 2-year "timer" before you get evaluated?

Once you get evaluated at the end of two years you can get re-evaluated whenever you want and you can still get the reward for the highest evaluation tier. You don't lose anything from not getting the perfect evaluation the first time.

I think that the central gameplay loop can affect people differently. Some people can turn their conscious thought off and just go through a checklist of chores and it is relaxing. Others, like yourself, may find themselves stuck on the concept of "Am I doing the most I can with each possible day". If you don't mind sharing, do you bring a similar mindset to your professional or private life?

Unrelated note to your comment: "fmining" was a great skill track.

I am the exact same way. It always gives me intense anxiety.

Yeah. Don't try to max everything. Take your time. I have never used a wiki while playing and really enjoyed spending a few hundred hours just discovering things.

I agree with your sentiment. I saw an RPG for sale and one of the reviewers said the quests had timers. ugh.

I do understand that some experiences are heightened by conflict or urgency - but if you've been gamed all day at work with those experiences - maybe just taking the time to be aware and explore is what you're looking for.

The timer prevents the player from performing the same task endlessly. Even trying to do the same task every day of every season is likely impossible. I like the timer, because I felt like it forced me to pick new things and explore every morning.