Chapter Review – Stardew Valley

In the third chapter of the book, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Schreier recounts the tale of Stardew Valley’s creation. For those who don’t know, Stardew Valley is a relaxing pixelated game about farming and living in the rural life in a town far away from the big cities. This game, originally based off of a Japanese title Harvest Moon, was created solely by Eric Barone. Originally called Sprout Valley, the game took Barone’s sole focus. In 2011, he had given up trying to look for a full-time job, taking the development of this game as his sole responsibility. While he worked on his game, his girlfriend, Amber Hageman supported the both of them by paying for their living space with two jobs. After about a year of working on the game, Barone launched his website to advertise the game. The advertising went extremely well, and soon hundreds were flocking to watch the monthly updates.

Fighting the Struggles

As he continued to work on the game, he battled his urges to just drop and release it, growing extremely depressed and having struggles on working on it. Even his girlfriend, who had no problem being the main source of income in the relationship, was pushing towards the idea of Barone to release the game. Even years later, in 2015, he continued to make content releases on his blog, posting about how progress was being made, but he didn’t know when it would be released, and did not want to give fans a false sense of belief or excitement at giving a false release date. Being the solo developer he was, both the drive to work on the game, and the sheer amount of content the one person needed to do could be extremely overwhelming. The second main difficulty was having to face the loneliness. When you work in the office with other workers, you are a part of a community, one such thing that Barone did not have. Finally, on February 26th, 2016, a tired, lonely, depressed and drained Eric Barone released the game on Steam for $15. Nearly instantly, his game exploded on the platform, getting to watch live as tens of thousands of people bought the game, the heavily anticipated and extremely amazing product. After taking a lengthy, well deserved break, he continued the life of a developer, and kept working on updating his passion project.

Reflections

The actions and capabilities Barone had are legendary, still being widely spoken of to this day. No matter how nice and polished your game looks in the AAA standards, the sheer amount of work of Barone can’t be toppled. It is also a good story for understanding the reality of the situation as a game developer. If you plan on making something as a solo game developer, make sure to focus on the small things, you passion projects. If you intend to make a AAA title game, you won’t be able to. It will take you a long time, so you should plan ahead for such conditions, and it will be very lonely for you. Make sure to pace yourself properly, get time to take breaks, relax, spend time with others. Focus on little bits of the game at a time. It would be difficult, but realistically you would most probably have a job as well, and would have to balance all of the pieces. It could take a while, but remember, it’s your dream. If you haven’t publicized it, then the only person you are affecting by shelving it for a little bit is yourself, so take those breaks. When you do make your game and publish it, it is good to be hopeful, but do also know that it is very unlikely what happened to Barone may happen to you. If it does, be very happy. I can’t even imagine how I would feel if 100 people downloaded and played a game I made, let alone 1.5 million people. Pace yourself, and enjoy the ride. This is your dream for others to see, don’t lose sight of that along the way and get yourself tired out. And the most important thing: have fun.