Stardew Valley - Interview with Eric Barone

So far, Stardew Valley is the surprise hit of 2016. It's been one of the most-played games on Steam since it launched on February 26, on the top sellers list just as long, and has recently found itself as one of the most watched games on Twitch. That's impressive for any game, but the story of its creator, Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone, makes that success even more incredible.

Barone is the sole developer of Stardew Valley, singlehandedly authoring the game over a period of four years. And now, in a mere 12 days, Barone has sold over 400,000 copies of his game. In less than two weeks, he's gone from being a part-time theater usher (who's making a game on the side) to what we can only assume is a multimillionaire-and the only name behind one of the most exciting indie games of 2016.

I spoke with Barone about the unexpected success of a game he says basically started out as a Harvest Moon clone to teach himself how to code in C#. We also talked about what the money means to him, what's coming next to Stardew Valley, and a Stardew secret that no one has found yet.

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PCG: At what point in the process did the scope shift? When did you say "wow, this is actually really fun and I want to keep going?"

EB: It was actually pretty early on-but my ambitions for the game grew over time. At first I thought it was just going to be something I would release on Xbox Live Indie Games, which is kind of a free-for-all. Anyone can publish a game on there, I just thought it would be a small little thing. It would take me a couple months, I would post it to Xbox Live, and that would be it. But then-I don't know, for some reason I just kept deciding I wanted to go bigger and bigger with it.

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For example Grandpa's evaluation at the end of two years I feel like is a little bit harsh. It’s kind of something I added at the last minute to tie together the story with your grandfather, and I feel like it's a little bit too harsh and it kind of breaks the relaxed feel of the game. And many people who’ve played it have expressed that same idea. So I'm actually working on that right now, even this morning I was finishing it up. I'm going to change that a little bit, make it softer. Make it more open ended, so you don't feel like there's some score that the game is evaluating you on and judging you for. I want Stardew Valley to be a really relaxed and joyous experience. I don't want it to be stressful at all or for you to feel bad that you didn't please Grandpa.

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If anything goes wrong, if anyone has a crash or a bug, I basically feel personally responsible for it and it weighs heavily on me. I want everyone to have a perfect experience with Stardew Valley—It's super important to me. So that's pretty much it. I mean, I was just really stressed out at launch hearing people say that this and this doesn't work, the game's crashing—I mean, it's not like it was super buggy or anything. I don’t want to say that, but there were some problems and I felt really personally responsible for it. So I just had to fix it as fast as possible, and there's still bugs I'm aware of and I'm working on another patch right now, which will hopefully be out either today or tomorrow.

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many reasons. For one, I just graduated from college with a computer science degree and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had applied at a few places and had interviews and I didn't get those jobs. So I was thinking “what am I going to do,” you know?

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I pretty much have ideas with regard to every single area of the game that I could expand on. I want to release a pretty substantial free content update.

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If anything goes wrong, if anyone has a crash or a bug, I basically feel personally responsible for it and it weighs heavily on me. I want everyone to have a perfect experience with Stardew Valley—It's super important to me.

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Hexprone said:

Elsewhere, I've read that butchering animals was in the game for part of the production period, but was later removed, leaving us with the peculiar idea that anyone would raise a barnful of chubby pigs solely in order to have them hunt truffles.

I'd be very curious to see anything from Barone on how that decision was made, and how far along in development the butcher system was before it was (ironically) axed.

Including it would obviously present challenges for a kid-friendly game, and realism is not exactly Stardew Valley's primary goal, but I don't think it would have been that hard to do without excessive gruesomeness.

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Hexprone said:

Elsewhere, I've read that butchering animals was in the game for part of the production period, but was later removed, leaving us with the peculiar idea that anyone would raise a barnful of chubby pigs solely in order to have them hunt truffles.

I'd be very curious to see anything from Barone on how that decision was made, and how far along in development the butcher system was before it was (ironically) axed.

Including it would obviously present challenges for a kid-friendly game, and realism is not exactly Stardew Valley's primary goal, but I don't think it would have been that hard to do without excessive gruesomeness.

Click to expand...