Game design theory - Stardew Valley

News & General Discussion
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I’m trying to work on a game that will hopefully appeal to both casual and more traditional gamers, and so I’ve been studying that market by looking into a game that seems to do something similar and has also been wildly popular - Stardew Valley - but I cannot figure out why people like it at all, much less why so many call it one of the best games of all time. The gameplay videos I’ve seen of it are a bit like watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” (agonizingly slow and tedious as well as a bit saccharine), and it seems to mostly be a Drudgework Simulator with even more work than Farmville (you have to water each and every tiny plot of ground each game day for up to a month for some of the crops). It’s also a dating simulator - dating NPCs who live in the village, not real people - combined with the old Endless Dungeon concept from FRPGs (infinite levels of tunnels filled with monsters which inexplicably exist underneath this farming town that seems to take place in modern-day America). So that adds old-school hack-and-slash grind combat except you’re a modern-day farmer rather than a medieval-themed soldier.

I don’t get it. Granted, I’m almost 50 years old, which means I don’t understand most modern games or the modern gaming audience. I didn’t understand why Farmville and Candy Crush were such huge hits. I grew up on combat games back in the days when 99% of video gamers were young males. So I’m generally clueless about these things, but this one has me really baffled. Many people say they like the large assortment of things to do in the game, but I don’t see how it’s any more feature-rich than countless FRPGs. People seem to like the cheerful tone and gentle pace, which I suppose is a nice escape. But I think it would drive me nuts to try to play it for more than 15 minutes.

Anyone know the reason this game - and similar ones - are so popular?

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Generally, when I think “that’s awful”, “what a waste of time”, or “why would anyone play that”, the game in question is really popular. But then I’m nearly as old as you are, so perhaps therein lies the answer.

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Rough idea:

The game works because it appeals to user’s inner hamster, pretty much.

You have lots of stuff you can collect. Your inner hamster will want all of it.
This stuff is unlocked in tiers.
Things from one tier unlock things in another tier.
At the same time, thing you unlock affect your gameplay, unlock more stuff, and can be used to customize the experience. So, at any given point you have something to do, you cannot quickly exhaust list of things to do, finishing one thing increases number of things you could do/try.

It is classic scheme in grindy games. Examples are Minecraft, Terraria, StaroBound and even Hyperdimension Neptunia.

Basically:

  • Allow user to customize the environment.
  • Do not make customization options available from the start, instead make them unlockable.
  • Make several tiers of unlockables, preferably affected by different gameplay mechanic.
  • Apply some decent art, basic story, and okay music.
  • Make sure some things are not instantly available and can only be unlocked when some conditiosn are met.
  • Do not tell anyone what those conditions are.
  • Drop hints of something bigger, and do not reveal your full story.
  • Also, limit number of things player can do in a period of time, by introducing “tiredness”, “day/night” cycle, etc. You could also add time limit to your game. That’ll leave the player with more things he/she WANTS to do than he/she CAN do.

Star dew valley player can be heavily driven by desire to unlock everything, try everything and experiment with everything. It is similar to minecraft, terraria, voxel games, etc.

At the maximum oversimplications:

  1. There’s a lot of things you want.
  2. You feel like you can figure out how to get them.
  3. At the same time, you’re limited in your attempts, somehow. (an attempt to get a thing requires a resource, or can be only done X times per game day, etc).

That can lead to incredibly addictive experience. If done wrong, the experience will be infuriating in addition to being addictive.

P.S. I tried Stardew Valley and refunded it.

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There is no need to guess at why people like it.

Steam reviews:

THIS GAME IS RUINING MY LIFE!
I thought that it’s a cute game, so i bought it.
I started playing, at 6pm after i got off work.
I farmed, made friends, did some stuff… Oh …It’s summer already?
Let me just give this gift to someone… oh character wants this? I have it. Lemme go get it.
Well since I’m here I’ll fish a little.
Oh, free stuff on the ground.
Oh, luck is on my side today? I’ll go mining then.
Well tomorrow’s the festival, so I might as well play one more day.
Omg my crops are done!
Hey, one more heart and I can get in Marnie’s room to get the mayor’s underpants.
Oh, i have some stuff to put in the community center.
Bridge repaired? Lemme go see.
Gets sidetracked by 5000 other things
Aaand it’s 5am and i have to go to work in 2 hours…

This title is about nothing except escapism. You will trade your life, ideally on a temporary basis, for the life of your self-designed character in Stardew Valley. In the game, you escape your boring cubicle job to live a simpler life as a farmer in a close community that is struggling to stay relevant in an increasingly conglomerate-dominated western society. The game manages to argue an anti-corporate-America “Wal-Mart is bad, but not inherently evil” agenda in such a real way that is impossible to ignore; all the while providing you the opportunity to choose for yourself; and unabashedly encouraging you to embrace capitalism to maximize the value of your labor and intellect. The game succeeds in this alternative reality in much the same way The Sims captured so many gamers’ hearts. In Stardew it seems you are able to achieve things that perhaps you cannot achieve in real life. However, you will leave the game feeling happy, uplifted, and hopeful.

the gameplay follows very much the Rune Factory formula. The controls are fine, but you should enable the option that makes you see what field your tools will work on. Like in Rune Factory etc. you run around and can converse or use tools with a simple click. As said above, there are many things to do - would you rather grow crops, forage shells, fish or mine? Or all together? In each profession you level up and unlock new blueprints that you can craft, including better sprinklers, so you will want to specialize in everything sooner or later. But the progress often comes naturally, just as you play. And then you have the mysteries to unravel: What are the mysterious creatures in the community center? What does the wizard know? Where are the mayor’s pants? Umm, okay, I solved the latter one, but let us just not talk about it. Anyway, the quests, awkward as they might be, often help giving personality to the characters, of which you also have 10 marriage candidates.

This game is practically:
Cocaine mixed with crack
Harvest moon on steroids
This game will make you:
Lose your girlfriend and get a virtual one(:heart:Haley​:heart:)
Quit your job to tend your blueberry crops
stay one more day,Just one more day…
and the thought of all this was the doing of one man is unbelievable
THIS GAME IS WORTH EVERY DIME

Also this article:
How Did Stardew Valley Top The Steam Sales Chart?

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Basically… as our good friend @Master-Frog tried to tell us a month or so ago… games are an escape for a lot of people.

It can be hard to relate to that when you are older and more established. Life is generally more stable. You kind of mold your life over time to become the way you like it. At least that is what I did and my friends too.

But think back to a time when life was chaos and maybe you lived paycheck to paycheck. Perhaps always worried you’d lose your job and at same time afraid you’d always be stuck at that same place in same job that you didn’t get much satisfaction from. Maybe even hated.

Maybe you were alone with no significant other. Perhaps few friends. And maybe all of them were very negative too. Life kind of sucked. Well… that is basically life for the majority of people at least in the USA.

So this kind of game allows them to escape the day to day drudgery of their real world. They find a place where they can succeed. A place where they can change things and even be an important person. A winner instead of feeling like a loser.

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That pretty much describes my current life as well as earlier life, so I can identify with escapism. But why on earth would you want to spend hours doing tedious farmwork and tedious level grinding as an escape? Sure, the old FRPGs had a lot of grinding too, but there was also some excitement. And conquest games at least allow you to feel like Napoleon, but watering parsnip plants for eight hours just to produce some parsnips to sell for virtual money to buy sprinklers to water more parsnip plants? I guess that doesn’t sound like grand success to me. Maybe it’s the cheerfulness of the game’s environment, I don’t know.

Apparently Stardew Valley is based on the Harvest Moon series, so I looked that up and found the following video which possibly clarifies the main demographic group involved (giggly teenage girl gushing about all the NPCs she fell in love with in Harvest Moon):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-YToA58D1o

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I don’t know if that video represents the main target market. For all we know she may not have a very satisfying life either and be escaping into the game.

I believe the game was created by a guy working as a part-time usher in a theatre. I have a feeling he (either intentionally or subconsciously) created a world where he could escape into.

On a related note… thinking about all of this has made me change my view of achievements and compliments and such in games. Where I used to think “who cares about that crap?” Now I feel ya know it is very important. Because really a great game should let the player feel like a great success, make them forget their problems and be the hero or heroine and hear how awesome they are… if only for a little while.

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Some of us escape into games, and in a way we are sick and games help us get better. Music is the same. So are books. Much cheaper than therapy or meds.

Those of us who are especially sick move into making games. Granted, a lot of people are just workman code monkeys, turning out games just for the $$$. But there’s nothing like an addicting game designed by an addicted gamer. It understands you. It knows what you’re going through.

Yeah, it’s bad… and a lot of us are in a struggle. Those who are comfortable with their secure lives… I pity you, deeply. You’re not living. I like games about hardship, that simulate the struggle. Play Minecraft on Survival Mode, hard difficulty and don’t use any guides or walkthroughs… what you find is a game that we play… not the sugary saccharine sweet kid game it is made out to be. I don’t think I have ever played creative mode for more than the time it took to get bored of it.

There’s nothing to understand, no theory needed. We know what’s going on. Different people play for different reasons, but a person who plays to escape into Mr Roger’s neighborhood is simply someone who needs help… and they get it from that game. Take that game away and you might have yourself a serial killer or a dangerous stalker who follows girls home. Who knows?

I like violence and hardship, weapons and technology. Without games to create flak cannons and flamethrowers in, I would get super bored and probably play around with making little propane flame throwers and oxy-acetylene potato guns… who knows.

Games provide us an outlet for behavior deemed socially unacceptable or otherwise illegal, or a means to experience *that which is otherwise denied to us.

*And in times where our parent’s generation has turned the whole world into a second-rate, 2-star society where they control the means to production and people under 30 are effectively non-citizens, forced to pay fines for not carrying health care we cannot afford… because there are no jobs, because they’ve all been eliminated in order to increase corporate profitibility… in which the propoganda tells us that we are lucky that the system allows us to have a part-time job and drive a car (because everything is a revocable privilege)… there is a lot of stuff that is denied to us. Most notably… the ability to think for yourself and make your own choices…

…so tell me, why do you think escapist games are so popular?

I think without games I would just be like Glenn Beck, screaming into a microphone until I became irrelevant and everybody stopped caring… games are good, my friends.

Games can prevent World War 3… we will just settle everything through Starcraft matches, and Koreans will be a special class of citizen…

God I am crazy.

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Because achieving goal in a game is easier than achieving it in a real life. Goals are clear cut and rewards are quick. You want that “shiny virtual something”, you’ll get it in a hour, maybe. And IIRC brain is not good at destinguishing between real and virtual items. If it is in your character’s inventory, it must be real.

There are people that get feel like they HAVE to clear all achievments in the game even if they don’t really like it. Basically, I wouldn’t do that. Achivements, Steam trading cards and the like - those can be borderline unhealthy.

I don’t share this opinion. I prefer amazing virtual/fictional worlds instead.

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I can relate to that. I’ve never played games as “an escape” or to “gain recognition” or whatever. For me a game is just something to do. Like going for a hike or whatever. It is just an experience to enjoy. And I’ve always looked at them that way until this thread when I did a bit of research online for what people were saying about the game. And that combined with all of the trend in AAA games to have constant compliments / rewards and such made me realize wow… I actually never got that before. Because, like you, I don’t play games for that.

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Have you actually played the game?

My first issue to levy is that what you do in a game isn’t even half of what constitutes design. You can perfectly encapsulate the shallow design of a game like Doom by saying it’s a game where you shoot demons in the face, but try to describe anything closer to the sim side of the spectrum this way and you fail miserably. Trying to describe Dwarf Fortress as a game where you throw dwarfs into a pit and watch their inevitable decent into !Fun! doesn’t come close to explaining why it’s engaging, god forbid you ever take it upon yourself to explain Sim Ant.

Second, the escapism argument is bullshit. I’m sorry guys, but it’s grasping at straws and you can do better. There is nothing to the game that is inherently more escapist that any other game. If anything, because it’s closer to reality, it’s less of an escapist’s fantasy than Doom (the epitome of power fantasy). The argument here is that theme alone is enough to keep engagement, and I call bullshit on that.

Fundamentally, the game is engaging. It constantly throws new problems at the player to solve (most of them coming organically out from play), and constantly forces players to re-evaluate short term and long term goals. It’s systemically deep. Problems you encounter in one system are almost always solved with another system, and in the process of solving the major problem, you can usually solve two or three other issues. A good half of the game is about mechanical exploration, where you are figuring out the interplay of all of these systems and what the game may still be withholding. Sprinkle in some One More Turn Syndrome and it becomes fairly difficult to find a time to stop.

So I have to ask again, have you actually played the game? Everyone in the thread so far sound like they’ve only heard of the game secondhand, or have played it at most for ten minutes and think that perfectly demonstrated the rest of the game’s experience.

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It’s a management game, you care about stuff, you need to prioritize task, stuff grow, you are satisfied. Clear progression, clear reward.

Most people don’t play game for the excitement but to wind down, That’s why sudoku, cross words, the sims, TV, and stardust valley are popular.

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Ok, so I’m thinking of last week. Go on.

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I haven’t played the game, but it reminds me of Animal Crossing. I thought the game looked stupid, but reviews raved about it so I bought it and became addicted. I had roommates at the time and all of them watched me play, remarked on how stupid the game was, and then tried it for themselves. After that we would all argue over whose turn it was to play.

I don’t think the escapism argument is wrong at all. It isn’t about trading your life for one that is fictional. The characters in Animal Crossing live their lives the same way we do, except without all the worry. It’s a completely different type of escapism than running around shooting demons. One that appeals to a basic human desire for a simpler world than reality allows for.

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Was that directed at anyone in particular?

I played, refunded it, because it is the same core set of stuff as in terraria, minecraft, starbound and other games. IIRC there was also harvest moon before that. I think harvest moon was more fun.

Stardew valley also had very annoying ui problem (meaning that you had to click with mouse way too much - to pour water onto tile you had to click with mouse on it). That was similar to terraira where one clickable block was half of t he wight of your characters and you had to click it with mouse too.

Either way, highly similar core to other games I saw.

Nah, it is valid one. People shouldn’t live virtual life instead of real one, it is unhealthy. Unwinding is good. Getting fascinated by someone’s world is good. Trying to escape into game is bad. That’s because once you’re done escaping you’ll come back to find that life got from bad to worse while you weren’t paying attention to it. So you’ll want to escape again. That’s why I don’t understand fascination with FullDive VR.

Played it up to two hours, saw where it is going, and didn’t like it, so refunded. The game didn’t click for me. Had similar experience with few other games (like massive chalice). Wrong curve. I like having stuff to LEARN instead of stuff to DO. It was about throwing stuff to DO.

FYI in general, you’re not obliged to defend honor of your favorite game. People perceive things differently.

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On escapism; not everyone has a “decent” life (for example presence of “abuse” of all sorts), in this case escapism can almost be survival.

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To the OP: You have to stop watching videos and actually try playing the games. Videos do a poor job of conveying the experience.

Disclaimer: I haven’t played this game, but I’ve played several like it.

There are several reasons these type of games work. First and foremost humans like watching numbers go up. Engine building is fun. Tonnes of games from Dominion to Cookie Clicker to Civilisation to StarCraft to Factorio rely on this principle. There is something inherently satisfying about starting with nothing and building your way up to a complex engine.

Secondly humans like being rewarded. Games with a very clear and quick reward cycle tend to become addictive. People like to be told they are awesome and have done well. This is not just a games thing, successful individuals, businesses, sports teams, and educational intstitutes all operate on the same principle. Frequent feedback is effective. (Training dogs and children also works the same).

Escapism is also valid, but escapism is valid for all games. Playing games is a way to step out of our often chaotic world and step into a world of clear, defined rules. Escapism is not a bad thing, it’s an important aspect of human nature.

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Stardew Valley is about as close in design to Terraria and Minecraft as it is Mount and Blade. I’m totally aware it’s not a good defense for a game, but at two hours you haven’t scratched the surface.

I’m confused. Learn in what way? There are a ton of mysteries that get established, mechanics that unravel, waifu’s to make babies with, places to discover, etc. Unless learning means something totally different to you, I don’t think we were playing the same game.

The point I was trying to get at was that there isn’t anything about the game that particularly caters to escapism. The actual percentage of people who play the game as an escape is probably the same as any other game. When you have testimony from people that’s basically “I started playing when I got home from work, then suddenly it was four in the morning”, that should be a good indicator that there is honest to god engagement.

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Nothing in common with mount and blade, pretty similar to terraria.
Same stuff. Build stuff. Find stuff. Get stuff A to unlock stuff B. Find something at point X to make something happen at point Y. It is very similar. Resembled too many games to be fun.

Well, do you want to buy me the game again so I could give it another whirl and conclude that I still don’t like it? Because I don’t feel like spending money at it and last time when I got it and refunded it it was sold with discount.

Please don’t start another goddamn dictionary argument.

I like:

  • Complex mechanic that keeps unraveling layers and layers of complexity as I learn it. Examples: X3 Reunion, X3 Terrain Conflict, Colen McRay Rally, Blaz Blue, Street Fighter 4, The Movies, Dwarf Fortress.
  • Story. Examples: Silent Hill series, Mass Effect series, Lots of RPGs, Bioshock, etc.
  • Experimenting with storylines and forcing them towards outcome I wanted (multiple endings, and the like)

I HATE:

  • “Find item X at randomly generated location somewhere”.
  • I absolutely despise searching for goddamn collectibles, pigeons, those blasted gemstones in Far Cry 2 and all the stuff like that. Oh, and damn minerals in minecraft Especially when damn thing is tied to achievment to make me feel obliged to start looking for it.
  • Any kind of forced appeal to inner hamster:
  • Building stuff one block at a time by clicking without any kind of blueprints or automation.(That’s why I didn’t like minecraft.)

Speaking of marriagable npcs, as far as I know (I checked reviews), it has zero depth and less dialogue lines than when it is not married, plus I didn’t quite like the visuals.

I think one day I might try “harvest moon: it is a wonderful life” instead.

No, the point you appeared to be making is “none of you guys played the game, you’re trying to badmouth it!”.
Please keep your emotions under control next time and be more clear.

The game is grindy and can be quite addictive to some because of that. Whether it is escapism or not - I don’t care.

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Yep, you pretty much nailed it. Someone who likes stardew might get stuck in cookie clicker for a day or two, IMO.

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