Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley

Recently, Juliana has gotten into Stardew Valley. Hard. Since I’m a huge fan myself, I'm doing a Game Design Perspective on the game to celebrate. I'll be looking at the game mechanics and how the interlocking layers make the game tick.

In Stardew Valley, you play as a disillusioned city slicker who takes over their grandfather's broken-down farm. You clear the land so you can grow crops, a la Harvest Moon. Beyond the basics of farming, the game really shines in its variety. You can go fishing on the beach, delve into a dangerous cave in the mountains, raise livestock, interact with a town full of characters, cook up different dishes, donate buried treasure to the museum, and participate in a number of holiday festivals throughout the year. Juliana's put in maybe forty hours over the past couple weeks, which is about half the time I put in when I played. Clearly, the game has something that makes you want to come back. Let's take a look why.

One of the things Stardew Valley does best is variety, both in the small and in the large. Farming is the most fundamental activity in the game and it's a great example of variety "in the small". You have 44 different crops in the game (not counting fruit trees or mushrooms). Each crop has distinct and visually-appealing pixel artwork that shows the growing plant and the final product. Time passes through the four seasons, and each season has its own soundtrack, background weather effects (snowy forests or flower petals swaying in the breeze), and set of crops. As soon as the player gets used to, say, planting parsnips in the spring, summer arrives and a whole new set of crops becomes available. The player isn't able to keep going in the same routine. That's good for keeping engagement up.

More so than the sheer quantity of crops (or fish or buried treasure or...), Stardew shines in the number of activities available to you. This is the variety "in the large". There are five major skill tracks - farming, fishing, foraging, fighting, and fmining. Each one has an experience tracker and perks for being more experienced. All tracks except foraging have associated and upgradable equipment.

A day could be spent gathering wood or stone to upgrade your farm or trying to catch a rare fish in the mountain lake. It could be spent a day going deeper in the monster-infested mines or running errands for the townsfolk. You can forage for wild flowers near the river or decorate your farm. You can skip out on all your responsibilities and do nothing but play video games - just like real life! There's never enough time in a single Stardew day to do everything you want to do. That's a great way to keep players coming back - it gives that "just one more turn" feeling that leads people to play Civilization until dawn.

Of course, it's not enough just to have a whole lot of options. Stardew keeps on chugging by having these different activities overlap with each other and support each other. Performing one activity will provide progress towards another or even unlock new goals for the player. A player could spend the day fishing, perhaps trying to catch the elusive lingcod. They might bring up some sunken treasure chests containing artifacts to donate to the museum. The player will likely catch a few common fish while going after the lingcod - these common fish could be turned into fertilizer to grow better crops. If the player is delving into the mines, they will find the stone to help build a barn. If a player is making friends with the townsfolk, they'll get new crafting recipes to increase their farm's production. Almost every activity in the game will help out another. This keeps the flow of the game smooth, as finishing one activity primes the player for the next one.

I find it useful to think about games in terms of nested reward cycles. A game designer needs to think about feedback, goals, and rewards happening both in repeating cycles and hierarchical layers. What should the player do in the next fifteen seconds? The next five minutes? The next thirty? Mario can provide a quick example - the player can jump on a goomba (pleasant sound effects!), finish a level (look at that flag go!), and rescue the princess (take that, Bowser!).  A short-term cycle will happen many times during a medium-term cycle, which in turn repeats itself during the long-term cycles. In Stardew, chopping down a tree nets you wood, which you can use to build yourself a new chicken coop, which you can use to hatch a flock of egg-laying chickens, which you can use to get a mayonnaise factory going, and so on and so forth.

Stardew adds an effective twist to this idea by delaying rewards. When you first plant a parsnip seed, you won't get to harvest it until a week later. You'll have to spend time each day watering the little guy, and that anticipation makes the eventual pay-off that much sweeter. It uses the delay to good effect in other areas. For instance, when you upgrade your equipment with the town blacksmith, the upgrade doesn't happen instantly. It easily could have happened this way if the game designer wanted it to. Instead, the blacksmith keeps your tool (watering can, pickax, etc.) for a couple of days. If you don't have, say, your pickaxe, then you can't delve into the mines. This forces you to explore other aspects of the game by constraining your available options. Sometimes the game incentivizes different activities with the carrot, and sometimes it uses the stick.

One of my favorite bits of game design in Stardew are the Bundles. In the community center, you can help the spirits of the forest restore the community by leaving various items as offerings. These offerings are grouped together as a "bundle", and each room in the community center has a set of bundles to complete. You get smaller rewards for finishing individual bundles, like a new scarecrow or a new mayonnaise press. You get larger rewards for finishing off a room's worth of bundles, like a greenhouse that can grow crops in the winter. The Bundles provide the player with a sense of direction in a game that otherwise has few explicit long-term goals. It organizes and focuses the time spent in the game. In fact, I consider the game "beaten" once all the Bundles have been completed.

As nice as the big "Room" rewards are, the individual "bundle" rewards are worth taking a look at. In true Stardew fashion, there are a whole boatload of different craftable items. The craftables will have different effects on your farm. For example, a mayonnaise press can turn eggs into more valuable mayo, a scarecrow will prevent wild crows from eating your crops, and a beehive will produce honey if it is nearby a flower crop. If you're developing a game and you design an item, the player may or may not end up using it. They might think it won't fit their playstyle or they might not know it's even an option. Stardew gets around this issue by just giving these craftable items to the player, which encourages the player to experiment with it. If the player likes it, they will aim to craft more. If not, the player didn’t have to spend their own resources building the thing.

Long before we started recording and publishing podcasts, Bryan and I did a Video Game Book Club on Stardew Valley. At one point, he mentioned that he wished there was a way to hire someone to milk his cows and goats and didn't have to spend time with them each morning. (Note: Update 1.3 introduced this exact item.) I found his comment hilarious. The game's ostensible narrative is that you quit your soulless job at a MegaCorporation in order to get closer to the land, but after just two years on the farm you want to hire someone to work the land for you. You've become the corporation that you tried to escape from. I waffle back and forth on whether Stardew is pro- or anti-capitalism, but in the meantime I'll be planting some parsnips.

Addendum: I’ve created a short Stardew-like game as part of something called the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge. It was tons of fun, and I’m preparing to expand the game into a full Steam release. You can read about my initial experience developing the game, or you can check the game out on itch.io