Most games are made by development studios that have multiple people working on the same
game and triple-A titles can even go into hundreds of developers, while small indie
teams consist of at least two developers more often than not.
However, it’s very rare to encounter a bigger sized game where every single part is made
by only one person.
This is exactly the case with Stardew Valley though since all the art, music, sound effects,
dialogue and programming were done by Eric Barone, also known as ConcernedApe.
In 2011 Eric graduated from the University of Washington Tacoma with a computer-science
degree so afterwards he applied at a few places, did some interviews, but they never offered
him the job.
At that point he didn’t really know what to do next.
Eric has always been into video games, drawing doodles, making music, and writing, but he
hadn’t really considered combining all his hobbies to become an actual game developer.
Now that he was looking for a job he decided to give it a shot and develop his first game.
Eric figured he could get better at programming this way and improve his chances at scoring
a job.
Growing up he was encouraged by his father to play around with computers since his father
was a technical, logical person himself.
His mom on the other hand was more artistic and this gave Eric an insight into both worlds
from an early age.
In high school Eric kept himself busy playing guitar and even joined a couple of bands,
while also making music on the computer.
After school, he would work at a pretzel place where he would stand at a kiosk and draw little
sketches.
“I guess it's all just a lifetime of creating stuff.
I've always just enjoyed making things, and in the process of doing that I learned a lot
of skills.”
He’s a huge fan of the farm simulation RPG series Harvest Moon so when Eric wanted to
make a quick little game to get familiar with game development, he decided to create a Harvest
Moon clone.
“I liked that you could have relationships with the townsfolk and even get married and
start a family.
That was something you couldn't do in most games I played as a kid and it made the experience
much more personal.
That you were living in a world that felt alive, time moved forward with or without
your input.”
According to Eric however, the series became progressively worse after Back To Nature so
he frequently searched for a fan-made or indie Harvest Moon clone, but he never found anything
that satisfied him, which compelled Eric to try making one himself.
Initially he was planning on releasing his fan-made project, back when it was still called
Sprout Valley, on Xbox Live Indie Games since anyone was able to publish a game on that
platform.
Eric figured he would work on the project for a few months, release it and move on.
Perhaps a few Harvest Moon fans would enjoy it and the game would look nice on his resume
for future job prospects.
However, once he started working on the game and his development skills improved, Eric
started seeing more possibilities.
He believed it could become a legitimate game and start his career as a real indie developer.
Eric didn’t have a deliberate plan when working on Stardew Valley and would just follow
his intuition when it came to expanding the game.
He started with creating the player avatar and next he added a simple area that would
later become the player’s farm.
After that, Eric added the basic farming mechanics.
Before he would add things like crops and minerals, he would do proper research on them
to accurately match their behaviors and scarcities in the game.
He applied this technique to the rest of the game: work on one part until it was about
80% done before he would add depth to it and move on to the next part.
In September 2012 Eric, now 24 of age, publicly announced the game on Steam Greenlight to
see if people would be interested in the concept behind Stardew Valley.
The announcement was accompanied with the first official trailer.
Eric had also set up a website to keep people updated on Stardew Valley’s progression.
As mentioned before, he wanted to develop a Harvest Moon homage at first, but since
he decided to expand the scope of the project, Eric saw an opportunity to improve on one
of his favorite video game series.
"The gameplay in Harvest Moon was usually fun, but I felt like no title in the series
ever brought it all together in a perfect way.
My idea with Stardew Valley was to address the problems I had with Harvest Moon, as well
as create more 'purpose' with tried-and-true gameplay elements such as crafting and quests."
In February 2013, a couple of months after the Steam Greenlight announcement, it was
revealed that Stardew Valley would be published by Chucklefish, a development studio and publisher
that specializes in retro-style games.
Eric said that the offer came at just the right time, since he didn’t want to put
the game on Steam Early Access.
“It seemed like nearly every indie game was doing Early Access at the time.
I wanted my game to stand out from the crowd, and I knew that many people were growing tired
of paying for unfinished products.
Furthermore, I felt that Early Access was better suited to very open-ended sandbox games,
but was not ideal for a game like Stardew Valley.”
The team at Chucklefish helped Eric with creating a brand new website, including a new, better
forum system.
In May 2013 Eric announced that Stardew Valley had been greenlit so now with the help from
a publisher and Steam’s approval, nothing was holding Eric back from releasing his passion
project once it was ready.
Yet, it would take an additional three years before Stardew Valley would be released on
Steam.
Eric initially estimated that the game would be done somewhere before 2014, but in November
2013 he created a blogpost to let people know that he probably wasn’t going to hit that
target.
He explained that although the game was “mostly done”, there was still a lot that had to
be finished before he was comfortable releasing Stardew Valley.
He would rather focus on developing a polished feature rich game than a rushed quick release.
The following years Eric would frequently blog about Stardew Valley’s progression,
which kept people’s interest in the game and also allowed fans to provide feedback.
While developing Stardew Valley was definitely Eric’s main focus, he still needed a way
to earn some money to pay the bills.
Therefore, he worked part-time as an usher at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre.
Fortunately, he was able to live together with his girlfriend Amber, who was a plant
biology graduate student.
A perfect situation for someone who’s developing a farming simulator.
During its entire development, the game went through quite a lot of changes.
Eric’s game development skills would greatly improve over time, which is why he decided
to redo some parts of the game several times over.
The character art especially took some time before he was happy with it.
“I put in thousands of hours on pixel art just to get better at it and better at it.
I just persevered and forced myself to learn.
You realize the thing that you thought was good actually isn’t.
You realize why and you improve on it.
And that’s just an endless cycle.”
All the artwork was done in Paint.NET, a free raster graphics editor program for Microsoft
Windows and all the programming was done in C# using the Microsoft XNA framework.
Eric used the audio software called Reason by Reason Studios, formerly known as Propellerhead
Software, to produce all the games’ music and sound effects.
Eric was very excited that he was able to work on Stardew Valley as a solo developer.
He enjoyed the total freedom to implement whatever idea came to his mind and enabled
him to bring a cohesive vision to life.
He also didn’t mind that he had to cover all the development aspects himself.
“I also enjoy all the aspects of making a game: coding, drawing, making music, and
writing…I would get bored doing just one thing all the time.”
It was very important to Eric that Stardew Valley was as open and accessible as possible
to a variety of players.
“If you want to raise 300 rabbits, you can.
If you want to invest in a huge field of crops with automated sprinkler systems, you can
do that too.
The gameplay is flexible and open.”
Another improvement over the Harvest Moon series that Eric wanted to include was an
endless stream of endgame content.
He said that most Harvest Moon games end after two in-game years of farming, so he designed
Stardew Valley in a way so that people can enjoy the game for as long as they want, even
after many in-game years.
Besides making the game as open as possible, Eric also aimed for a certain feel that he
wanted the game to represent.
A feel that was intrinsically tied to his own values in real life and those were sometimes
more important to him than expanding gameplay mechanics.
For instance, at one point during development, butchering animals was part of the gameplay.
Stardew Valley allows you to raise farm animals that produce useful products for the player
like eggs, milk and so on, but some beta testers requested the option to butcher the animals
and collect their meat.
Eric initially added the feature, but he eventually removed it again since it didn’t feel right
to him.
“I didn’t want to have that sort of violence.
You give the animals names, pet them, and a little heart goes above their head and stuff,
and then you butcher them?
It just felt wrong.
It didn’t jibe with the feeling I was going for with the game, so I cut that, and I don’t
regret it.”
While creating the world for Stardew Valley, Eric, an Auburn native, took some inspiration
from the area he grew up in.
Therefore, many items in the game are local to the Pacific Northwest, like salmonberries,
ferns and chanterelles.
“I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest my whole life, so the feeling of this nature
is deeply ingrained in me.”
Eric has said that he wants the game to be fun, but to also have real-world messages.
The story for example clearly illustrates the fight against capitalism and the importance
of local communities.
This is further emphasized by Stardew Valley’s many villagers that all have their unique
identity and throughout the course of the game they all go about their daily schedules.
Furthermore, the player is encouraged to interact with them by giving the villagers gifts so
they can unlock more of their storylines.
While for the most part the game has a general fun, uplifting theme, the villager’s individual
storylines can get dark sometimes.
“People struggle with personal issues and I wanted to portray that.
I think it makes the characters a lot more relatable...not just these ideal abstractions
of people that are sometimes found in games.”
Eric wrote and rewrote hundreds of lines of dialogue for all the villagers which would
take him several months of work.
The villagers also have their own individual cutscenes which required extensive work and
testing as well.
Eric also considered what type of game he wanted Stardew Valley to be.
He wanted to go in a more zen, slower-paced direction, since he’s not a fan of games
that encourage more clicking than anything else.
That’s the reason why the cooking mechanic for example is meant to heal more of your
energy than regular uncooked products, as opposed to selling the cooked food for more
gold.
Eric wanted to avoid players feeling like they had to turn every ingredient into cooking
to maximize their profits, which would just end up in the player clicking more buttons.
According to Eric, a game like Stardew Valley is a lot more personal than a game made by
a hundred people that’s some kind of focus-tested experience where they just want to make as
much profit as possible.
However, Eric kept his real life identity a secret for years and instead used his nickname
ConcernedApe whenever he communicated about Stardew Valley’s progress on his blog.
He later said in an interview that he’s an introvert and likes to keep to himself.
“I think for me I've always been kind of a lonely guy, kind of a hermit.
I keep to myself.
I don't really have that many friends, I don't go out much.
I'm an introvert.
Art is a way to connect with other people.
It's a way to communicate and for other people to see who I really am.
I think everyone wants to feel like they belong or that they can connect with society in some
way.
This is just my way of doing that.”
His hermit lifestyle and his immense dedication to Stardew Valley would eventually put strain
on his relationship with Amber, who would often remind Eric to eat and relax by watching
Star Trek together.
His busy schedule allowed little room for anything else in his life.
“When I’m deep into a project that’s consuming my entire life, that’s what makes
me feel the best.”
Not once during development did Eric ask anyone for help, not even on online forums.
He taught everything he needed to know himself, since he hates asking people for help.
He’s proud of that achievement and didn’t want to have a subconscious feeling of owing
someone else credit for a specific part of the game.
The huge responsibility of making a game all by yourself would take its toll sometimes,
Eric admitted.
“There were times during development that I didn't feel like working, that I even wanted
to quit entirely."
However, he never gave up and kept pushing to make his dream a reality.
It was both passion and discipline that kept Eric going and he said it’s a lot easier
to stay driven when you're doing your own project, knowing that there are no limits
to how far you can go.
When Eric didn’t feel like working he would just browse Reddit and procrastinate, but
once he had an idea that he was really passionate about, Eric would work like crazy.
He explained that during those moments he wanted to see that idea come to life as quickly
as possible when it was still fresh in his mind.
In April 2015 Eric addressed the game’s release date, since people were very eager
to get their hands on it.
"I've been working on Stardew Valley for years and I want it to be released as much as anyone.
However, I'm not willing to do that until the game is not only complete, but also in
a state I'm happy with.
It simply could not be released in its current form...
It's not a finished game yet.
It's tantalizingly close to being a finished game, but it's also a huge project and I'm
just one guy."
In november 2015 he addressed the release date once again, saying he had spent the month
of October trying to finish the singleplayer part.
However, he also spoke about the multiplayer portion of the game and how there’s still
work to be done on that front.
People had suggested to release the single player version first and patch in the multiplayer
later, but Eric mentioned that other developers had advised him to wait with the release until
the game was completely finished.
A month later however, Eric had changed his mind and addressed this in a new blogpost,
saying it felt wrong to him to postpone the release when the single player portion was
already fully completed.
It’s always been important to him to get the game in the hands of the community as
soon as possible.
The months leading up to the game’s release would prove to be Eric’s biggest challenge
yet and he almost gave up on the game entirely.
“Imagine playing the same game, every day, for four and a half years.
All day.
I was just absolutely sick of it, I was bored.
I didn’t even have an objective sense of if the game was good or not.
In fact, I thought it was bad.”
No one else was playing and testing Stardew Valley besides Eric and although his girlfriend
would try out new builds of the game from time to time, she couldn’t give detailed
feedback due to her lack of video game knowledge.
Therefore, Eric was never really sure if the game was actually any fun to play or not and
this pressure would build up more and more in the final weeks of development.
“I had to prove that I wasn’t just crazy, that this wasn’t just a pipe dream, and
that I was actually gonna follow through on it.
That was really getting to me, psychologically, thinking about whether I was wasting my life,
wasting my time.”
Luckily, his confidence in the game came back when he decided to let other people playtest
his game.
A mutual contact at Chucklefish had introduced Eric to three Twitch streamers and he contacted
them to play Stardew Valley.
They helped Eric look for bugs and gave detailed feedback to further improve the game.
Unfortunately, the day before release, disaster struck.
Eric found a game-breaking bug and with only a few hours until the game’s release, he
needed to fix it fast.
“I stayed up very late in a panic to fix it.
I was in a sort of daze the whole time.
It was very stressful but also exhilarating.”
The singleplayer version of the game was finally ready for release on February 26th, 2016.
It first launched on Steam and was later ported to macOS, Linux, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch,
PlayStation Vita, iOS and Android.
In 2019, the game was even added to Tesla Arcade, a video game service that’s implemented
in every Tesla car.
Stardew Valley was very well received by both critics and gamers and scored an 89 on Metacritic,
with many reviewers saying that the farming RPG provides a rich and seemingly endless
gaming experience.
As of January 2020, Stardew Valley has sold over 10 million copies across all available
platforms, another testament to its overwhelming success.
Eric was also named one of the top ten developers of 2016 by Gamasutra.
“He ended up single-handedly developing something that breathed new life into a genre
that had mostly been dominated by Harvest Moon since the '90s.”
Furthermore, Forbes also named Eric one of their 30 under 30 in the games industry.
Development didn’t slow down after its release and if anything it made Eric work even harder.
He said that during the four years leading up to Stardew Valley’s release, he would
work ten hours a day, seven days a week on average.
After the release his average work day would increase to 15 hours a day.
The first few weeks were especially busy for Eric since he was fixing bugs and releasing
patches as fast as he possibly could, since it would affect Eric greatly when someone
online was having problems with the game.
After the first major update for Stardew Valley, Eric finally felt the need for some time off
so in August of 2017 he went on a vacation with his girlfriend and some friends.
They all went on a road trip where they visited many national parks and even the Grand Canyon.
Over the years, Stardew Valley generated a very welcoming and friendly community and
despite Eric being an introvert, he would respond as much as possible to fans to either
troubleshoot problems with the game or just to answer questions.
"My strategy with the community is simple: no strategy at all!
I think that, as an indie developer, you should just be yourself and be a real human.
I try to act online like I do in real life: treat everyone with respect and be as honest
and straightforward as possible."
When asked why Stardew Valley became such a huge success, Eric said that it maybe had
something to do with indie games in general.
He further explained that the special thing about indie is that it’s kind of a personal
connection between the creator and the audience.
Eric noted that it’s kind of rare that a game with the scope of Stardew Valley is made
entirely by one person, which makes it even more personal and he thinks that’s what
people are looking for in an indie game.
“It's not some faceless corporation that is giving you a focus tested message or focus
tested experience.
It’s this raw connection between the creator and the audience.
I think maybe people are ready for that sort of thing.”
After releasing Stardew Valley, Eric got the opportunity to meet the father of the Harvest
Moon series Yasuhiro Wada during an interview, which was a huge honor for Eric and a dream
come true.
He even left the interview with a signed copy of his old Harvest Moon SNES copy.
Wada spoke very highly of Stardew Valley saying it carries on the legacy of the original Harvest
Moon, because of the freedom you’re given.
Looking back, Eric isn’t exactly sure how he pulled it off to make a huge game like
Stardew Valley all on his own.
"I'm not sure if there was any technique to it or if it was just a quirk of my brain chemistry.
I did always have a ridiculous amount of faith in myself and in the game, and yet I knew
that I was still a nobody and the only way I could change that was to work super hard.
It does help if you can absolutely convince yourself that you're destined for greatness.
It's not even an ego thing--it's just a way to prevent doubt and insecurity from hindering
you."
The 4 player co-op multiplayer portion was released on August 1st, 2018 for all PC platforms,
thanks to the help of Chucklefish, who took care of the technical aspects relating to
the online multiplayer.
This way Eric was free to focus on creating more content for Stardew Valley which was
added to the game as free updates and included things like new farm types, new house upgrades,
new crops, new buildings, new relationship options, new quests and so on.
With a new update on the horizon, it seems like Eric is still far from done with Stardew
Valley.
However, he said he’s already got ideas for future games that he’d like to explore
after he’s done with Stardew Valley.
Luckily for fans, Eric is open to the idea of letting those future games take place in
the same universe as his farming simulator.
Whatever the case may be, Eric Barone has a bright future ahead of him as an indie developer.
“I want to create a collection of games during my career, so that when I’m on my
deathbed I can look back and see that I created all these wonderful things that brought people
joy.”