![]() ![]() He liked computers, dabbled in basic programming, but it was never a career ambition. The funny thing is that Eric never wanted to make video games, at least not professionally. I think it makes the characters a lot more relatable.not just these ideal abstractions of people that are sometimes found in games.” For Eric, it was another way of ensuring the world of Stardew Valley felt truly alive. People struggle with personal issues, and I wanted to portray that. Barone explains: “To me, that includes going beyond the normal confines of what is expected from a video-game character. The game’s main charms are its marriage of workmanlike play and sentimental atmosphere, but the themes get pretty dark. Stardew Valley is a perfect loop, one that turns repetitive monotony into therapeutic compulsion. The next day, you wake up and repeat the same tasks. Whether you’re growing rows of cabbages to sell at the local market or expanding your stables and coops for livestock, an ever-depleting bar counts down the time left before you have to go to bed. Everything you do drains your character’s energy. You also explore the nearby town and speak to its locals. You gather, cutting down trees for lumber and mining veins for ore. You wake up, sow seeds, water crops, nurture your livestock. This is your farm-yours to grow and develop through hundreds of hours of play. It’s a somber beginning that acts as a perfect transferral of responsibilities. I know you’ll honor the family home, my boy. This was my most precious gift of all, and now it’s yours. It’s the perfect place to start your new life. It’s located in Stardew Valley, on the southern coast. I’ve enclosed the deed to that place…my pride and joy. So I dropped everything and moved to the place I truly belong. I’d lost sight of what mattered most in life…real connections with other people and nature. If you’re reading this, you must be in dire need of a change. You reach into your drawer and retrieve the envelope: ![]() ![]() But as just one man, Eric Barone tested the limits of video-game ambition and unintentionally created something that resonated with an audience of millions. Even putting money aside, the demands of making intimate art of this scale are enough to break a person: obsession, isolation, ambition. Games like Minecraft may have paved the way for the democratization of indie-game development, yet despite the tectonic shift in the scene, entirely solo projects like Stardew Valley-financially unviable and creatively overwhelming-are still very rare. His budget was the part-time wage he made as an evening usher at the local stage theater. It took him four and a half years to design, program, animate, draw, compose, record, and write everything in the game, working 12-hour days, seven days a week. Then there’s Stardew Valley-a humble, intimate farming adventure about the monotony of domestic life, in which you spend dozens of hours parenting cabbages. Grand Theft Auto, Madden, Call of Duty-guns, sports, more guns. “I wanted to do all the music, the art.”īlockbusters of this scope take a few familiar shapes. “I think it makes sense that I worked entirely alone,” Eric says. So he made it himself-all by himself, having never made a game before. He kept wishing a better version existed. It all started with a modest idea: a renaissance for Harvest Moon, the long-running Japanese farming simulation series that, in Eric’s eyes, had lost its way. We’re speaking a few days before the second anniversary of the release of Stardew Valley, the video game Eric spent nearly half a decade making. He could afford it for several lifetimes. Most of his days are spent much like today: an indeterminate spiral of reading articles and perusing the comments below, eventually starting work at some unspecified point in the afternoon. Even his three-times-weekly workout takes place downstairs in his basement-alone, away from other people. It’s a place he rarely leaves: only to go get groceries, for walks to clear his head, or to drive his long-term girlfriend, Amber, to college. It’s just after lunch and Eric Barone, a 30-year-old developer, is at his computer in his Seattle apartment. ![]()
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